Great post, the last paragraph in particular, and this is what I've told many people in recent years (those that aren't so closed-minded that they won't listen): NO company or organization anywhere should have the breadth and depth of data that Google has on citizens around the world. Even if their intent and past-records were sparklingly clean (and they're not anymore), it's just too dangerous, and it's only getting worse.
If Google disappeared tomorrow and no longer provided the advertising service, do you think another company (or companies) would jump in to fill the void?
I'll handle this. As we've discussed before, here's a full and complete list of all the real, personal data Apple requires to purchase their devices and buy apps from their App Store.
#1) Uh, actually there is no #1. ... I can take wonderful advantage of Apple's products without giving them a single tiny bit of personal data whatsoever.
Blah, if you're going to "handle this" at least try to do so honestly. You already said you're not comfortable with Apple's Siri service and won't use it to give them even a "tiny bit of data", apparently considering it an intrusion on your privacy.
IMO these are some questions whose answers would benefit users if you really want to handle this:
-1.When they use Siri every word they say is sent to Apple. What use does Apple make of it, if any?
-2. Are your Siri inquiries logged to an associated account, saved for some period of time?
-3. Does Siri search for keywords to associate with iAds?
-4. We already know Apple automatically scans your inbound/outbound email for certain keywords/phrases. Does Apple record found keywords and attach them to your profile?
- 5. Could found email keywords be contributed to your iAd profile to monitize your data?
-6. Does Apple pull credit files from the credit bureaus and/or maintain any financial information on it's users?
-7. Where do I request a list of the data Apple maintains on me, how do I get it corrected if wrong, purged if I don't want them to have it any longer and how long will it take?
-8. Is there somewhere at Apple where a user can see what what general types of information are collected and associated with them.
-9. If someone doesn't own an iDevice but an Apple user has them in their contacts, or sends an iTunes gift card to their email address does Apple begin maintaining a file/account on that non-Apple owner?
-10. In a more general sense how does Apple handle requests from governments, investigators or police agencies for access to information (ie emails, text messages etc) on it's users? I understand that unlike Microsoft, Google and Twitter they don't (yet?) publicly announce in Transparency Reports the types and numbers of requests they receive or their compliance rate with them.
You acting right now as if it's not important to know if Apple may do the same general data gathering as Google because there might be a way to stay off their radar if you're on constant guard, planned ahead of your purchase for anonymity, try to avoid certain Apple services and remind your friends firmly and often to never use your email address nor to store any information about you in their iDevice.
I'm not in any way saying that Apple is doing anything unethical and certainly not illegal with it's user's information. There are a lot of unanswered questions and fuzzy areas. This is your quote from an earlier post in this thread:
"NO company or organization anywhere should have the breadth and depth of data that Google has on citizens around the world. Even if their intent and past-records were sparklingly clean (and they're not anymore), it's just too dangerous, and it's only getting worse."
Are you exempting Apple from that statement? That's certainly not the impression you gave me in other discussions we've had. Why the sudden acceptance?
"NO company or organization anywhere should have the breadth and depth of data that Google has on citizens around the world. Even if their intent and past-records were sparklingly clean (and they're not anymore), it's just too dangerous, and it's only getting worse."
Are you exempting Apple from that statement? That's certainly not the impression you gave me in other discussions we've had. Why the sudden acceptance?
What would possibly give you the idea that I've exempted Apple?! The statement is absolute. The entire post I wrote makes it very clear that I do NOT exempt Apple, otherwise I would be happily using Siri and every other damn thing they provide. The difference, as has been pointed out to you many times is that Apple is in the business of selling hardware. Even if they do collect and use people's personal data, I don't give a shit because I can enjoy their product and many of their apps without giving them a thing -- other than my money. Ads and user profiles are ancillary to Apple's business. Ads and user profiling are core to Google's business. If the federal government enacted a law tomorrow stating that it was illegal to gather personal profiles of your customers, Apple would lose a little value, but not much. Google probably wouldn't survive, or if they did it would be with a drastically altered business model worth some tiny fraction of the market cap they now have. So you can make pedantic comparisons forever, but that's all they are.
As to your list, #1-8 are absolutely and completely irrelevant to me, personally. I do think they are issues that people should think about more, but relatively easy to avoid. #9 is a big concern for everyone, and I already wrote about this concern in my reply above to solip. I think there will eventually be ways to deal with it -- the ramifications are too large to ignore, but I don't think it will be on enough people's radar in a big way for many years. #10 (transparency) is something that every organization should be forced to do, and I think this will be addressed sooner than #9, but the gov't is more than happy to use commercial interests to do their data gathering, so there's a conflict of interest.
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
If Google disappeared tomorrow and no longer provided the advertising service, do you think another company (or companies) would jump in to fill the void?
Certainly others would try. So what? My statement above is very clear: "NO COMPANY OR ORGANIZATION...", that includes Google, Apple, any government agency, any non-profit, or any other company yet to be imagined. Frankly, I can't see that this should be controversial. Google is just the first to reach this level, and by FAR the most efficient at gathering personal intel, which makes them an easily understood target.
As to your list, #1-8 are absolutely and completely irrelevant to me, personally.
Huh.
So you don't feel any need to know for certain whether Apple has personal details connected to you despite your best efforts and if you find they do ask that they be removed? Interesting. That's not the the takeaway I got from your previous posts on privacy. Perhaps your views really did change somewhat over the past few months.
Appreciate the honesty tho in at least saying you either don't know or don't care what data Apple collects from it's customers and how it's used.
What would possibly give you the idea that I've exempted Apple?! The statement is absolute. The entire post I wrote makes it very clear that I do NOT exempt Apple, otherwise I would be happily using Siri and every other damn thing they provide. The difference, as has been pointed out to you many times is that Apple is in the business of selling hardware. Even if they do collect and use people's personal data, I don't give a shit because I can enjoy their product and many of their apps without giving them a thing -- other than my money. Ads and user profiles are ancillary to Apple's business. Ads and user profiling are core to Google's business. If the federal government enacted a law tomorrow stating that it was illegal to gather personal profiles of your customers, Apple would lose a little value, but not much. Google probably wouldn't survive, or if they did it would be with a drastically altered business model worth some tiny fraction of the market cap they now have. So you can make pedantic comparisons forever, but that's all they are.
As to your list, #1-8 are absolutely and completely irrelevant to me, personally. I do think they are issues that people should think about more, but relatively easy to avoid. #9 is a big concern for everyone, and I already wrote about this concern in my reply above to solip. I think there will eventually be ways to deal with it -- the ramifications are too large to ignore, but I don't think it will be on enough people's radar in a big way for many years. #10 (transparency) is something that every organization should be forced to do, and I think this will be addressed sooner than #9, but the gov't is more than happy to use commercial interests to do their data gathering, so there's a conflict of interest.
<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;padding-top:0px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:0px;padding-left:0px;">Certainly others would try. So what? My statement above is very clear: "NO COMPANY OR ORGANIZATION...", that includes Google, Apple, any government agency, any non-profit, or any other company yet to be imagined. Frankly, I can't see that this should be controversial. Google is just the first to reach this level, and by FAR the most efficient at gathering personal intel, which makes them an easily understood target.</p>
So you are still following our discussion despite saying you don't read my posts. I'd still like to see you gather what you know about Apple's data collection as you're pretty thorough when you chose to be, and several members here trust your findings. The post above that you commented about has a few questions to serve as a starting point.
You are right there are some tradeoffs with Siri being solely cloud based. When I got my iPhone 5 I did some tests and I found it totally strange that it was possible to ask for the directions for one address and it failed for another although it had recognized the right names.
After a while I figured out that the "error" is based on fact, that it can't access the addresses stored in corporate server accounts. While the fact is irritating I think that the separation of address pools for these functions makes totally sense.
I refuse to upload those addresses and I hope that my customers or partners also will, although I doubt it especially at those who use public cloud services.
So I have to live with limited Siri functionality but I'm fine with this.
As a developer I think there are technical reasons behind the online limitation of Siri.
A service like Siri needs a huge dictionary, comparable huge resources of RAM and processing power. Those are pretty constrained on the current generation of iOS devices.
The second reason is that the services need to be trained in order to improve and last but not least they can be updated without deploying millions of OS updates limiting the improvement performance.
In short we might see offline Siri some day but it's obviously not there yet. The same goes for the dictation functionality which is currently only available as cloud service even on the Mac.
May be I'm wrong, but your points can be summarized as "but Apple does the same."
It's not necessarily equal if two (persons / companies) do the same.
I'll try to answer your questions. Please note that I don't have all necessary data but for most questions there is an answer in the privacy section of OS X dictation which I took as a starting point (dictation is a part of Siri and I reckon that it's privacy policy is similar).
Now to your questions:
-1. Yes it sends the words you say to Apple's servers because those are processed there. Apple states that it uses the data to train and improve the system. There might also information be saved like your home address or nick name or relationships like "my father" in order to enable functionality like "bring me home" or "say my father that I'm late". You are asked to confirm this information.
-2. Apple saves the input partly anonymized, partly because some relationship to your account might be necessary (compare 1.). If you disable Siri or dictation your transcripts and audio files get wiped from the servers while fully anonymized data chunks, used for improving the system, might stay.
-3. I didn't find any evidence neither that it does nor that it doesn't. But you can change your advertising identifier in system preferences which will brake the relationship between your commands and your identity.
In addition you can completely opt out of Siri and / or iAds.
The fact that opting out of one or even both doesn't degrade the functionality in a significant way indicates that there's no strong data binding between them.
-4. iCloud Mail isn't ad-supported and therefore doesn't implement the iAd framework which is only available for 3rd party devs on iOS devices. iCloud Mail is TRUSTe certified and I'm convinced it wouldn't have achieved this if a connection to iAds would exist, because it in this case it should be labeled as ad- supported in some way. http://www.apple.com/privacy/ and http://www.truste.com/privacy-program-requirements/
In addition scanning in- and out-bound messages is a necessity for spam- and virus-protection which is technically done on the transfer gateway. In some countries there are additional laws to apply. The inference that scanning on the gateway is related to iAds is pretty far fetched.
-5. compare 4.
-6. The credit check of buyers is done by financial service providers like credit card companies. Like every other company Apple just gets the result of this check. For iTunes gift card purchases this is obviously not necessary and if customers want to avoid any information provided then that's their way to go.
-9. You are really turing things around. If I send a gift card to someone he / she has to have or to create an iTunes account in order to get it booked. It's simply the electronic version of printed gift cards you can buy at a store. The person who has got the code can use it with an existing account.
If I send it to a wrong person or it get's lost it's bad luck. You can't get the code back.
-10. Well, that's a good question. First of all Apple is bound to the current law which might answer most of the questions. I'm no lawyer and therefore I refuse to interpret it here. I heaven't read something about Transperancy Reports covering government requests.
All I know is that accessing iMessages isn't that simple because Apple uses a device to device encryption apparently without additional server component
It took me about 45 min to find these answers simply by clicking through my iTunes / iCloud account and the related privacy documents. While there's still space for improvement I think that Apple has done a solid job here.
I kindly ask you to answer the same 10 questions for the comparable google services like Google Now, Gmail, Play Store so we can compare them.
If you find the answers insufficient I'll try to clarify them e.g. by sending a request to Apple or TRUSTe.
I'd prefer this to the discussion taking off while I was editing this post.
You are right there are some tradeoffs with Siri being solely cloud based. When I got my iPhone 5 I did some tests and I found it totally strange that it was possible to ask for the directions for one address and it failed for another although it had recognized the right names.
After a while I figured out that the "error" is based on fact, that it can't access the addresses stored in corporate server accounts. While the fact is irritating I think that the separation of address pools for these functions makes totally sense.
I refuse to upload those addresses and I hope that my customers or partners also will, although I doubt it especially at those who use public cloud services.
So I have to live with limited Siri functionality but I'm fine with this.
As a developer I think there are technical reasons behind the online limitation of Siri.
A service like Siri needs a huge dictionary, comparable huge resources of RAM and processing power. Those are pretty constrained on the current generation of iOS devices.
The second reason is that the services need to be trained in order to improve and last but not least they can be updated without deploying millions of OS updates limiting the improvement performance.
In short we might see offline Siri some day but it's obviously not there yet. The same goes for the dictation functionality which is currently only available as cloud service even on the Mac.
May be I'm wrong, but your points can be summarized as "but Apple does the same."
It's not necessarily equal if two (persons / companies) do the same.
I'll try to answer your questions. Please note that I don't have all necessary data but for most questions there is an answer in the privacy section of OS X dictation which I took as a starting point (dictation is a part of Siri and I reckon that it's privacy policy is similar).
Now to your questions:
-1. Yes it sends the words you say to Apple's servers because those are processed there. Apple states that it uses the data to train and improve the system. There might also information be saved like your home address or nick name or relationships like "my father" in order to enable functionality like "bring me home" or "say my father that I'm late". You are asked to confirm this information.
-2. Apple saves the input partly anonymized, partly because some relationship to your account might be necessary (compare 1.). If you disable Siri or dictation your transcripts and audio files get wiped from the servers while fully anonymized data chunks, used for improving the system, might stay.
-3. I didn't find any evidence neither that it does nor that it doesn't. But you can change your advertising identifier in system preferences which will brake the relationship between your commands and your identity.
In addition you can completely opt out of Siri and / or iAds.
The fact that opting out of one or even both doesn't degrade the functionality in a significant way indicates that there's no strong data binding between them.
-4. iCloud Mail isn't ad-supported and therefore doesn't implement the iAd framework which is only available for 3rd party devs on iOS devices. iCloud Mail is TRUSTe certified and I'm convinced it wouldn't have achieved this if a connection to iAds would exist, because it in this case it should be labeled as ad- supported in some way. http://www.apple.com/privacy/ and http://www.truste.com/privacy-program-requirements/
In addition scanning in- and out-bound messages is a necessity for spam- and virus-protection which is technically done on the transfer gateway. In some countries there are additional laws to apply. The inference that scanning on the gateway is related to iAds is pretty far fetched.
-5. compare 4.
-6. The credit check of buyers is done by financial service providers like credit card companies. Like every other company Apple just gets the result of this check. For iTunes gift card purchases this is obviously not necessary and if customers want to avoid any information provided then that's their way to go.
-9. You are really turing things around. If I send a gift card to someone he / she has to have or to create an iTunes account in order to get it booked. It's simply the electronic version of printed gift cards you can buy at a store. The person who has got the code can use it with an existing account.
If I send it to a wrong person or it get's lost it's bad luck. You can't get the code back.
-10. Well, that's a good question. First of all Apple is bound to the current law which might answer most of the questions. I'm no lawyer and therefore I refuse to interpret it here. I heaven't read something about Transperancy Reports covering government requests.
All I know is that accessing iMessages isn't that simple because Apple uses a device to device encryption apparently without additional server component
It took me about 45 min to find these answers simply by clicking through my iTunes / iCloud account and the related privacy documents. While there's still space for improvement I think that Apple has done a solid job here.
I kindly ask you to answer the same 10 questions for the comparable google services like Google Now, Gmail, Play Store so we can compare them.
If you find the answers insufficient I'll try to clarify them e.g. by sending a request to Apple or TRUSTe.
I'd prefer this to the discussion taking off while I was editing this post.
Edit again: Fixing some typos.
MacBook Pro already offered the Google version and much more completely than I would have been able to. That's why I had hoped he would also do the Apple version to compare with.
I don't think you really understood question 9, but I found a partial answer in Apple's Privacy Policy:
When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to join you on Apple forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number.
They don't say what becomes of it and whether it's retained.
... and no I'm not claiming Apple collects the same types of data as Google does. I simply don't know and I've never seen any in-depth articles on just what Apple collects and what it knows about us. That's again why I had hoped MacBook Pro might take the project on.
-1. Yes it sends the words you say to Apple's servers because those are processed there. Apple states that it uses the data to train and improve the system.
Google also saves voice data to train its recognition engine for a particular person.
However, you can go to your Google Dashboard and delete that info and/or anonymize it if you wish. (I almost deleted the data it had stored up about me, then decided I liked how well it recognized my voice, so I left it enabled. Below is the screen capture I made at the time.)
Quote:
-3. I didn't find any evidence neither that it does nor that it doesn't. But you can change your advertising identifier in system preferences which will brake the relationship between your commands and your identity.
In addition you can completely opt out of Siri and / or iAds.
The fact that opting out of one or even both doesn't degrade the functionality in a significant way indicates that there's no strong data binding between them.
IIRC, a user can only opt out of getting targeted ads, not the ads themselves.
(All that the iOS ad settings button does, is set a flag to advise the advertiser not to use it for targeted purposes. The user's advertising identifier is still given to each advertiser anyway.)
I wish that Apple had something like the Google Dashboard pages, where anyone can drill down to see and edit what interests the company has saved about them. It's both fascinating and boring at the same time. It makes you realize that most of the info isn't that personal. (Outside of saved searches, which you can turn off.)
MacBook Pro already offered the Google version and much more completely than I would have been able to. That's why I had hoped he would also do the Apple version to compare with.
I don't think you really understood question 9, but I found a partial answer in Apple's Privacy Policy:
When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to join you on Apple forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number.
They don't say what becomes of it and whether it's retained.
... and no I'm not claiming Apple collects the same types of data as Google does. I simply don't know and I've never seen any in-depth articles on just what Apple collects and what it knows about us. That's again why I had hoped MacBook Pro might take the project on.
I think I got number 9 partially right, because to be able to send a gift card you need some address data that has to be stored for the receipt.
The same goes for invitations which have to be processed. It's stated that "Apple may" because it's up to you to fill the form and provide the information in order to e.g. send a mail like "Dear XXX, YYY has send you a gift card."
I think I have made the point earlier that for some kind of transactions specific data is needed.
And again: privacy doesn't force you to stop communication. Privacy's goal is to limit and control the amount of what is shared with whom. In practice this describes the effort to limit collected data to the necessary minimum.
Now to your last paragraph. I appreciate that Apple was able to produce a brief, understandable privacy site helping average people to understand the big picture instead of the common juristic gibberish, playing rhetoric games by using a squishy language solely aiming on keeping companies a**** out of the firing line.
And well I thought that I help MacBook Pro a bit because analyzing Google's privacy documents related to those 10 points will take a while.
I hoped you will add your expertise too.
The last time I did it was when I thought about using Google Maps for iOS. There were some points I didn't agree with, so I wiped the app unused.
Google also saves voice data to train its recognition engine for a particular person.
However, you can go to your Google Dashboard and delete that info and/or anonymize it if you wish. (I almost deleted the data it had stored up about me, then decided I liked how well it recognized my voice, so I left it enabled. Below is the screen capture I made at the time.)
IIRC, a user can only opt out of getting targeted ads, not the ads themselves.
(All that the iOS ad settings button does, is set a flag to advise the advertiser not to use it for targeted purposes. The user's advertising identifier is still given to each advertiser anyway.)
I wish that Apple had something like the Google Dashboard pages, where anyone can drill down to see and edit what interests the company has saved about them. It's both fascinating and boring at the same time. It makes you realize that most of the info isn't that personal. (Outside of saved searches, which you can turn off.)
Beside the option to limit ad-tracking there's an option to reset the Ad-ID which basically is like starting with a new profile.
I don't think that Dashboard is the best solution, because you first have to personalize in order to do adjustments.
I fear the majority isn't using those features anyway. They'd be better served by more restricted presets and optional opt-in for specific services.
I doubt that the most info isn't that personalized because the searches are the most comprehensive description of most user's profiles.
Technically the search profile can act as a so called "multifunctional super key" I e.g. use to merge or combine multiple data sources.
To be honest I haven't looked at it yet. If it can be reset or wiped I'm fine because this means I can start with a new Ad-ID.
Beside the option to limit ad-tracking there's an option to reset the Ad-ID which basically is like starting with a new profile.
Ah, thanks! Something new in 6.1. How many people do you think will go click that between each app?
Apple had good intentions, but unfortunately, what the missing UDID ended up causing, was for advertisers to come up with their own MAC address databases to correlate users.
Quote:
I fear the majority isn't using those features anyway. They'd be better served by more restricted presets and optional opt-in for specific services.
I agree. Opt-in is usually the best solution. On the other hand, there are so many people who never figure out things like that, and all they wonder is, why doesn't this darned thing remember me?
Quote:
I doubt that the most info isn't that personalized because the searches are the most comprehensive description of most user's profiles.
I mean that the profile it builds is so general. When you search for new cars, Google saves that you're interested in new cars. It doesn't seem to save in your profile that you were interested in Fords or BMWs. (It could be in your search history, but you can turn that off or clear it.)
Sign up for Google's adSense network and you can see for yourself exactly what kind of consumer target options are available. They're nowhere near as personal as people think. Umm... well, yes, you can target keywords. Yet unless someone clicks on your ad and enters some info, you won't know who they are.
Personally I like when computers remember me and my preferences. Imagine if every time you came to this forum you had to sign in, and it didn't remember your posts, etc. Yet this forum lives off ads that seem targeted. Do I worry? No.
As to your list, #1-8 are absolutely and completely irrelevant to me, personally. I do think they are issues that people should think about more, but relatively easy to avoid.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
Huh.
So you don't feel any need to know for certain whether Apple has personal details connected to you despite your best efforts and if you find they do ask that they be removed? Interesting. That's not the the takeaway I got from your previous posts on privacy. Perhaps your views really did change somewhat over the past few months.
Appreciate the honesty tho in at least saying you either don't know or don't care what data Apple collects from it's customers and how it's used.
Read more carefully! ----> "to me, personally" <---- Immediately followed by "I do think they are issues that [other] people should think about more", because these are important issues in general. For me personally, those points are irrelevant because I do not give Apple any personal data. I may be inconvenienced, but I'm not worried.
Remember the overriding manifesto above: NO company or organization... It's very clear that I think EVERYTHING revolving around these issues, with ALL companies and organizations is important, in general. That doesn't mean I need to be concerned personally.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blah64
#9 is a big concern for everyone, and I already wrote about this concern in my reply above to solip.
But your response targeted such a wafer-thin slice of what I wrote. How about addressing stuff like:
a) the manifesto: NO company or organization anywhere should have the breadth and depth of data that Google has on citizens around the world. Even if their intent and past-records were sparklingly clean (and they're not anymore), it's just too dangerous, and it's only getting worse.
I've found that when I explain this to people (educated, but not necessarily techy enough to understand what happens behind the scenes), most of them "get it", and agree that it's dangerous. However, they're too addicted to the conveniences to deal with it personally. That's a sad statement.
b) gathering personal intel on 3rd parties (family, friends) from your users is very scary, no matter who does it, and this practice seems to be growing.
c) Your main theme here on this board is that Google and Apple's behavior are equally bad. But it's simply not true, because one is primarily in the business of selling hardware, the other is primarily in the business of selling its users, for better or worse. Whether or not they "sell" "personally-identifiable" information (which is nearly impossible to know because there are many weasel-y, but legal ways to mask technicalities of data transfer), their main business is gathering that intel. For Apple, it's secondary, or even tertiary.
Instead of picking some lesser portion of people's posts, hit the meat.
Personally I like when computers remember me and my preferences. Imagine if every time you came to this forum you had to sign in, and it didn't remember your posts, etc.
Ha. I would write this almost 180 degrees the other way. I don't care what MY computer knows about me, because it's operating within my control (yes, I use various tools to control inbound and outbound data), but in general I don't want most computers (I think you meant web sites) to remember me at all -- except when I explicitly want them to. Creepsville.
I don't have to imagine having to sign in every time I come here, because that's exactly what happens and it's perfect. The alternative is either leaving all cookies enabled all the time (crazy, no one should ever do that!!), or managing them carefully, which most people are unable or too lazy to do.
No big deal, I'm only replying because it seemed so funny to me how completely opposite people can be.
Personally I like when computers remember me and my preferences. Imagine if every time you came to this forum you had to sign in, and it didn't remember your posts, etc.
I'm good with that -- as long as I'm the one managing it on the client side.
Ah, thanks! Something new in 6.1. How many people do you think will go click that between each app?
Apple had good intentions, but unfortunately, what the missing UDID ended up causing, was for advertisers to come up with their own MAC address databases to correlate users.
I noticed this somehow childish happiness of advertisers finding a way to circumvent it instead of thinking through the issue.
The problem was that Apple provided a unique identifier that could be used / misused for system wide tracking and got sued for it.
On the one hand we have an unique vendor specific ID enabling linking private data, an the other hand there's a technical parameter like the MAC address open to a variety of companies.
In addition the UUID got provided, while the MAC address get's pulled.
Don't you think there's a difference?.
Originally Posted by KDarling
I agree. Opt-in is usually the best solution. On the other hand, there are so many people who never figure out things like that, and all they wonder is, why doesn't this darned thing remember me?
There's still a difference whether my own device saves something to remember me or if it's done by someone else on a external system. The other issue here is that this data get's saved for advertising purpose and is not actually knowingly saved data of the users current work.
You are right, that people aren't able to figure out what's going on, but is there an implicit right to pull the data without consent because of that?
I think transparency and clarification are the ways to go.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KDarling
I mean that the profile it builds is so general. When you search for new cars, Google saves that you're interested in new cars. It doesn't seem to save in your profile that you were interested in Fords or BMWs. (It could be in your search history, but you can turn that off or clear it.)
Sign up for Google's adSense network and you can see for yourself exactly what kind of consumer target options are available. They're nowhere near as personal as people think. Umm... well, yes, you can target keywords. Yet unless someone clicks on your ad and enters some info, you won't know who they are.
Personally I like when computers remember me and my preferences. Imagine if every time you came to this forum you had to sign in, and it didn't remember your posts, etc. Yet this forum lives off ads that seem targeted. Do I worry? No.
I think we have now reached the basic issue of this discussion. You are part of the advertising business when you use adSense. I'm not, at least when I exclude that I have done some SOE for websites. You are profiting of this private data, me not.
I can't blame you in first place, but I'd like to raise concerns about the risks.
What I see is that honest journalism looses more and more ground on the web, because fill-rate and clicks turn to their new main income.
I observe a tendency to write articles using hyperbolism, selective truth and sensationalism in order to generate controversy, because controversy leads to higher click-rates.
These mechanisms remind me at HPT where "the godhead" is called liquidity all other market participants have to subordinate. I'm highly critical to HPT because I know about the implicit flaws of algorithms.
There's still a difference whether my own device saves something to remember me or if it's done by someone else on a external system. The other issue here is that this data get's saved for advertising purpose and is not actually knowingly saved data of the users current work.
I think you have a valid point about whether the preferences are saved on device or off, although either way the information is going to be sent up at times.
Quote:
I think we have now reached the basic issue of this discussion. You are part of the advertising business when you use adSense. I'm not, at least when I exclude that I have done some SOE for websites. You are profiting of this private data, me not. I can't blame you in first place, but I'd like to raise concerns about the risks.
Oh. No sir. I don't actually use adSense.
The reason I signed up for it, was so that I could see for myself what target information was available... instead of relying on internet paranoia and hearsay.
All throughout human history, the lack of knowledge has bred fear and then mob behavior. It's much better when people can calmly make up their own minds, either way, from a more factual starting point.
The reason I signed up for it, was so that I could see for myself what target information was available... instead of relying on internet paranoia and hearsay.
All throughout human history, the lack of knowledge has bred fear and then mob behavior. It's much better when people can calmly make up their own minds, either way, from a more factual starting point.
Regards.
Sorry, but your sentence "Sign up for Google's adSense network and you can see for yourself exactly what kind of consumer target options are available" gave the impression that you have sufficient first hand information about adSense.
You should consider to indicate your background more clearly because there's a risk to get you wrong. I don't feel responsible for you being in a pissy mood.
And please stop to insinuate that I have a lack of knowledge and I'm trying to spread fear and ignite mob behavior, because this might make me switch to a mistaken attack mode.
For using adSense you need a website you are the owner or at least the technical administrator or the marketing agent.
When you sign in your website get's checked and after you get approved you have to specify your ad-types and define your marketing strategy.
To judge the related statistics and information you should have a sufficient amount of data to investigate. I hope the "just sign in" in order to "get a clue" is not taken as advice by others because that's not the way how these things should be handled IHMO.
There are better suited additional sources of information e.g. provided by Google for understanding this service.
Edit: There are some typos I didn't correct. I just want to point out that it's SEO (search engine optimization) and not SOE.
I don't feel responsible for you being in a pissy mood.
And please stop to insinuate that I have a lack of knowledge and I'm trying to spread fear and ignite mob behavior, because this might make me switch to a mistaken attack mode.
I was not trying to insinuate anything towards you, but only towards those who argue points without doing any checking at all.
I thought the "Regards" at the end would make it quite apparent that I appreciated your discussion.
It's strange, I've been in the Google ecosystem for awhile, and yet the only spam I get in my email is from Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and a few other smaller services I've unfortunately signed up for (which are all quite useless).
For all the apps, books, etc... I've bought from Google, I haven't got any spam from them (ie. App makers)...
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blah64
Great post, the last paragraph in particular, and this is what I've told many people in recent years (those that aren't so closed-minded that they won't listen): NO company or organization anywhere should have the breadth and depth of data that Google has on citizens around the world. Even if their intent and past-records were sparklingly clean (and they're not anymore), it's just too dangerous, and it's only getting worse.
If Google disappeared tomorrow and no longer provided the advertising service, do you think another company (or companies) would jump in to fill the void?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blah64
I'll handle this. As we've discussed before, here's a full and complete list of all the real, personal data Apple requires to purchase their devices and buy apps from their App Store.
#1) Uh, actually there is no #1. ... I can take wonderful advantage of Apple's products without giving them a single tiny bit of personal data whatsoever.
Blah, if you're going to "handle this" at least try to do so honestly. You already said you're not comfortable with Apple's Siri service and won't use it to give them even a "tiny bit of data", apparently considering it an intrusion on your privacy.
IMO these are some questions whose answers would benefit users if you really want to handle this:
-1.When they use Siri every word they say is sent to Apple. What use does Apple make of it, if any?
-2. Are your Siri inquiries logged to an associated account, saved for some period of time?
-3. Does Siri search for keywords to associate with iAds?
-4. We already know Apple automatically scans your inbound/outbound email for certain keywords/phrases. Does Apple record found keywords and attach them to your profile?
- 5. Could found email keywords be contributed to your iAd profile to monitize your data?
-6. Does Apple pull credit files from the credit bureaus and/or maintain any financial information on it's users?
-7. Where do I request a list of the data Apple maintains on me, how do I get it corrected if wrong, purged if I don't want them to have it any longer and how long will it take?
-8. Is there somewhere at Apple where a user can see what what general types of information are collected and associated with them.
-9. If someone doesn't own an iDevice but an Apple user has them in their contacts, or sends an iTunes gift card to their email address does Apple begin maintaining a file/account on that non-Apple owner?
-10. In a more general sense how does Apple handle requests from governments, investigators or police agencies for access to information (ie emails, text messages etc) on it's users? I understand that unlike Microsoft, Google and Twitter they don't (yet?) publicly announce in Transparency Reports the types and numbers of requests they receive or their compliance rate with them.
You acting right now as if it's not important to know if Apple may do the same general data gathering as Google because there might be a way to stay off their radar if you're on constant guard, planned ahead of your purchase for anonymity, try to avoid certain Apple services and remind your friends firmly and often to never use your email address nor to store any information about you in their iDevice.
I'm not in any way saying that Apple is doing anything unethical and certainly not illegal with it's user's information. There are a lot of unanswered questions and fuzzy areas. This is your quote from an earlier post in this thread:
"NO company or organization anywhere should have the breadth and depth of data that Google has on citizens around the world. Even if their intent and past-records were sparklingly clean (and they're not anymore), it's just too dangerous, and it's only getting worse."
Are you exempting Apple from that statement? That's certainly not the impression you gave me in other discussions we've had. Why the sudden acceptance?
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
"NO company or organization anywhere should have the breadth and depth of data that Google has on citizens around the world. Even if their intent and past-records were sparklingly clean (and they're not anymore), it's just too dangerous, and it's only getting worse."
Are you exempting Apple from that statement? That's certainly not the impression you gave me in other discussions we've had. Why the sudden acceptance?
What would possibly give you the idea that I've exempted Apple?! The statement is absolute. The entire post I wrote makes it very clear that I do NOT exempt Apple, otherwise I would be happily using Siri and every other damn thing they provide. The difference, as has been pointed out to you many times is that Apple is in the business of selling hardware. Even if they do collect and use people's personal data, I don't give a shit because I can enjoy their product and many of their apps without giving them a thing -- other than my money. Ads and user profiles are ancillary to Apple's business. Ads and user profiling are core to Google's business. If the federal government enacted a law tomorrow stating that it was illegal to gather personal profiles of your customers, Apple would lose a little value, but not much. Google probably wouldn't survive, or if they did it would be with a drastically altered business model worth some tiny fraction of the market cap they now have. So you can make pedantic comparisons forever, but that's all they are.
As to your list, #1-8 are absolutely and completely irrelevant to me, personally. I do think they are issues that people should think about more, but relatively easy to avoid. #9 is a big concern for everyone, and I already wrote about this concern in my reply above to solip. I think there will eventually be ways to deal with it -- the ramifications are too large to ignore, but I don't think it will be on enough people's radar in a big way for many years. #10 (transparency) is something that every organization should be forced to do, and I think this will be addressed sooner than #9, but the gov't is more than happy to use commercial interests to do their data gathering, so there's a conflict of interest.
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
If Google disappeared tomorrow and no longer provided the advertising service, do you think another company (or companies) would jump in to fill the void?
Certainly others would try. So what? My statement above is very clear: "NO COMPANY OR ORGANIZATION...", that includes Google, Apple, any government agency, any non-profit, or any other company yet to be imagined. Frankly, I can't see that this should be controversial. Google is just the first to reach this level, and by FAR the most efficient at gathering personal intel, which makes them an easily understood target.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blah64
As to your list, #1-8 are absolutely and completely irrelevant to me, personally.
Huh.
So you don't feel any need to know for certain whether Apple has personal details connected to you despite your best efforts and if you find they do ask that they be removed? Interesting. That's not the the takeaway I got from your previous posts on privacy. Perhaps your views really did change somewhat over the past few months.
Appreciate the honesty tho in at least saying you either don't know or don't care what data Apple collects from it's customers and how it's used.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacBook Pro
So you are still following our discussion despite saying you don't read my posts. I'd still like to see you gather what you know about Apple's data collection as you're pretty thorough when you chose to be, and several members here trust your findings. The post above that you commented about has a few questions to serve as a starting point.
@Blah64
You are right there are some tradeoffs with Siri being solely cloud based. When I got my iPhone 5 I did some tests and I found it totally strange that it was possible to ask for the directions for one address and it failed for another although it had recognized the right names.
After a while I figured out that the "error" is based on fact, that it can't access the addresses stored in corporate server accounts. While the fact is irritating I think that the separation of address pools for these functions makes totally sense.
I refuse to upload those addresses and I hope that my customers or partners also will, although I doubt it especially at those who use public cloud services.
So I have to live with limited Siri functionality but I'm fine with this.
As a developer I think there are technical reasons behind the online limitation of Siri.
A service like Siri needs a huge dictionary, comparable huge resources of RAM and processing power. Those are pretty constrained on the current generation of iOS devices.
The second reason is that the services need to be trained in order to improve and last but not least they can be updated without deploying millions of OS updates limiting the improvement performance.
In short we might see offline Siri some day but it's obviously not there yet. The same goes for the dictation functionality which is currently only available as cloud service even on the Mac.
@GG
May be I'm wrong, but your points can be summarized as "but Apple does the same."
It's not necessarily equal if two (persons / companies) do the same.
I'll try to answer your questions. Please note that I don't have all necessary data but for most questions there is an answer in the privacy section of OS X dictation which I took as a starting point (dictation is a part of Siri and I reckon that it's privacy policy is similar).
Now to your questions:
-1. Yes it sends the words you say to Apple's servers because those are processed there. Apple states that it uses the data to train and improve the system. There might also information be saved like your home address or nick name or relationships like "my father" in order to enable functionality like "bring me home" or "say my father that I'm late". You are asked to confirm this information.
-2. Apple saves the input partly anonymized, partly because some relationship to your account might be necessary (compare 1.). If you disable Siri or dictation your transcripts and audio files get wiped from the servers while fully anonymized data chunks, used for improving the system, might stay.
-3. I didn't find any evidence neither that it does nor that it doesn't. But you can change your advertising identifier in system preferences which will brake the relationship between your commands and your identity.
In addition you can completely opt out of Siri and / or iAds.
The fact that opting out of one or even both doesn't degrade the functionality in a significant way indicates that there's no strong data binding between them.
-4. iCloud Mail isn't ad-supported and therefore doesn't implement the iAd framework which is only available for 3rd party devs on iOS devices. iCloud Mail is TRUSTe certified and I'm convinced it wouldn't have achieved this if a connection to iAds would exist, because it in this case it should be labeled as ad- supported in some way. http://www.apple.com/privacy/ and http://www.truste.com/privacy-program-requirements/
In addition scanning in- and out-bound messages is a necessity for spam- and virus-protection which is technically done on the transfer gateway. In some countries there are additional laws to apply. The inference that scanning on the gateway is related to iAds is pretty far fetched.
-5. compare 4.
-6. The credit check of buyers is done by financial service providers like credit card companies. Like every other company Apple just gets the result of this check. For iTunes gift card purchases this is obviously not necessary and if customers want to avoid any information provided then that's their way to go.
-7. http://www.apple.com/privacy/contact/
-8. Your iTunes / iCloud profile including your purchasing list + http://www.apple.com/privacy/ ;
-9. You are really turing things around. If I send a gift card to someone he / she has to have or to create an iTunes account in order to get it booked. It's simply the electronic version of printed gift cards you can buy at a store. The person who has got the code can use it with an existing account.
If I send it to a wrong person or it get's lost it's bad luck. You can't get the code back.
-10. Well, that's a good question. First of all Apple is bound to the current law which might answer most of the questions. I'm no lawyer and therefore I refuse to interpret it here. I heaven't read something about Transperancy Reports covering government requests.
All I know is that accessing iMessages isn't that simple because Apple uses a device to device encryption apparently without additional server component
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/
It took me about 45 min to find these answers simply by clicking through my iTunes / iCloud account and the related privacy documents. While there's still space for improvement I think that Apple has done a solid job here.
I kindly ask you to answer the same 10 questions for the comparable google services like Google Now, Gmail, Play Store so we can compare them.
If you find the answers insufficient I'll try to clarify them e.g. by sending a request to Apple or TRUSTe.
I'd prefer this to the discussion taking off while I was editing this post.
Edit again: Fixing some typos.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DominoXML
@Blah64
You are right there are some tradeoffs with Siri being solely cloud based. When I got my iPhone 5 I did some tests and I found it totally strange that it was possible to ask for the directions for one address and it failed for another although it had recognized the right names.
After a while I figured out that the "error" is based on fact, that it can't access the addresses stored in corporate server accounts. While the fact is irritating I think that the separation of address pools for these functions makes totally sense.
I refuse to upload those addresses and I hope that my customers or partners also will, although I doubt it especially at those who use public cloud services.
So I have to live with limited Siri functionality but I'm fine with this.
As a developer I think there are technical reasons behind the online limitation of Siri.
A service like Siri needs a huge dictionary, comparable huge resources of RAM and processing power. Those are pretty constrained on the current generation of iOS devices.
The second reason is that the services need to be trained in order to improve and last but not least they can be updated without deploying millions of OS updates limiting the improvement performance.
In short we might see offline Siri some day but it's obviously not there yet. The same goes for the dictation functionality which is currently only available as cloud service even on the Mac.
@GG
May be I'm wrong, but your points can be summarized as "but Apple does the same."
It's not necessarily equal if two (persons / companies) do the same.
I'll try to answer your questions. Please note that I don't have all necessary data but for most questions there is an answer in the privacy section of OS X dictation which I took as a starting point (dictation is a part of Siri and I reckon that it's privacy policy is similar).
Now to your questions:
-1. Yes it sends the words you say to Apple's servers because those are processed there. Apple states that it uses the data to train and improve the system. There might also information be saved like your home address or nick name or relationships like "my father" in order to enable functionality like "bring me home" or "say my father that I'm late". You are asked to confirm this information.
-2. Apple saves the input partly anonymized, partly because some relationship to your account might be necessary (compare 1.). If you disable Siri or dictation your transcripts and audio files get wiped from the servers while fully anonymized data chunks, used for improving the system, might stay.
-3. I didn't find any evidence neither that it does nor that it doesn't. But you can change your advertising identifier in system preferences which will brake the relationship between your commands and your identity.
In addition you can completely opt out of Siri and / or iAds.
The fact that opting out of one or even both doesn't degrade the functionality in a significant way indicates that there's no strong data binding between them.
-4. iCloud Mail isn't ad-supported and therefore doesn't implement the iAd framework which is only available for 3rd party devs on iOS devices. iCloud Mail is TRUSTe certified and I'm convinced it wouldn't have achieved this if a connection to iAds would exist, because it in this case it should be labeled as ad- supported in some way. http://www.apple.com/privacy/ and http://www.truste.com/privacy-program-requirements/
In addition scanning in- and out-bound messages is a necessity for spam- and virus-protection which is technically done on the transfer gateway. In some countries there are additional laws to apply. The inference that scanning on the gateway is related to iAds is pretty far fetched.
-5. compare 4.
-6. The credit check of buyers is done by financial service providers like credit card companies. Like every other company Apple just gets the result of this check. For iTunes gift card purchases this is obviously not necessary and if customers want to avoid any information provided then that's their way to go.
-7. http://www.apple.com/privacy/contact/
-8. Your iTunes / iCloud profile including your purchasing list + http://www.apple.com/privacy/ ;
-9. You are really turing things around. If I send a gift card to someone he / she has to have or to create an iTunes account in order to get it booked. It's simply the electronic version of printed gift cards you can buy at a store. The person who has got the code can use it with an existing account.
If I send it to a wrong person or it get's lost it's bad luck. You can't get the code back.
-10. Well, that's a good question. First of all Apple is bound to the current law which might answer most of the questions. I'm no lawyer and therefore I refuse to interpret it here. I heaven't read something about Transperancy Reports covering government requests.
All I know is that accessing iMessages isn't that simple because Apple uses a device to device encryption apparently without additional server component
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/
It took me about 45 min to find these answers simply by clicking through my iTunes / iCloud account and the related privacy documents. While there's still space for improvement I think that Apple has done a solid job here.
I kindly ask you to answer the same 10 questions for the comparable google services like Google Now, Gmail, Play Store so we can compare them.
If you find the answers insufficient I'll try to clarify them e.g. by sending a request to Apple or TRUSTe.
I'd prefer this to the discussion taking off while I was editing this post.
Edit again: Fixing some typos.
MacBook Pro already offered the Google version and much more completely than I would have been able to. That's why I had hoped he would also do the Apple version to compare with.
I don't think you really understood question 9, but I found a partial answer in Apple's Privacy Policy:
When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to join you on Apple forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number.
They don't say what becomes of it and whether it's retained.
... and no I'm not claiming Apple collects the same types of data as Google does. I simply don't know and I've never seen any in-depth articles on just what Apple collects and what it knows about us. That's again why I had hoped MacBook Pro might take the project on.
Hi. A few notes, jumping in:
Quote:
Originally Posted by DominoXML
-1. Yes it sends the words you say to Apple's servers because those are processed there. Apple states that it uses the data to train and improve the system.
Google also saves voice data to train its recognition engine for a particular person.
However, you can go to your Google Dashboard and delete that info and/or anonymize it if you wish. (I almost deleted the data it had stored up about me, then decided I liked how well it recognized my voice, so I left it enabled. Below is the screen capture I made at the time.)
Quote:
-3. I didn't find any evidence neither that it does nor that it doesn't. But you can change your advertising identifier in system preferences which will brake the relationship between your commands and your identity.
In addition you can completely opt out of Siri and / or iAds.
The fact that opting out of one or even both doesn't degrade the functionality in a significant way indicates that there's no strong data binding between them.
IIRC, a user can only opt out of getting targeted ads, not the ads themselves.
(All that the iOS ad settings button does, is set a flag to advise the advertiser not to use it for targeted purposes. The user's advertising identifier is still given to each advertiser anyway.)
I wish that Apple had something like the Google Dashboard pages, where anyone can drill down to see and edit what interests the company has saved about them. It's both fascinating and boring at the same time. It makes you realize that most of the info isn't that personal. (Outside of saved searches, which you can turn off.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
MacBook Pro already offered the Google version and much more completely than I would have been able to. That's why I had hoped he would also do the Apple version to compare with.
I don't think you really understood question 9, but I found a partial answer in Apple's Privacy Policy:
When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to join you on Apple forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number.
They don't say what becomes of it and whether it's retained.
... and no I'm not claiming Apple collects the same types of data as Google does. I simply don't know and I've never seen any in-depth articles on just what Apple collects and what it knows about us. That's again why I had hoped MacBook Pro might take the project on.
I think I got number 9 partially right, because to be able to send a gift card you need some address data that has to be stored for the receipt.
The same goes for invitations which have to be processed. It's stated that "Apple may" because it's up to you to fill the form and provide the information in order to e.g. send a mail like "Dear XXX, YYY has send you a gift card."
I think I have made the point earlier that for some kind of transactions specific data is needed.
And again: privacy doesn't force you to stop communication. Privacy's goal is to limit and control the amount of what is shared with whom. In practice this describes the effort to limit collected data to the necessary minimum.
Now to your last paragraph. I appreciate that Apple was able to produce a brief, understandable privacy site helping average people to understand the big picture instead of the common juristic gibberish, playing rhetoric games by using a squishy language solely aiming on keeping companies a**** out of the firing line.
And well I thought that I help MacBook Pro a bit because analyzing Google's privacy documents related to those 10 points will take a while.
I hoped you will add your expertise too.
The last time I did it was when I thought about using Google Maps for iOS. There were some points I didn't agree with, so I wiped the app unused.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KDarling
Hi. A few notes, jumping in:
Google also saves voice data to train its recognition engine for a particular person.
However, you can go to your Google Dashboard and delete that info and/or anonymize it if you wish. (I almost deleted the data it had stored up about me, then decided I liked how well it recognized my voice, so I left it enabled. Below is the screen capture I made at the time.)
IIRC, a user can only opt out of getting targeted ads, not the ads themselves.
(All that the iOS ad settings button does, is set a flag to advise the advertiser not to use it for targeted purposes. The user's advertising identifier is still given to each advertiser anyway.)
I wish that Apple had something like the Google Dashboard pages, where anyone can drill down to see and edit what interests the company has saved about them. It's both fascinating and boring at the same time. It makes you realize that most of the info isn't that personal. (Outside of saved searches, which you can turn off.)
Beside the option to limit ad-tracking there's an option to reset the Ad-ID which basically is like starting with a new profile.
I don't think that Dashboard is the best solution, because you first have to personalize in order to do adjustments.
I fear the majority isn't using those features anyway. They'd be better served by more restricted presets and optional opt-in for specific services.
I doubt that the most info isn't that personalized because the searches are the most comprehensive description of most user's profiles.
Technically the search profile can act as a so called "multifunctional super key" I e.g. use to merge or combine multiple data sources.
To be honest I haven't looked at it yet. If it can be reset or wiped I'm fine because this means I can start with a new Ad-ID.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DominoXML
Beside the option to limit ad-tracking there's an option to reset the Ad-ID which basically is like starting with a new profile.
Ah, thanks! Something new in 6.1. How many people do you think will go click that between each app?
Apple had good intentions, but unfortunately, what the missing UDID ended up causing, was for advertisers to come up with their own MAC address databases to correlate users.
Quote:
I fear the majority isn't using those features anyway. They'd be better served by more restricted presets and optional opt-in for specific services.
I agree. Opt-in is usually the best solution. On the other hand, there are so many people who never figure out things like that, and all they wonder is, why doesn't this darned thing remember me?
Quote:
I doubt that the most info isn't that personalized because the searches are the most comprehensive description of most user's profiles.
I mean that the profile it builds is so general. When you search for new cars, Google saves that you're interested in new cars. It doesn't seem to save in your profile that you were interested in Fords or BMWs. (It could be in your search history, but you can turn that off or clear it.)
Sign up for Google's adSense network and you can see for yourself exactly what kind of consumer target options are available. They're nowhere near as personal as people think. Umm... well, yes, you can target keywords. Yet unless someone clicks on your ad and enters some info, you won't know who they are.
Personally I like when computers remember me and my preferences. Imagine if every time you came to this forum you had to sign in, and it didn't remember your posts, etc. Yet this forum lives off ads that seem targeted. Do I worry? No.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blah64
As to your list, #1-8 are absolutely and completely irrelevant to me, personally. I do think they are issues that people should think about more, but relatively easy to avoid.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
Huh.
So you don't feel any need to know for certain whether Apple has personal details connected to you despite your best efforts and if you find they do ask that they be removed? Interesting. That's not the the takeaway I got from your previous posts on privacy. Perhaps your views really did change somewhat over the past few months.
Appreciate the honesty tho in at least saying you either don't know or don't care what data Apple collects from it's customers and how it's used.
Read more carefully! ----> "to me, personally" <---- Immediately followed by "I do think they are issues that [other] people should think about more", because these are important issues in general. For me personally, those points are irrelevant because I do not give Apple any personal data. I may be inconvenienced, but I'm not worried.
Remember the overriding manifesto above: NO company or organization... It's very clear that I think EVERYTHING revolving around these issues, with ALL companies and organizations is important, in general. That doesn't mean I need to be concerned personally.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blah64
#9 is a big concern for everyone, and I already wrote about this concern in my reply above to solip.
But your response targeted such a wafer-thin slice of what I wrote. How about addressing stuff like:
a) the manifesto: NO company or organization anywhere should have the breadth and depth of data that Google has on citizens around the world. Even if their intent and past-records were sparklingly clean (and they're not anymore), it's just too dangerous, and it's only getting worse.
I've found that when I explain this to people (educated, but not necessarily techy enough to understand what happens behind the scenes), most of them "get it", and agree that it's dangerous. However, they're too addicted to the conveniences to deal with it personally. That's a sad statement.
b) gathering personal intel on 3rd parties (family, friends) from your users is very scary, no matter who does it, and this practice seems to be growing.
c) Your main theme here on this board is that Google and Apple's behavior are equally bad. But it's simply not true, because one is primarily in the business of selling hardware, the other is primarily in the business of selling its users, for better or worse. Whether or not they "sell" "personally-identifiable" information (which is nearly impossible to know because there are many weasel-y, but legal ways to mask technicalities of data transfer), their main business is gathering that intel. For Apple, it's secondary, or even tertiary.
Instead of picking some lesser portion of people's posts, hit the meat.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KDarling
Personally I like when computers remember me and my preferences. Imagine if every time you came to this forum you had to sign in, and it didn't remember your posts, etc.
Ha. I would write this almost 180 degrees the other way. I don't care what MY computer knows about me, because it's operating within my control (yes, I use various tools to control inbound and outbound data), but in general I don't want most computers (I think you meant web sites) to remember me at all -- except when I explicitly want them to. Creepsville.
I don't have to imagine having to sign in every time I come here, because that's exactly what happens and it's perfect. The alternative is either leaving all cookies enabled all the time (crazy, no one should ever do that!!), or managing them carefully, which most people are unable or too lazy to do.
No big deal, I'm only replying because it seemed so funny to me how completely opposite people can be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KDarling
Personally I like when computers remember me and my preferences. Imagine if every time you came to this forum you had to sign in, and it didn't remember your posts, etc.
I'm good with that -- as long as I'm the one managing it on the client side.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KDarling
Yet this forum lives off ads that seem targeted.
There are ads on this site?
Quote:
Originally Posted by KDarling
Ah, thanks! Something new in 6.1. How many people do you think will go click that between each app?
Apple had good intentions, but unfortunately, what the missing UDID ended up causing, was for advertisers to come up with their own MAC address databases to correlate users.
I noticed this somehow childish happiness of advertisers finding a way to circumvent it instead of thinking through the issue.
The problem was that Apple provided a unique identifier that could be used / misused for system wide tracking and got sued for it.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20026677-37.html#!
On the one hand we have an unique vendor specific ID enabling linking private data, an the other hand there's a technical parameter like the MAC address open to a variety of companies.
In addition the UUID got provided, while the MAC address get's pulled.
Don't you think there's a difference?.
Originally Posted by KDarling
I agree. Opt-in is usually the best solution. On the other hand, there are so many people who never figure out things like that, and all they wonder is, why doesn't this darned thing remember me?
There's still a difference whether my own device saves something to remember me or if it's done by someone else on a external system. The other issue here is that this data get's saved for advertising purpose and is not actually knowingly saved data of the users current work.
You are right, that people aren't able to figure out what's going on, but is there an implicit right to pull the data without consent because of that?
I think transparency and clarification are the ways to go.
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Originally Posted by KDarling
I mean that the profile it builds is so general. When you search for new cars, Google saves that you're interested in new cars. It doesn't seem to save in your profile that you were interested in Fords or BMWs. (It could be in your search history, but you can turn that off or clear it.)
Sign up for Google's adSense network and you can see for yourself exactly what kind of consumer target options are available. They're nowhere near as personal as people think. Umm... well, yes, you can target keywords. Yet unless someone clicks on your ad and enters some info, you won't know who they are.
Personally I like when computers remember me and my preferences. Imagine if every time you came to this forum you had to sign in, and it didn't remember your posts, etc. Yet this forum lives off ads that seem targeted. Do I worry? No.
I think we have now reached the basic issue of this discussion. You are part of the advertising business when you use adSense. I'm not, at least when I exclude that I have done some SOE for websites. You are profiting of this private data, me not.
I can't blame you in first place, but I'd like to raise concerns about the risks.
What I see is that honest journalism looses more and more ground on the web, because fill-rate and clicks turn to their new main income.
I observe a tendency to write articles using hyperbolism, selective truth and sensationalism in order to generate controversy, because controversy leads to higher click-rates.
These mechanisms remind me at HPT where "the godhead" is called liquidity all other market participants have to subordinate. I'm highly critical to HPT because I know about the implicit flaws of algorithms.
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Originally Posted by DominoXML
There's still a difference whether my own device saves something to remember me or if it's done by someone else on a external system. The other issue here is that this data get's saved for advertising purpose and is not actually knowingly saved data of the users current work.
I think you have a valid point about whether the preferences are saved on device or off, although either way the information is going to be sent up at times.
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I think we have now reached the basic issue of this discussion. You are part of the advertising business when you use adSense. I'm not, at least when I exclude that I have done some SOE for websites. You are profiting of this private data, me not. I can't blame you in first place, but I'd like to raise concerns about the risks.
Oh. No sir. I don't actually use adSense.
The reason I signed up for it, was so that I could see for myself what target information was available... instead of relying on internet paranoia and hearsay.
All throughout human history, the lack of knowledge has bred fear and then mob behavior. It's much better when people can calmly make up their own minds, either way, from a more factual starting point.
Regards.
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Originally Posted by KDarling
Oh. No sir. I don't actually use adSense.
The reason I signed up for it, was so that I could see for myself what target information was available... instead of relying on internet paranoia and hearsay.
All throughout human history, the lack of knowledge has bred fear and then mob behavior. It's much better when people can calmly make up their own minds, either way, from a more factual starting point.
Regards.
Sorry, but your sentence "Sign up for Google's adSense network and you can see for yourself exactly what kind of consumer target options are available" gave the impression that you have sufficient first hand information about adSense.
You should consider to indicate your background more clearly because there's a risk to get you wrong. I don't feel responsible for you being in a pissy mood.
And please stop to insinuate that I have a lack of knowledge and I'm trying to spread fear and ignite mob behavior, because this might make me switch to a mistaken attack mode.
For using adSense you need a website you are the owner or at least the technical administrator or the marketing agent.
When you sign in your website get's checked and after you get approved you have to specify your ad-types and define your marketing strategy.
To judge the related statistics and information you should have a sufficient amount of data to investigate. I hope the "just sign in" in order to "get a clue" is not taken as advice by others because that's not the way how these things should be handled IHMO.
There are better suited additional sources of information e.g. provided by Google for understanding this service.
Edit: There are some typos I didn't correct. I just want to point out that it's SEO (search engine optimization) and not SOE.
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Originally Posted by DominoXML
I don't feel responsible for you being in a pissy mood.
And please stop to insinuate that I have a lack of knowledge and I'm trying to spread fear and ignite mob behavior, because this might make me switch to a mistaken attack mode.
I was not trying to insinuate anything towards you, but only towards those who argue points without doing any checking at all.
I thought the "Regards" at the end would make it quite apparent that I appreciated your discussion.
Sorry if that wasn't clear.
It's strange, I've been in the Google ecosystem for awhile, and yet the only spam I get in my email is from Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and a few other smaller services I've unfortunately signed up for (which are all quite useless).
For all the apps, books, etc... I've bought from Google, I haven't got any spam from them (ie. App makers)...