However, Google is scanning everything in your account.
We recently had a thread from a historian whose entire account was suspended after Google scanned all the files in his Google Drive, and didn't like what they saw (files on the history of tanks).
https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/81988101/google-l...
If you want your photos to upload in the background, iCloud Photos is your only choice on iOS. Not so on Android. This makes backing up photos to a server privately on iOS essentially unusable.
This kind of crippling anti-privacy pro-Apple-profits design permeates iOS. You cannot even install an app on your device without giving Apple your billing details and letting them know you installed it, which is used for ads. You cannot get your location without also telling it to Apple. You cannot tell Apple not to track your WiFi SSID's location. You cannot uninstall Apple News, which is filled with user tracking for ads. On and on.
> We recently had a thread from a historian whose entire account was suspended after Google scanned all the files in his Google Drive,
You're comparing iOS to the wrong entity when you compare it to Google instead of Android, but even your comparison to Google is faulty. Your link is about Google suspending an account for files shared publicly, not about Google scanning all the files in that account. Section V.B. of https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/ says that sharing those types of images publicly is also a violation of the iCloud TOS, and Apple has the right to do the same thing. The difference is that Apple will probably handle the customer complaint better, but that is an issue of customer service, not privacy.
Nope. Background App Refresh has allowed any iOS app to update data between the server and client in the background for more than half a decade.
Apple has discussed scanning photos uploaded to the iCloud Photos portion of their cloud service in the future, but nothing is scanned now.
Google has been scanning everything in in their user's cloud accounts for the past decade.
Also, given Google's reluctance to pay human beings to supervise decisions made by their algorithms, I have zero doubt that Google is turning in users when they have a single false positive.
All the other privacy-invading criticisms remain, making iOS an awful choice for privacy.
I still don't know why you're comparing iOS to Google. As I've already explained, that is the wrong comparison. I can use my own services on Android. Apple is planning to scan photos in iCloud (and already does in mail) and only hasn't because their services are still so basic, so it is just as bad as Google in that respect but only temporarily better due to incompetence. My own server does not scan and review photos and never will.
I guess I could have said almost a decade ago.
So, again, Apple only discussed scanning the iCloud Photos portion of their cloud service some time in the future, but NOTHING is being scanned now.
Google, on the other hand, has been scanning everything in your account for the past decade.
Also, documents from the discovery phase of Google's various antitrust trials show that Google has literally pressured device makers to hide the privacy settings from users.
Google also buys a copy of everybody's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on your real world purchases as much as they spy on your online life.
A company with surveillance capitalism as it's business model, like Google, will always be motivated to violate user privacy as much as possible.
I don't know why you're still trying to pretend that Google's cloud service is separate from Android while Apple's cloud service is not separate from iOS?
I acknowledged that. The point is that they admitted this is an oversight because they are already scanning iCloud Mail. Their intentions are exactly the same as Google's. They are merely less competent. Apple is also a surveillance capitalist, as I explained in my previous post, giving several examples. iOS even splits the privacy settings of Apple's apps from the privacy settings of all other apps to make it harder for users to control what little Apple lets them control.
> Google also buys a copy of everybody's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on your real world purchases as much as they spy on your online life.
Apple gets the exact same information for transactions completed with Apple Pay. Users have to opt in for Google to see this information. Once again, exactly the same.
> I don't know why you're still trying to pretend that Google's cloud service is separate from Android while Apple's cloud service is not separate from iOS?
I already explained why. I don't have to use Google services on Android. iOS ties me to Apple's privacy nightmare. I listed several other examples of Apple data collection on iOS that are unavoidable. Android, even in builds provided by Google, has none of those problems.
Nope.
>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...
Buying a copy of everyone's credit card transaction data, no matter who they bank through, is not even close to the same.
>I don't have to use Google services on Android. iOS ties me to Apple's privacy nightmare.
Nope. Apple's cloud service is every bit as optional as Google's.
The difference is that Google has been scanning everything in Google accounts for the past decade.
Google and Facebook, as the pioneers of surveillance capitalism, are both privacy nightmares.
Yep.
> Buying a copy of everyone's credit card transaction data, no matter who they bank through, is not even close to the same.
As I already explained, the user has to opt in to share that data with Google. The purchase is a deal with the credit card companies to send data that users have opted in to share. https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/10845853?hl=en
> Nope. Apple's cloud service is every bit as optional as Google's.
You completely ignored my post explaining why they are not. To repeat myself from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28933939:
"You cannot even install an app on your device without giving Apple your billing details and letting them know you installed it, which is used for ads. You cannot get your location without also telling it to Apple. You cannot tell Apple not to track your WiFi SSID's location. You cannot uninstall Apple News, which is filled with user tracking for ads. On and on."
Apple, Google, and Facebook are all privacy nightmares. The difference is that iOS forces that privacy nightmare on its users, while Android does not. Your comparison of Apple to Google is as irrelevant as it is incorrect.
As I have already explained, this has nothing to do with Google Pay whatsoever.
It doesn't matter who issues your card. Google made deals directly with Visa and Mastercard to buy your transaction data.
>as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.
Google has gone from spying on everything you do online, to spying on your offline behavior as well.
As for the rest of your errors. I'm afraid that I'm not willing to take the time to correct them individually.
That is about aggregate purchases, which have no privacy implications at all, not about individual purchases, which need to be matched either by email or by users opting in to share their credit card transactions, which is exactly the same as Apple Pay.
> Also, how exactly do you use the Google Play Store without having a Google account?
You don't have to use Google Play to install apps on Android. Even if you use Google Pay, you don't have to completely de-anonymize yourself with billing details.
> I'm afraid that I'm not willing to take the time to correct them individually.
More like you're afraid that you cannot correct them because they are already correct. I have made those claims hundreds of times on this forum, and they have never been corrected.
You have simply fallen for Apple's marketing without critically thinking about what data Apple actually collects, and the embarrassment of overpaying for an ecosystem that is clearly worse has understandably caused you to become defensive. The takeaway is to not trust marketing and verify if what the marketing actually claims is true. None of these companies are looking out for you. If Apple can make more money by exploiting your privacy on top of getting you to pay more, they will do it, and they are doing it (why actually make a privacy-respecting product that ties Apple's hands when they can just have the marketing department claim that it's a privacy respecting product and have their cake and eat it too). The only reason Android has gotten away with less user exploitation is that Google is still not yet as top-down driven as Apple, so the hackers who work on Android can influence how the base system is made while just enabling the company's services teams to build what they want on top of that instead of directly into the base system, and the only reason Google still lets them get away with that is that Android initially had to be released as AOSP + vendor bits in order to bring other companies into the ecosystem, and it is now too expensive to change course.
Spying on everywhere you shop no matter which bank issues your card has no privacy implications at all?
Sorry, but at this point I can't take you seriously.
It's literally the headline of the article I've posted three times now.
Connecting purchases to your user profile has nothing to do with aggregate data and everything to do with spying on individual users for a profit.
I suppose it's also Apple's fault that Google pressured device makers to hide the Android privacy settings, and ignored users when they turned off the setting Google told them would stop Android from tracking their location?
It might be Apple's fault that you believe I said that. Try reading my comments on an Android phone, which gives you a choice of multiple working web browsers instead of just different skins of the same buggy browser engine.
> Google pressured device makers to hide the Android privacy settings.
That's funny. The privacy settings on Android are more easily accessible than the privacy settings on iOS, and they apply to all apps, not special-casing Apple apps like iOS does.
> ignored users when they turned off the setting Google told them would stop Android from tracking their location?
You're talking about two different settings in two different Google apps, not in Android. The really faulty thing is that there is no way to prevent iOS from sending your location to Apple at all unless you don't get your location on your iOS device at all.
You keep trying to compare iOS to Google and failing. The correct comparison is iOS to Android, where iOS fails badly.
Apple claims to not scan your pictures, but that's unrelated to whether they scan your pictures
Google, on the other hand, has been scanning the entire contents of your account for the past decade.
>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect’s Gmail account.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...