Owning usually means you can use, modify and control/own what you produce with your property to your heart's and physical reality's extent.

Apple owns your data and says what you can do with its software, content and devices. Much of which you license and do not own.

> Apple owns your data

Citation? I'm aware of OS licensing and music/video downloads like itunes, but they claim "Your data"?

Data collected by Apple produced by your activity for things like product metrics, improvements, Siri, traffic data / directions or whatever they decide fits their business model at a later date.

The collection of which you can decline during the setup process. Further, even if Apple could be said to own the analytics data you're talking about, they certainly don't make any claim over my data; that is to say, the information I choose to store on my phone.

Can you opt out of App store analytics? What about data collected from Siri[0], of which Apple says it can hold on to for two years[1]?

By disabling these services you are severely limiting the advertised functionality and features of a device you purchased.

From Apple's privacy policy[2]:

>We also collect data in a form that does not, on its own, permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. The following are some examples of non-personal information that we collect and how we may use it:

>We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising.

>We may collect information regarding customer activities on our website, iCloud services, and iTunes Store and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered non-personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.

>We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries. This information may be used to improve the relevancy of results provided by our services. Except in limited instances to ensure quality of our services over the Internet, such information will not be associated with your IP address.

From your reply:

>they certainly don't make any claim over my data; that is to say, the information I choose to store on my phone.

I was unclear, I never meant to imply they own the information you store on your phone.

  [0] http://www.wired.com/2013/04/siri-two-years/
  [1] http://www.mynameissiri.com/siri-and-privacy/
  [2] http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

How does Apple prevent you from modifying your phone? Sure you'll void your warrantee, but other than that I'm pretty sure you can do what you want with your phone.

The DMCA, for one. If there is a copyright protection mechanism on the phone, Apple has the right to prevent you from defeating said copyright protection. The language is generic enough that anything you want to modify or use on the device is subject to their approval.

To illustrate this point, imagine your phone is a rather complicated DVD player. DVDs have copyright protection, and as such, you may not modify your DVD player or DVD discs to extract or modify (or even play!) the DVDs on an unlicensed player. Similarly, you may not do anything remotely like that with Apple copyright-protected music or video files, or any other digital media copyright-protected by Apple. This means if suddenly all the data on your phone were bundled up and "protected" by Apple, you would have no right to said data, other than the right to use them the way Apple wants you to.

Of course, the DMCA has been amended over the years to allow exemptions to this (which are reviewed again every three years). Some allow jailbreaking, some allow remixing of media. Some allow disabled people to read their e-books (yes, this was illegal for a while due to the DMCA). You can only carrier-unlock your phone if you bought it before 2013 (seriously). Oh, and tablets/smartwatches can only be jailbroken since 2015.

A 2010 ruling determined that even if your purchase a phone, you do not own its software - you are merely leasing the phone software from Apple according to their EULA. You may find a way to modify their software, but you'll also be breaking the law.

Try running a non-Apple signed OS on an iPhone.

Been done [0], albeit not on recent hardware.

[0] http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2010/04/ive-been-working-o...

That qualifier at the end is because Apple does their very best to prevent this sort of thing, and any time you see it being done, it means someone is exploiting a security vulnerability which will surely be patched.

Apple just has to issue a patch for the hack, and may have already, given that the project has been dead for 5+ years.

edit: in 2012, it was deemed not a violation of the DMCA to jailbreak a phone. Whoops.

I don't know what the consequences of exploiting a hole in their security implementation or possibly violating their ToS or EULA.

Trying to profit from such an exploit commercially would test the waters by attracting Apple's legal department.