“Catastrophic privacy” is quite a huge claim - do you have any actual examples? My perspective is that iphone privacy protections have actually gotten better and more sophisticated over time, and I’m much more comfortable having older non-techie relatives on iOS for that reason. When it comes to providing them tech support ios has always been less finicky than android.

But when you follow history of how IDFA was introduced (a replacement for more privacy-invasive identifiers which were available), IDFA makes sense. At least it's completely fair and honest - it is an identifier for advertisers, that user's have control over.

Identifier for Advertisers was opt-out, and will soon be opt-in [1], so that seems like an example of Apple's privacy protections getting better over time.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/03/idfa-st...

Yes, but "better" is a qualitative term not a quantitative. That this thing even exists in the first place and was either mandatory or opt-out is still concerning to me.

This change moved Apple a little closer to the "good guys" column, but not really into it.

If by "good guys" you mean champions of privacy, I don't think Apple will ever be that. They're a giant business and that means they're primarily motivated by profit.

It's up to the people to be the champions of privacy and help Apple realize that our interests (privacy) are aligned with their interests (profit).

(And I say this as someone who's rather anti-Apple for other reasons. Life is complicated and full of compromises.)

Agreed, we should be careful not to champion them as the saviours of consumer privacy just because they have lately been marketing themselves as an improvement over Google and Microsoft.

They haven't just "lately been marketing themselves as an improvement over Google and Microsoft".

Anyone aware of Apple's history knows that Apple has always pushed consumer privacy forward, forcing others in the industry to follow.

I don't know any other consumer electronics company other than Apple that has been championing consumer privacy so much over the last 12-15 years.

If you learned about Apple's stance on privacy only in their recent marketing, that doesn't mean they haven't been doing it before.

What are they doing that other vendors aren't? From what I can tell their privacy-forward marketing began with the rollout of the Secure Enclave in the 5S, but Android vendors were already using hardware key stores and full disk encryption at that time.

I will admit that this action to change the advertising ID to default-off is a promising one though.

This is a good overview from last week what they've done so far (where others had to follow) and what they're doing next

https://youtu.be/08IC1AZTxls?t=2941