Sure they do. What if they switch accounts, usernames, phones, etc. More data is better.

If you do that, you lose all your apps and settings. Ergo, nobody does that. If you switch phones, you transfer the account. Also, Apple tracking what you do in their App Store is perhaps not very nice but doesn’t affect anyone in any detectable way so no normal person is going to go through the effort to avoid it, if they even know it is happening.

This argument’s logical error is declaring that an inconvenience takes higher precedence than the desired outcome.

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.

It's extremely easy to disregard and disable any mention of your iCloud email address. You can set an apple id's email itself in settings -> user -> "name, phone numbers, email" which changes what nearly every part of the OS refers to. I forgot I even had one until I read this comment.

You are an extreme outlier, Apple is not going to risk their reputation fingerprinting users just so they can track you.

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.

This argument’s logical error is presenting unprovable beliefs as if they were facts.

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.

This argument’s logical error is approaching a response to a statements as if it exists in isolation.

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?

Starting every comment with “this argument’s logical error is…” is nauseating and hinders good conversation. Your point would sound better without it.

Everyone’s using my comment about the OP post as a launching point for their own discussions and arguments about Apple, that would have earned their own standing as top-level threads — and ideally, some would have displaced mine. So I certainly didn’t expect to wake up and see my comment earning so much attention. Hooray, I suppose. Anyways, I stand by my original point and the reiteration of it demonstrated in that chain of replies:

Unsupported arguments based on misconstrued statements and logical fallacies waste all our time here at HN. Do better, please.

What? If they switch devices and accounts, it doesn't matter WHAT is being "fingerprinted'... there's no way a unique identifier will persist across that type of change. Points for the theory though.

The context here is "fingerprinting" you based on what your fingers do.

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.

I remember credit cards being only usable by one AppleID.

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.

This argument’s logical reasoning error is to claim the absence of all incentive due to the absence of one incentive.

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.

you can use an apple device without logging into icloud