They absolutely are. And they give it to governments upon request.

Their privacy stories are marketing first.

I don't think they sell it like Google or Samsung. For example Apple does not have a location intelligence team dedicated to driving revenue for store brands or targeting users that go there using precise geo location data.

Google and Samsung do.

Give me a source that they are selling your data, not targeted ads.

I _trust_ Google to attempt to do so, and fail sadly along the way…

They went from “Don’t be evil” to a cartoonish “Doctor Evil” character in a decade.

They are selling data to advertisers? I would like to know more about that.

Google isn't. They are the advertising engine and sell to advertisers for reach, just like Facebook does.

I trust Apple about as far as I can throw them too. They are inherently anti-consumer rights everywhere in their ecosystem. The "Privacy" angle is just PR.

I would say it is PR as much as it is a strategic differentiation. Their business model is too sell products and services directly to consumers. This is different from Microsoft who is selling to businesses who need data protection, but actually want to be able to monitor their employees and Google who wants to leverage your data / behavior to allow advertisers to effectively target you with ads.

None of the big companies expressly sell your information. Not because they are altruistic, but because it is an asset that they want to protect so they can rent to the next person.

Yo Apple is an ad company as well now. They do both.

They all do a little bit of everything. Google sells devices too, but they are not predominantly a physical device company.

At 3 trillion Dollars of market cap they are a capitalistic hellscape and do everything in their power to benefit their own interests, which are not yours.

It’s amazing how many here don’t understand that.

There are several very nuanced comments much farther up this chain who clearly do understand that, and lay out their informed reasoning for why they have chosen to use Apple devices for themselves. It’s amazing how many here seem to have ignored them.

> And they give it to governments upon request.

So in other words, "companies operating within a nation are expected to abide by the laws of that nation"?

Apple structures their systems to limit the data they can turn over by request, and documents what data they do turn over. What else do you believe they should be doing?

Actually under US rule of law you don’t just turn over things upon request.

Much like every other tech company you test the request.

Apple never does.

> Apple never does.

Citation needed?

None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers. They allow advertisers to target people based on the data, but the data itself is never sold. And it would be dumb to sell it because selling targeted ads is a lot more valuable than selling data.

Just about everyone else other than the tech companies are actually selling your data to various brokers, from the DMV to the cellphone companies.

> None of the tech companies are selling your data to advertisers.

First-hand account from me that this is not factual at all.

I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.

On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes.

I can go on and on, and yeah, we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels, but to say FAANG doesn’t sell user data is naive at best.

> we didn’t see “Joe Smith” level of granularity, it was at Zip code levels

So you got aggregated analytics instead of data about individual users.

Meanwhile other companies are selling your name, phone number, address history, people you are affiliated with, detailed location history, etc.

Which one would you say is "selling user data"?