Re:iOS14 reveals that TikTok may snoop clipboard contents ev...
by chongli on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @09:02PM
(#23635691)
And that's the dilemma of our society. How do we trust all these people and big companies we don't know? Maybe we can't!
It seems like an intractable problem but I think we still have a few tricks up our sleeves. For one thing, we can look at what public companies report in their quarterly earnings and what major business decisions they make. For Apple, the vast majority of their revenue comes from hardware and services. A very, very tiny amount of their revenue comes from advertising.
Compare that with Google and Facebook. These companies make nearly all of their revenue from advertising. Why is this distinction important? Because advertising is all about data collection. Hardware sales? Much less so.
So when I need to figure out whether I should trust Apple vs trusting Google, I look at where their incentives are and how much they align with my own. Google's incentive is to collect as much of my data as possible and monetize it while keeping me engaged with search and YouTube. Apple's incentive, on the other hand, is to sell me new hardware and get me to subscribe to their services.
It seems pretty clear to me that Apple has far less incentive to snoop on my personal data and abuse my privacy than Google does, so I deem them more trustworthy. Is this a complete picture? Probably not. But I think it's still a valuable one.
It seems like an intractable problem but I think we still have a few tricks up our sleeves. For one thing, we can look at what public companies report in their quarterly earnings and what major business decisions they make. For Apple, the vast majority of their revenue comes from hardware and services. A very, very tiny amount of their revenue comes from advertising.
Compare that with Google and Facebook. These companies make nearly all of their revenue from advertising. Why is this distinction important? Because advertising is all about data collection. Hardware sales? Much less so.
So when I need to figure out whether I should trust Apple vs trusting Google, I look at where their incentives are and how much they align with my own. Google's incentive is to collect as much of my data as possible and monetize it while keeping me engaged with search and YouTube. Apple's incentive, on the other hand, is to sell me new hardware and get me to subscribe to their services.
It seems pretty clear to me that Apple has far less incentive to snoop on my personal data and abuse my privacy than Google does, so I deem them more trustworthy. Is this a complete picture? Probably not. But I think it's still a valuable one.