> Why aren't Apple's apps themselves also having to ask for permission?

If you look at the list of example reasons [1] that would require an app to ask for tracking permission, they are (broadly) in two buckets: correlating and/or consuming user data from multiple sources, and sharing data with a data broker for advertising purposes.

Apple does not share data outside of itself, and their apps do not display ads.

-- [1] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-...

To be honest some of their apps, like the Podcasts app do much more tracking. It is kind of described in the privacy policy but you can’t turn it off.

At least not 3rd party ads. The App Store has ads for apps plus non-stop Arcade+ advertising. The News app is full of ads for News+ and loads of restricted links as well.

This is, however, very different, as you point out.

These do not rely on tracking or personalization - which is very obvious to me (I don't play games - and they constantly have game promotions etc).

Google gets this much better - with a ton of SAAS / biz focused apps. So I imagine google is tracking me somehow (I use google search / chrome etc) and apple does not seem to be doing that good a job.

> their apps do not display ads

Except for the App Store and Apple News, AFAIK.

Apple News doesn’t display Ads except the upsell for Apple news+. They don’t sell advertising on Apple News.

The App Store does display ads, but those are based on advertisers bidding for keywords in the search terms.

Apple has a specific definition of "tracking," which involves sending information collected to third parties. Apple doesn't do that. For that matter, it generally doesn't even collect information unless it's needed to perform a task (ie: location to show the weather). In those cases, it minimizes the data used, and doesn't associate it with you.

Only apps that do this sort of tracking have to ask. Otherwise there is no need. Does that make sense?

We don’t know whether Apple’s apps will ask yet do we? Not until the next iOS update.

And when an app doesn’t ask, does that just mean there is no tracking going on or is it some nefarious scheme to achieve who knows what?

The nefarious option will probably become most popular on the interwebs, obviously. I can already see the HN posts: “Pages caught loading an asset from apple.com, violating their own tracking policy! Is Apple doomed?”

Check out your iPhone’s Settings > Privacy and scroll to the very bottom. You’ll see “Analytics & Improvements” and “Apple Advertising”, which both contain toggles and details about the data that has been gathered so far. There was also an iOS update in the past where the onboarding flow asked me to grant these permissions, though I vaguely remember seeing it on every major iOS version update.

Now, that’s not to say that the iPhone setting guarantees that Apple is not up to something sketchy. We can’t tell what’s going on under the hood or in their servers, but if we really wanted to be extremists about privacy, then we have to resort to apps that we’ve built and self-hosted ourselves.

So who investigates whether Apple’s apps do this sort of tracking or not?

All kinds of people. You frequently see analysis and reverse engineering of Apple’s app and network traffic here on HN.

Story removed as not useful

Apple's stand on privacy is quite flexible at the top of the pyramid - for example in China they were happy to axe hundreds of VPN apps which were allowing people in HK and mainland China access to content without risking being thrown into jails.

So I am unable to infer that Apple consistently puts privacy (and the right to privacy) ahead of profit.

Because the company follows the law?

(To be clear, I'm not suggesting China is righteous, just that Apple still has to follow laws, even if it doesn't like them)

Exactly. Apple's choice here is either follow Chinese law or get their devices and services banned from China.

The CCP is awful in many ways but I can understand Apple preferring to follow the law rather than lose their second biggest market.

To be fair, I strongly suspect the various VPN apps out there are doing Facebook-style shenanigans with user activity. Especially the free ones.

It was a blanket ban on all VPNs.

Their exact statement said: "We are writing to notify that your application will be removed from the China App Store because it includes content that is illegal in China..."

Not stealing user’s private PDF file during crash is very low bar for privacy.

I agree that Apple cares about this stuff, but your story doesn’t really show it.

> Well, I worked at Apple for about NN years. ... If Apple was claiming it cared about privacy, but was secretly doing the opposite, I think this fact would not remain secret.

> I will give one more concrete example: the crash reporter system would send me a detailed stack trace, but NOT the original document. I was told explicitly that this was done for reasons of privacy ... I had no idea who the user was or what was in the document.

So you’ve had access to everything at Apple in your long career there, investigated it deeply the whole time and you’ve found nothing out of sorts. Got it.

This jives with what I’ve read about Apple’s internal culture - that there’s no compartmentalization at all and employees can roam freely around the halls collecting whatever information they want from any department.

I feel good now that you’ve investigated your own company and found no issues! Police unions should look into using this tactic of self-investigation. It seems quite effective!

(I hope I protected your privacy by removing the irrelevant parts of your comment. Sorry I had to paste them in there but you deleted them and then my response made no sense.

Also, sorry to have to use all of that sarcasm but you could’ve just answered the question. It’s Apple. Apple investigates if Apple apps for doing any sort of improper data collection.)

Personal attacks will get you banned here. We've had to warn you about this more than once before. Please don't do it again.

(Edit: I got this part wrong - sorry wayneftw! It's particularly bad that you bullied another user into removing what was probably an interesting story. That makes the thread strictly worse, whether or not you felt like it answered your specific question.)

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? The intention is curious conversation—not bashing other people or their positions, even if you feel like they have wrong positions.

> It's particularly bad that you bullied another user into removing what was probably an interesting story.

That's not what happened. They removed it before I even posted a reply. By the time my reply came up, their story was gone and I had to navigate backwards to copy it. Please look at timestamps or something and remove this warning.

Aside from that, the story was not interesting. It just said that they worked there for a number of years and that their coworkers seemed trustworthy. Also that they couldn't get user documents along with stack traces. I left the most salient bits.

> Personal attacks will get you banned here.

Where's the personal attack? I responded directly to what their comment said, nothing more. And, I didn't get personal - I got sarcastic about what they said. And I apologized for it.

Yikes that's bad - I'm sorry! I made up a story around a wrong assumption. I try not to, and I tell HN users several times a day not to, yet it's still incredibly easy. I've added a note to my comment above, and I'll try to remember this case for similar occasions in the future.

Re personal attack - if you go after what another person is saying that aggressively and use the second-person pronoun a lot, it starts to bleed into personal attack. Particularly "you’ve found nothing out of sorts. Got it" struck me as attacking the other person's integrity.

OK, I get the point, which is why I removed the story. Do you mind deleting what I wrote from your comment?

I removed most of it. I guess email dang if you feel that what’s left is too sensitive.

> Why aren't Apple's apps themselves also having to ask for permission?

They are. This question is based on a false premise.

I see it repeatedly. It’s starting to sound a lot like “have you stopped beating your wife yet.

> Why aren't Apple's apps themselves also having to ask for permission? I personally do not trust Apple one bit, just as I do not trust Facebook. So why is it so much harder to disable Apple's tracking, compared to Facebook's?

They do ask, either on every OS install or upgrade (things like Siri) or first use (non-core apps). If you look at the various privacy settings, Apple’s own apps are listed and you have the same controls to block or limit the data they can access.

I don't have a iota of trust in Apple, but it does seem that they would have little to gain and a lot to lose from just selling user data.