The Cloud/BigData business, which is the strategic thrust of Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure and Google/GCP, is simply 2nd degree surveillance. BigData is code word for "ever more detailed logs of every human on the planet".

In many ways it has come to mean surveillance-as-a-service. Big Data usually means, “we want monitoring, logging & tracking at a scale large enough to cope with surveillance data ingestion rates.”

There are remarkably few instances of actual “big data” problems, at least in the commercial sector, that aren’t merely surveillance.

As a machine learning engineer myself, this is somewhat of an existential crisis. It truly makes quant finance look like one of the most ethically positive career choices left.

I'm curious.. Can you please provide more information or sources on these concepts? I've always had a hunch this was the case

Those don't necessarily go together. For the cloud, you pay for infrastructure. You are not the product.

I wonder if samsung will follow suit. I imagine building privacy conditions into android is likely harder than it is for Apple into iOS..

The words "privacy" and "Android" don't go well in the same sentence but at least on Android you can use FF with uBlock origin, while Apple keeps their walled garden with an iron fist (I'm beginning to wonder if that should be even legal; certainly an iPhone is everything but a loss leader for app and media purchases). Samsung isn't beyond mining your data either - the attention economy compromises everything.

Now you just have uBlock origin that can track you - meet the new boss.

With the content blocking framework that has been part of iOS for years, not even the ad blocking app can see your browsing history. It just sends a JSON file to Safari and Safari blocks content based on the JSON file.

Apple's content blocking framework can also work in other apps that embed web views depending on which web view they use. For instance, it works in my RSS reader.

The iPhone a loss leader? Apple has 40% margins, 80% of all the profit in the phone market, and the average selling price of an iPhone is $450 higher than the average selling price of Android.

Apple is not one of the most profitable companies in the world based on media sells.

> Now you just have uBlock origin that can track you - meet the new boss.

Please don't spread disinformation, uBO tracks nothing. Privacy policy is here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Privacy-policy

Yeah I might've used the phrase "iPhone is everything but a loss leader" in a wrong way (I'm actually not quite sure). What I meant is exactly what you said: that it of course is not a loss leader given its price.

uBlock origin is open source, so you know it does not store your history. Unlike Safari