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A comment on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?. Parent comment

Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? by astrange on Thursday December 18, 2025 @11:49AM (#46315149)
"Harvesting user data" doesn't make money. The reason people think this is that on HN people have main character syndrome that makes them think their personal data is interesting, plus an assumption that making money is evil therefore anything you can think of that is evil would make money.

(Google and Facebook don't make money by "harvesting" or "selling" user data, they make webpages you spend a lot of time on then put ads on them.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? by bigyabai on Thursday December 18, 2025 @11:58AM (#46315297)
No, I think the reason people on HN think this is because Apple, Google and Microsoft have all been caught harvesting user data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? by astrange on Thursday December 18, 2025 @12:06PM (#46315436)
That is a government using a court order to get access to something?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? by snowwrestler on Thursday December 18, 2025 @12:44PM (#46315979)
The data that Google and Meta harvest are your interactions on other websites and apps that are loading a Google or Meta JavaScript, or have a back-end data integration with them.

I don’t know if Apple has client-side ad scripts like those, but in decades of building websites I’ve never been asked to implement one.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? by Eisenstein on Thursday December 18, 2025 @12:46PM (#46316004)
If it isn't worth anything then why do they want it?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? by array_key_first on Thursday December 18, 2025 @01:37PM (#46316682)
Pretty much nobody's personal info is valuable by itself, but it's EXTREMELY valuable in aggregate, because it lets you target advertisement. Like, so valuable it's on the order of tens of billions.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? by isodev on Thursday December 18, 2025 @03:03PM (#46317872)
Indeed, and the entire concept of smarter Siri, chatGPT integration as well as apple's ever-increasing Ad surfaces ... is powered by aggegading more and more usage analytics from users. There are so many that come on by default when you install macOS/iOS.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? by astrange on Friday December 19, 2025 @10:30AM (#46326866)
No, you don't need usage analytics for Siri.

(You need it for music to fulfill your contracts with the artists though.)

[ Parent | on HN ]