For example, I am seriously considering doing exactly what you describe as “nobody does that” — having to repurchase all my apps and redo all my settings — in order to complete my transgender name change. Apple refuses to purge my old deadname’s iCloud email address, and so if I want to remove it, I’ll need to start a new Apple account and re-purchase all of my apps and content.
If you truly have a request like this, send an email to the person in the executive team responsible for Apple accounts, they’ll probably have executive relations fix it for you.
Apple may or may not care if users switch accounts. Only Apple confidential knowledge can prove or disprove this argument with certainty. In the absence of certainty, a best-faith effort must be made to determine whether their actions support or contradict these assertions.
The claim “Sure they do” is unsupported both by available evidence and by a good faith interpretation of their material actions. Apple’s public statements and app store policies do not support the assertion “More data is better”. There is no indication that Apple is performing enrichment of accounts using third-party data.
The person you are replying to was merely offering an example to contradict a blanket statement without a factual basis, essentially that Apple does not track users because the user is already logged in. The respondent presented a situation in which that reason would not apply.
Also, your way of engaging people in this way is annoying -- specifically starting every reply with 'This argument’s logical error' and then coming up with a seems-right-at-a-glance breakdown of their argument's faults. Are you doing it on purpose to annoy people?
Unsupported arguments based on misconstrued statements and logical fallacies waste all our time here at HN. Do better, please.
So that will persist across devices and accounts.
And before you say that's crazy, location information can mean they only need to distinguish a handful of people at a time.
So switching accounts would not only mean you lose all of your App Store purchases, iCloud data etc. It would mean having to get a new credit card.
That would make the likelihood of this scenario happening being pretty slim.
Apple has access to the logged-in account’s properties, as you assert, but this does not rule out Apple having other incentives for tracking.
This doesn't look like tracking or fingerprinting at all to me - they're logging user interaction (that many apps and websites have done for decades).
Even if they didn't do this just about every click you make in the App Store results in a query to their backend for more information, presumably with the account id (so family, regional, parental control works).
Also, I recall a case where MacOS was asking Apple permission whenever the user wished to start an executable. This is nuts.
>Also, I recall a case where MacOS was asking Apple permission whenever the user wished to start an executable. This is nuts.
Not that nuts. It's intended to be able to blacklist malware and such and retroactively disable it, through notarization (basically, registering apps to Apple and them getting a kind of fingerprint).
They could have done it with a local cache (and they probably do in some capacity), but it would still need to ask/sync every now and then.
No, because you can make your phone work with other service providers. The dependence on the original hardware vendor is artificial.
> It's intended to be able to blacklist malware
Choice of blacklists, content filters etc. is also orthogonal to the vendor.
Yes. But then it wouldn't be a commercial commodity product, it would be more of a build-your-own DIY kit. Would it be as succesful?
>Choice of blacklists, content filters etc. is also orthogonal to the vendor.
Everything is orthogonal to the vendor, even choice of screen or disk.
But most people don't like choice, want something that mostly works as is. And even for those that do the optionally increases the product complexity, maintainance, and error condition space (integrated vs mix-and-match).
Plus, a few modular laptop and mobile phone designs never sold well.
Apple most definitely sells you a service, which is a managed computing platform. Alternatives exist. (And if they don’t, that’s not Apple’s problem.)
"Alternatives exists" sounds a lot like this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo
The world isn't as simple as: there are companies and they can sell whatever they like, and there are consumers and they can buy whatever they like.
Personally analytics don't bother me, I don't think they're a significant privacy issue. The service provider already knows almost everything you do with the service anyway, just as a requirement to provide the service. I don't believe that invasive regulation on the detailed behaviour and functions of a phone by governments is genuinely in the interests of users. I suspect that the detrimental effects would far outweigh the benefits, which would only be useful to a tiny fraction of users anyway.
But what confidence do you have if the product you bought is tethered to the original vendor? What if they decide to do something that makes you unable to use the product?
As for making the product unusable, they can do that anyway through OTA updates, which are applied at the user's discretion. If you think that's a problem then you should regulate that, not some other technical issues that may or may not be related.
Knowing is not the issue. The issue is they use that understanding to their advantage, not yours. Their duty is to maximize shareholder value, not your health, happiness, and well being.
I'm not saying don't use them. I am saying it's naive to trust so blindly.
The fact that an argument is superficially similar to an informal fallacy doesn't make the argument inherently fallacious. You can easily construct a variation of the same conversation which is structurally identical but is obviously not fallacious—
Critic: "I want a banana, but I don't like the texture."
Respondent: "If you don't like them, don't eat them."
Now let's turn that into an "alternatives exist" argument and replay—
Critic: "I demand a banana that I do like."
Respondent: "I understand your desire for a banana which suits you. However nobody is obligated to supply you with such a banana. Thankfully, alternatives do exist, such as the nectarine."
If you don't like that you can't buy an Apple branded dumbphone, and you have failed to convince Apple to make it for you, perhaps try lobbying your government? They could pass a law which requires smartphone makers to also sell dumbphones.
However in many cases I can only do that via an app, and apps are only available on iOS or Android. Your argument a based upon me being able to buy something from an alternative manufacturer, yet here we are. And I have to purchase Apple or Android to be able to function in society.
If Apple isn't going to follow open standards yet be the largest phone manufacturer then we are going to have to regulate them. You don't have to be the only company to be a monopoly.
If you did, what has any of that got to do with anything I wrote? How does your complaint relate to the issue of tracking?
Which open standard, specifically relevant to your ability to access your bank account and do your taxes, is Apple not following? And how is that relevant to concerns over privacy?
(Seriously, I’d like to engage with your argument but it seems like you’re confusing a discussion about the choice to buy a zero-tracking device with a unspecific complaint about standards.)
don't connect it to the internet.
It's not perfect, but at least I don't have to open the settings app each time.
To add insult to injury, when you automate WiFi and Bluetooth to turn off when you leave your home you need to manually affirm this action via a notification every time.
Super annoying.
> The strange thing is that Apple introduced strict measures in iOS 14.5 to prevent developers from fingerprinting users.
The dialog text in their screenshot reads:
> *Allow “App” to track your activity across other companies’ apps and sites?
Users refusing this permission are not prohibiting tracking by the company that issued the dialog. They are prohibiting the company from tracking users beyond the boundary of their corporation. Apple’s App Store app is within the boundary of Apple Corporation, and so the tracking dialog shown is not relevant to their complaint.
(I have no viewpoint to offer on OP’s argument beyond the logical reasoning error described above.)