How Much Does Apple Know About You? (Basically Nothing)

[DrMacintosh]

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Following Facebook's acknowledgement that it had let a political ad targeting firm scrape the personal data of 87 million users, I rushed to see what kind of personal data the social network and Google had gathered on me. Both had more information, reaching back longer, than I had envisioned.  

 

So Apple was next. I use an iPhone, iPad and two Mac computers, and Apple also offers data downloads in the privacy section of its website. It's hard to find, and once you do make the connection, you can expect a hefty wait to get the results.

You would expect a company that claims to take customer privacy seriously would make it easier for users to see what data that they have on them, but it makes sense once you realize what Apple does have on its users. 

 

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The zip file I eventually received from Apple was tiny, only 9 megabytes, compared to 243 MB from Google and 881 MB from Facebook. And there's not much there, because Apple says the information is primarily kept on your device, not its servers. 

This has been what Apple has been doing for some time now. Apple would rather have all your data stay on your device. It's generally going to be more secure, and much easier for your device to access since it is local and does not have to be pinged from a server. 

 

Someone during an Apple keynote once said something along the lines of, "We don't know what is on your phone and we don't want to know!" and that seems to hold true. 

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The one sentence highlight: a list of my downloads, purchases and repairs, but not my search histories through the Siri personal assistant or the Safari browser. 

That is what Apple had on the author of this article. (of course in addition to all the standard data associated with your AppleID for things like iTunes and the App Store .aka a billing address)

 

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It took eight days for my data to arrive from Apple, from a European office that is handling the privacy requests. After making the request, the iPhone maker first asked for my street address, phone number, the serial number of the iPhone, and other personal information before releasing it.  This compares to Google and Facebook's data dump. They asked no questions, and the results arrived swiftly—Facebook within minutes, and Google within hours.

At least some form of verification is attempted during the process to see what data Apple has on you. 

 

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What I got

Apple's file on me took longer but was lightweight — a testimony, according to the company, of how little it collects and stores on its individual users. 

According to the file, it had made time stamps of when I backed up my iPhone, when I uploaded photos to iCloud and really boring things like that. It had stored my e-mail and physical address, but not the phone number, which is odd, since the information came from the iPhone.

It kept a copy of every app and song I'd downloaded, every tune I'd added to my iTunes music library, and every time I needed repair on a multitude of Apple devices going back a decade. 

What it didn't include

What Apple didn’t share with me is all the questions I've asked the Siri personal digital assistant, queries it gathers to make the artificial intelligence smarter.

The company says the data wouldn't tell an individual user anything, since it's not associated with him or her.  Your Siri requests —"Show me how to get to PF Chang's," or "What year was Steve Jobs born?" go back to Apple — but 

it uses a random identifier to mask your identity. So a Siri search for the closest Chipotle restaurant will only tell Apple that a user requested the data, but not associate it with me.

 

On the Safari browser on my Macs, my browsing history goes back to July, 2017, but Apple says it doesn't track that information.

So really, according to this, Apple keeps the equivalent of "squat" on its users in stark contrast to the type of data that is associated with you on social media platforms or even companies like Google. 

 

Apple believes in selling you products, not in making you the product, and that is why they do not need, nor want, your personal data and serving you targeted ads. 

 

This position of course means that Apple will most likely be forever at a disadvantage when it comes to machine learning and cloud services, but Apple has managed to make it this far without needing customer data to make their services function amazingly, and if the cost of privacy is not having the best virtual assistant.....Hey, sign me up!

 

I personally use iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Drive and I take comfort in knowing my data (what little of it there is) is in the hands of Apple and not someone else. 

 

source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/04/asked-apple-everything-had-me-heres-what-got/558362002/ 

 

[iamdarkyoshi]

All apple devices I've used aren't as intrusive as some of the android and god forbid windows devices, but both microsoft and google run more than just a business of laptops, desktops, phones, and tablets, so I guess I'm not too surprised.

[asus killer]

let's be honest it's a comparison that makes no sense. You pay nothing (money) for facebook and you pay way to much (money) for Apple products. 

For me we shouldn't be paying nothing and expect a good service in return, but we also shouldn't have to pay such a premium. Neither model is appealing. We are missing a middle term. 

 

i don't know the specifics but things like playstation service or even windows seem to offer a much balanced service. 

[DrMacintosh]

9 minutes ago, asus killer said:

We are missing a middle term. 

No, plenty examples of that exist, the problem is the people who run those paid services that are supposed to be “middle grounds” as you put it, are the same people who run the free services. Not only do they take your money they take your data too. 

 

I’d much rather pay for a premium device (but don’t act like iPhones are that expensive compared to other phones) 

[captain_to_fire]

This reminds me

Say whatever you want about Apple but there are certainly things they do better than everyone else. iMessage and FaceTime for instance is encrypted end-to-end. Telemetry is anonymized on the device level before it is sent to Apple's servers and unlike Windows 10, macOS and iOS has an off button for telemetry.

 

[asus killer]

7 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

No, plenty examples of that exist, the problem is the people who run those paid services that are supposed to be “middle grounds” as you put it, are the same people who run the free services. Not only do they take your money they take your data too. 

 

I’d much rather pay for a premium device (but don’t act like iPhones are that expensive compared to other phones) 

i agree with you i prefer to pay then having this "free services"

[kirashi]

Unless the methods for storing data are publicized and open sourced, we can only choose to trust that Apple indeed has little data about us, just like any other company. To be clear, I'm simply being realistic and by no means am trying to come across as paranoid, but it's impossible for the general public to find any truth in Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft's claims about the way data is collected, transmitted, stored, and used without being able to review and dissect the backend of any software system.

 

That being said, I am in full support of having the ability to do this so that consumers can see for themselves how their data is handled so they can make a real informed decision when they're deciding whether to sign up for Facebook vs VK, for example.

[Master Disaster]

It's safe to say I'm certainly one of Apples biggest critics however I have always said Apple deserve praise for their privacy and data collection policies.

 

They seem like the only corporation who want to do right by their users.

 

It's just a shame their users get screwed over in every other way.

[LienusLateTips]

26 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

It's safe to say I'm certainly one of Apples biggest critics however I have always said Apple deserve praise for their privacy and data collection policies.

 

They seem like the only corporation who want to do right by their users.

 

It's just a shame their users get screwed over in every other way.

Data recovery HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Not_Jony_Ive]

We have absolutely 0 interests in you and your cat photos. 

We've seen too many of that at our genius bar. 

 

 

 

[Granular]

Well...

He does say searches get random identifiers, but are they random for each search, or each user? In the latter case, Apple can say they don't know what you searched for, but could tie your searches to you if it wanted to. Or their PRISM overlords could do it if they wanted to, which they do.

Besides the data stored on your phone gets pushed to Apple's servers in the form of device backups that Apple can decrypt.

And sure, you can disable cloud backup and it's a lot better than what Google does, but Google is in the ad business, doesn't charge you money for their services and their products are mostly open source.

[ScratchCat]

6 minutes ago, Granular said:

Well...

He does say searches get random identifiers, but are they random for each search, or each user. In the latter case, Apple can say they don't know what you searched for, but could tie your searches to you if it wanted to. Or their PRISM overlords could do it if they wanted to, which they do.

Most likely on a per search basis or per Siri session to keep track of the last thing you said. Apple are excellent in this regard, they even randomize your MAC address on iPhones when searching for networks.

https://9to5mac.com/2014/09/26/more-details-on-how-ios-8s-mac-address-randomization-feature-works-and-when-it-doesnt/

[Linus_torvalds]

The thing is Apple makes products for dumb people. They only have animojies and cat pictures and pictures in toilet with their phone and duck face pictures. That's all. They do not think by themselves apple tells what they want and need. So what info can be taken from them? Nothing!

[D13H4RD]

I’m pretty sure that they made it so that when they need some information from you, a little privacy icon appears.

 

Generally, they don’t do much data harvesting. That’s partially why Siri isn’t as intelligent as others, but Siri (and AI assistants in general) are something that I never use anyway 

[Monkey Dust]

Well Apple aren't in the advertising business, what benefit would they gain from harvesting your data?

 

It's an appealing idea, a tech company who doesn't harvest your data and then put it up for sale. Where it falls down for me is that I'm not spending that much on a phone, fuck it Google can have my data.

[Mr.Meerkat]

13 minutes ago, Monkey Dust said:

Where it falls down for me is that I'm not spending that much on a phone, fuck it Google can have my data.

Problem is android flagships costs around the same as iPhones (X included) so if you were to buy a flagship, not only did you spend roughly the same amount of money but you're also getting your data harvest. That's a lose/lose scenario ya know  

[LAwLz]

"Anonymization" and the closed source nature of these services makes the whole "download your archive" thing nothing more than just a charade.

If you request your archive then they most likely won't include the anonymized data, because it is technically not about you. It's about a profile called "12235235" which could very easily be linked to you, but isn't really right now. Ask Microsoft for all data on you and they probably won't include all the telemetry for example, despite it being found to be very easy to deanonymize.

 

And the size of the archive is pretty irrelevant.

I just downloaded my Facebook archive. It's about 171MB, out of which 169MB is JPG, PNG GIF and mp4 files sent by other people in group chats I am in. However, that remaining 2MB might be a ton of information about me. All my posts I have ever done on Facebook totals up to 73KB. Compressed that's 10KB.

That 10KB tells Facebook far more about me than the 169MB of stupid gifs sent by my friends.

 

To prove this point, I just created this document. If you put this in Word, it will be roughly 100 pages long.

As just regular, UTF-8 formatted text, it is 369KiB. With some quick LZMA2 compression it's 78.5KiB.

I know they say a picture says more than a thousand words, but that compressed archive is 1/3 the size of a typical image, and contains 55,677 words.

 

Edit: With that being said, I do believe Apple is one of the most privacy respecting companies out there. At least out of the big ones.

 

 

 

7 hours ago, asus killer said:

i don't know the specifics but things like playstation service or even windows seem to offer a much balanced service. 

How is Windows balanced? They probably take more data than Google these days, on top of charging for it.

[Monkey Dust]

Just now, Mr.Meerkat said:

Problem is android flagships costs around the same as iPhones (X included) so if you were to buy a flagship, not only did you spend roughly the same amount of money but you're also getting your data harvest. That's a lose/lose scenario ya know  

But if you don't want a flagship phone Apple don't have any lower-middle range phones. Sure if your spending £/$/€ 500 upwards Apple makes sense for the privacy. If you're looking £/$/€ 150-200 Apple has nothing, whereas you can get a perfectly serviceable Android phone in that budget.

[Sauron]

So... all this is based on a file Apple gave him? They may not have his siri search history strictly linked to his apple account, but deanonymization techniques could put 2 and 2 together in a matter of seconds. Also, 9MB would be enough to know my entire medical and financial history... it's a pretty meaningless size comparison.

[MorganO]

2 hours ago, mate_mate91 said:

The thing is Apple makes products for dumb people. They only have animojies and cat pictures and pictures in toilet with their phone and duck face pictures. That's all. They do not think by themselves apple tells what they want and need. So what info can be taken from them? Nothing!

 

shut up, i have an iphone x, i also have  custom built watercooled pc THAT I built

 

apple for sure doesnt tell me what i want and need

[suicidalfranco]

stroking that Apple dongle hard i see 

[Tech Enthusiast]

Honestly i am not buying this at all.

Apple is the prime king of lies when it comes to this kinda stuff.

 

 

There are so many glaring loopholes in US laws that i am sure there is an army of lawyers at apple, only to check on how many stored data they really have to send to users. And how many they can hide, without facing any legal issues.

 

"You know, we don't even know your phone number on your phone!"

"We offer Apple pay and iTunes, but we don't save where to bill you from, honest!"

 

Also, 9 mb for the data that was outlined here?

Seriously? IF that would have been all, that file would be sub 1mb. 9 MB is enough to know everything relevant.

 

Edit: also the higher mb numbers for google and even facebook include stuff that is "nice to have", but the numbers don't say "facebook is almost 100x as bad!"

The critical stuff that counts is in the first 5mb. And i am 100% sure that every company has those saved. They are all the same in that regards. Google just saves some more to give you a great service, while facebook loves to save all your cat pics.

 

Not buying this stunt at all.

 

[Cheezdoodlez]

53 minutes ago, Monkey Dust said:

But if you don't want a flagship phone Apple don't have any lower-middle range phones. Sure if your spending £/$/€ 500 upwards Apple makes sense for the privacy. If you're looking £/$/€ 150-200 Apple has nothing, whereas you can get a perfectly serviceable Android phone in that budget.

I would call the iPhone SE a middle range phone. Sure it's more than £/$/€ 150-200 but not close to £/$/€ 500. 

 

On the topic.. I don't think this is the whole truth. Somewhere there's a apple server with all my iPhone activity logged minute for minute. Right next to the Facebook, Google, Microsoft servers. 

[Okjoek]

I don't honestly care all that much about privacy. They can send all the targeted ads they want, I feel there's bigger problems in my life.

[Trixanity]

I don't buy the notion that because Apple anonymizes their data that it somehow has a worse assistant because of it. Data is data. As long as they collect a lot of data during queries which I'm certain they do, they'll have the data. What they would be bad at is personalizing it to you since they won't be able to pin it to you and therefore serve data based on that. And that's if Apple's claims about their data collection and privacy policy is true.