Does Apple REALLY care about your privacy?

if you care at all about giant corporations harvesting your personal data for nefarious purposes you might have heard of one company that does things differently one company that cares about your privacy and will protect you from evil corporations like Facebook and Google it's Apple you've probably seen some sort of advertisement from Apple talking about how much they care about user privacy no more trackers collecting your personal data they're not going to sell your personal data to the highest bidder your data stays on your device privacy that's iPhone but how much do they really care about your privacy do they care or is privacy just the latest marketing buzzword that will help them sell more iPhones it's become almost common knowledge at this point that apple is the company you choose if you care about privacy well let's see if that's true or not in this video now for how much they claim to care about privacy They're Not always completely honest in their claims if you've ever seen Apple's marketing you know how much they love to talk about protecting you from online tracking and targeted advertisements but what if they were caught doing the exact same thing let's take one example a couple of years back in the Apple App Store it was found that among many other things that they were tracking they track what apps you search for and that this data was directly tied back to you now this is a problem because to quote a Gizmodo article this data can be sensitive especially when you consider that merely searching for apps related topics such as religion lgbtq issues health and addiction can reveal details about a person's life and it wasn't just the App Store that that was tracking you either there are Apple music Apple TV books the iTunes Store and stocks apps all collected similar data about you and these analytics would report back all kinds of information the stocks app reported which stocks you were watching stocks you search for stocks you viewed and timestamps for all of these the news app founded home all the Articles you viewed and of course they also sent home a bunch of additional information such as your device your screen resolution ID numbers your keyboard languages all of which can be used to better track you using device fingerprinting now if that wasn't bad enough this was even if you opted out to collecting analytics so you would go into the settings to disable the analytics Apple collects under the iPhone analytics option and apple claimed that turning this off would disable the sharing of device analytics altogether and yet even with it turned off it still kept phoning home the data now when you set up an iPhone they'll ask you if you consent to Apple collecting analytics data and you'd expect that if you said no that they wouldn't collect any data right but researchers said that whether you consent or not made no difference at all in the data sent now that's pretty hypocritical it's also pretty illegal and as a result Apple was hit with multiple class action lawsuits but the way they get around this in their own heads is to twist the definition of tracking a little bit so normally you would think of tracking as collecting user data to better serve you advertisements right but Apple's definition essentially boils down to it's only tracking if you share that data with third parties so if if you just keep all the personal info yourself it's not tracking right but this is a pretty slippery way to define things so I'm not sure if they really care about protecting you from targeted advertisements they just want to be the ones to do it and of course advertising is big business for them they made roughly 5 billion US doll in 2021 from advertising which is small compared to other players in the space but it's a part of their business they already making big plans to scale up and when Apple actually does roll out features to protect users privacy they're usually pretty half-baked implementations that don't protect you nearly as much as they claim to so Apple recently rolled out Advanced Data protection or end to end encryption of iCloud data essentially this means that data backed up to iCloud can only be viewed by you apple or anyone else has no way to decrypt it or to view it Apple was praised for making this change now your photos your notes your iCloud drive and your message backups can only be unlocked by you this sounds pretty good but like a lot of Apple's privacy promises it has some holes in it first of all contacts your calendar and email can't be endtoend encrypted so that's still a lot of personal data that's still out there second this feature is only opt in so the vast majority of users iCloud data can still be decrypted by Apple now some data is already endtoend encrypted by default like for example your health data and passwords but there's a lot that isn't endtoend encrypted by default and another problem is that most people aren't going to enable these additional protections since they require you to manually turn it on in the settings and the issue is let's say you want to end to- end encrypt your messages but you then send a message to someone else who doesn't have Advanced Data protection enabled which is most Apple users now it doesn't matter that you have end encrypted your messages because if the other party hasn't Apple will still be able to read through them since now they're part of their backup and of course they'll also be able to send it to a government if they are requested to not only that there's more holes in it the backed up iCloud photos are end to end encrypted but the metadata is not which can feel a lot about you so yes they have done something to improve users privacy that much is true but like a lot of Apple's efforts the implementation is pretty half-baked and it doesn't offer nearly as much protection as you would think and I'm sure there are some people who think that you have nothing to hide and you don't mind the government reading through all your text messages because everyone knows that law enforcement like the FBI always has your best interest at heart and you may be fine with this but Apple can and has handed over info to authoritarian governments like of course China and if it doesn't affect you it does affect thousands of political dissidents all over the world it's just a very hypocritical position for Apple to be in when they care so much about privacy well unless they care more about making money I mean even Google a company that is not exactly known anymore for not being evil they pulled out of China years ago after not wanting to comply with authoritarian government mandates so if you think that Apple protects your data when you upload it to iCloud they only end encrypt a fraction of the data in the cloud which gives them access to pour through the rest of it whenever they want finally we have to talk about one of Apple's most well-known privacy features you've probably heard of Apple's app tracking transparency you know the ask app not to track popup you get whenever you open up a new app on your iPhone now basically all this really does is prevent apps from being able to use your unique Advertiser ID so normally advertisers can use your ID to identify you and track you across different services and apps but hiding this ID from apps doesn't actually protect you against much tracking of of course if you log into something like Facebook they can still collect all the personal data you give them just by being on their platform that should be obvious but it should protect you from third party trackers right well technically Apple doesn't want third party trackers to collect personal data about users and apps but in practice a lot of apps just don't really care about Apple's asking politely to not track the users in a study a couple of years back lots of major apps still collected almost as much data even when asked not to track and some apps started tracking you even more after you ask them not to so apple is basically just using the honor System which is not really that effective and apple says that it's not allowed but it sounds like apple isn't really that strict with a lot of apps in 2021 The Washington Post flaged these findings to Apple and apple said that it was reaching out to these companies to understand what information they're collecting and how they are sharing it but several weeks later nothing appeared to have changed apps can also track individual users using a technique called fingerprinting so even if they don't have your own unique Advertiser ID they can still tell it you by collecting specific data about your phone apps can gain access to things like your screen brightness and volume down to 15 decimal places and free dis space on your phone down to the bite the info is so specific that essentially no two people can have the exact same device settings so they'll be able to tell that you and although Apple technically doesn't allow this and they have taken steps to try to reduce it it's not very hard to circumvent this though you're not allowed to collect this device data for tracking it can be used for as an example fraud protection now marketers can and do claim that this is just to prevent fraud but it can also be used to uniquely identify you for advertisements again Apple says that this isn't allowed but there hasn't been much in the way of policing now maybe it was just a bad start for Apple but a year later in 2022 according to the New York Times it didn't look like much had changed sure like a lot of Apple's privacy initiatives you could say that things are marginally better but the real tracking protection that this new feature gives you is not that significant worst of all it gives users a full sense of security if you see that Apple ask them not to track you you'd probably think that you're safe from all these evil online trackers never imagining that you're not actually so I hope that I've shown you that most of Apple so-called privacy protections are really ineffective at best and are much more about looking good than actually protecting users it looks great in terms of marketing but not so much in practice but at the same time I do have to give credit where credit is due as much as it pains me to say because compared to its biggest competitor Google with Android Apple is much better as one example Apple Maps are much more private than Google Maps because Apple keeps most data locally on your phone instead of sending it all to their servers it also end to-end encrypts a lot of personal location data by default like your favorite places which is good and that's just one example because Apple phones home a lot less data than Android does to Google this has been documented now if you really want my recommendation as to which phone you should buy I would much rather somebody use a custom Android ROM like graphine OS which is basically a degoogle version of Android if you really care about privacy this is pretty much as good as it gets if you still want to use a phone now if you have the technical know how to do that I would say go for it but I'm aware that this is Out Of Reach for the average User it's just too Technical and too complex for them to handle and so I do have to say for the average person who doesn't want to go hacker man and install a custom ROM on your phone and maybe you just want a phone that just works Apple phones are still much better than Android I've said a lot on this channel before that I don't think you have to be perfect in terms of privacy a little bit can go a long way and a lot of privacy Advocates see things from an All or Nothing perspective since apple is not perfect on privacy it's worthless but you have to look at your Threat Level or the level of privacy that you care about I've talked before at length about how the needs of a political dissident are going to be different than the Privacy needs of your mom not everybody has the time or the needs or the resources to do something like install a custom Android ROM which I totally understand in this case if you need a device and don't want to go overboard in caring about privacy I do have to say that apple is better by default Android just phones home way more data and analyzes and collects data about everything you do and of course Apple still collects data but not as much as Google they do run ads but they are not primarily an advertising company and thus they have less incentive to collect personal data so I'll say this but with a caveat Apple primarily cares about privacy as a marketing term like any company you should not trust them completely to have your best interests at heart and if you have high Threat Level needs apple is definitely not the option you should choose however I would say that Apple's phones are better than Google's for normies if you want a phone that just works then the iPhone makes more sense now saying this kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth just because I don't really like recommending Apple out of principle I can make a whole Lewis Rossman tier rant about all of my complaints with apple but as far as privacy goes they are definitely the better of the mainstream choices let's not get it twisted but just know that in the background Apple will still be collecting data about you they'll just be a little bit quieter about it than Google after all those targeted ads in the App Store aren't going to sell themselves and the next time Tim Cook gets on stage and starts talking about the amazing new privacy feature that just came to iPhone I'd like you to be just a little skeptical about how much Apple really cares

Nobody understands online privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H414XdcbC4Q Why do I care so much about privacy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aXIXozAsOE Email tier list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtH9ZTof-Tc Support the channel: https://ericmurphy.xyz/donate If you're tired of big companies like Facebook and Google suctioning up all of your personal data, you might have heard that Apple is different. Apple loves to talk about how much they care about user privacy and all the protections they put in place to keep their users safe from big, bad big data. But is Apple really being truthful in their claims? How much do they really value your privacy and protect you from trackers? And should you buy an iPhone or an Android?! Let's find out in this video. 🌐 My website: https://ericmurphy.xyz 🎥 Watch my videos on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@ericnmurphy Sources: https://gizmodo.com.au/2022/11/apple-sued-for-allegedly-deceiving-users-with-privacy-settings-after-gizmodo-story/ https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-analytics-12-lawsuits-statement-1850077715 https://pocketnow.com/apples-ad-business-5-billion-growth-app-tracking-transparency/ https://blog.lockdownprivacy.com/2021/09/22/study-effectiveness-of-apples-app-tracking-transparency.html https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/12/apple-reaches-quiet-truce-over-iphone-privacy-changes/ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/23/iphone-tracking https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-maps/ https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DCN-Google-Data-Collection-Paper.pdf Footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1KZWjZVnAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWN0146TEKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhWtA6zFSqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxoAwnRFwJ0 0:00 Intro 0:48 It's not tracking if WE do it! 3:24 The ineffectiveness of Apple's privacy features 6:01 Apple's App Tracking Transparency failure 8:43 What does Apple do right? 9:28 What's my recommendation? 11:02 Conclusion