Apple has recently shown a noticeable tendency to collect, gather, transmit, and sometimes even store privacy-sensitive data – despite repeatedly emphasizing the importance of protecting such data and ensuring it remains solely on the user’s device.
This is, of course, always accompanied by assurances that it is done in an anonymized manner that prevents any connection to an individual. However, this increasingly occurs without users being asked in advance for their consent to this data transmission and storage.
While Apple usually provides the option to disable these features, they are often enabled by default.
Aside from the recently much-discussed Enhanced Visual Search functionality, which analyzes image content from personal photos and matches it against an Apple database, macOS Sequoia introduces another new feature labelled Help Apple Improve Search, which sends and stores various search queries from Safari, Spotlight, and other sources to improve search results…
I don’t trust any of their “anonymous” claims until it’s proven to be effective by third-party researchers.
Wasn´t it obvious? Apple is a 3 trillion and they don´t want to stop growing.
Data Collection is new gold mine for monetization (every industry is doing it including car constructors now), it was obvious that Data collection is the next step for Apple.
Unpopular opinion, but I find it funny that in the recent years, Google is making steps to improve the users privacy (not for fun, but to avoid monopoly lawsuits and claims) while Apple keep “surprising” its users by bad privacy practices.
It is much worse than the article states. I went to buy an iPhone for my wife for Christmas at the local Apple store (she uses iPhones due to work requirements). To buy it I had to scan a bar code which then wanted to grab a whole laundry list of information from my phone, including things like name, address, the IMEI, which provider I was using and much more, most of which I forget (the list was more than a screen full). When I mentioned it was for my wife they wanted to know which provider she uses, and offered to “help” switch phones. This is not anonymous data, they know who bought it, what credit card, and everything about the new phone.
Didn’t expect anything better from Apple.