Quote:For a company whose CEO has repeatedly asserted that it is not interested in selling its customer data to advertisers, Apple sure is putting a lot of effort into developing new products that sell customer data to advertisers.

In a patent application filed today, Apple proposes a new e-commerce system that uses a mobile phone to deliver targeted ads to users based on what they can actually afford. This new patent comes on the heels of another recent in-development project for creating and tracking ads — and the Apple users who look at them — based on social media content that goes viral.
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The patent is nonetheless interesting because it contradicts several recent statements from CEO Tim Cook, who has said that Apple is not interested in monetising the private data of its users. Back in September 2014, he said he was "offended" by companies that did that. "Our business is not based on having information about you. You’re not our product. ... if they’re making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried," he told Charlie Rose.

In February, talking about Apple Pay, Cook said, "When you add a card to Apple Pay your actual card numbers are never stored in the device or servers. For every payment we create a unique one-time code that is only good for that one transaction from that one device. We don't store those transactions. They remain between you, the merchant, and your bank. We don't know your card number or what you bought or how much you paid. And we don't want to."

And earlier this month Cook said, "some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be."

So the takeaway here is that while Apple isn't launching products that monetize your data, it sure is able to if and when it wants to. That is important because most people forget that Apple is the owner of the largest collection of credit card numbers on the planet, approaching 1 billion accounts in 2014, more than Amazon.

(07-23-2015, 07:36 AM)gstanford Wrote: Why not Rollo, I thought you supported American companies.  I'm sure you have a dozen of each product.  The gold plated, diamond encrusted versions to boot!

(07-23-2015, 10:01 PM)ocre Wrote: that is just totally unfortunate

(07-24-2015, 01:22 PM)ocre Wrote: The lg phones, of course.

And not because I have something against lg or that I give two craps about Apple.  It shouldn't be hard for you to figure out what I mean

Quote:Apple spends a lot of time talking about how much it respects your privacy, casting Google as an invasive plight on the common user. However, security researcher Brian Krebs (of Krebs On Security fame) has demonstrated that the iPhone 11 Pro still reaches out to Apple’s servers to log your location even when all the location access toggles are turned off. Apple says this is “expected behavior,” but it’s a misleading setup at the very least.
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Apple notes that this is the way it designed iOS to work. If you want to really stop all location tracking, you have to turn off the location services toggle. This is not necessarily surprising, but Apple probably shouldn’t be telling people that its Location Services menu includes all the toggles they’ll need. It gives some location data collection special status, making it harder to disable. That’s not the kind of behavior we’d expect from a company that so regularly chastises the competition for its data collection practices.