Sidenote: I disagree that Apple Maps' success puts pressure on Google to up their privacy game. On the contrary, Google Maps comparative advantage is their data trove, as there are many more users of Google Maps than Apple Maps, so they seem more likely to lean on that to succeed.
I wouldn't look to the market to improve privacy, since as I said above, the market clearly doesn't care about privacy much at all. Without a seismic shift in public attitudes towards privacy, it's up to the government or the companies themselves to adapt.
Are they demonstrating their willingness, or do they simply not understand that there is a choice to be made? Considering the trivial difference in mapping performance in most places, I doubt most people would be willing to give up their privacy in exchange for saving a few seconds on their drive to the mall.
> Without a seismic shift in public attitudes towards privacy,
If people were truly aware of how much data is collected on them, how many people would opt in for the marginal benefits you get in return?
Acting as if people are unaware of data collection is disingenuous. If you told the average facebook user how much facebook and its third-party partners knew about them, I doubt many of them would stop using the platform.
It's not just ignorance, but a sense of helplessness. People don't feel in control and don't have any clue how they might reduce what data leaks out in their daily lives. The thing is, they are absolutely right.
I know and understand a lot of this stuff and I don't feel like I'm in control of my data. Even if you take precautions, Google and Facebook track your progress across the web. If you don't use Google Maps, Google still tracks your location using your IP address for network calls (often when you aren't deliberately connecting to Google services) and both Google and Facebook have been slurping up people's purchase history through credit card companies.
How is someone who doesn't have a clue about this stuff supposed to exert any control or choice when the people attacking their privacy out-gun them so thoroughly?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/technology/safety-s...
* Added incognito mode to maps
* Expands auto deletion of old data to include locations, and location searches
Now... this might not be due solely to competitive pressures from Apple, but it was a topic of conversations I had with pro-privacy Android users I know who have been warming up to iOS. Feature introductions like this definitely take the edge off.
Then buy Android if that's a tradeoff you're willing to make.
That was never going to work for Apple.
One profession missing in the parent comment are the researchers innovating on differential privacy. Apple has taken great pains to figure out ways to improve their maps without storing massive amounts of private user data, to the extent that they split routes in half, fuzz addresses, and analyze the start and end of trips independently.
There's an argument that Google had such a huge head start on maps, that without Apple having the capacity to set defaults (on a platform that is not even a plurality of users), Apple Maps wouldn't have gotten enough users to justify improvements to where it is now. Apple also didn't get serious about having its own maps until Google attempted to exercise their at-the-time near-monopoly power to jack up licensing costs. Now the mere existence of Apple maps puts pressure on Google to improve the privacy features of its own map products as we've seen recently.
Apple funds map development through device sales, and Google does it through targeted advertising, map services for third parties, and profiling users. Do we value competition only of mapping products, or should we also value a diversity of business models for mapping products? It's no small decision to bring in the Kommissar.