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Why Apple, Microsoft are healthier than Facebook

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In reality, Apple collects more information about its customers than Facebook as it offers more products and services.
In reality, Apple collects more information about its customers than Facebook as it offers more products and services.

It’s easy to understand Apple CEO Tim Cook’s somewhat self-righteous comments on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal: His company has never emphasized customer data monetization, and privacy has been one of its persistent selling points.

Apple still collects our data — and reserves the right to share it — but the company has a much better track record than newer tech titans.

“The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer; if our customer was our product Cook said on Wednesday. “We’ve elected not to do that.” Asked what he’d do if he were in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s shoes, he said, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

In reality, Apple collects more information about its customers than Facebook as it offers more products and services. It knows everything from an iPhone’s location to its owner’s taste in movies and music.

It’s all in the company’s privacy statement, including the frank admission that Apple will share the data with “strategic partners that work with Apple to provide products and services, or that help Apple market to customers” and with law enforce Apple also lets applications that run on its platform (including Facebook) hoover up data. And it does have a small ad platform that allows targeted advertising.

Apple’s closest equivalent in terms of data collection, sharing and pass-through to app developers is Google, which offers roughly the same array of services (plus search) and owns mobile and desktop operating systems. The difference is that Apple has imposed voluntary restrictions on itself. Google and Microsoft also use that to some degree, and a co-inventor of differential privacy, Cynthia Dwork, has even worked for Microsoft Research.



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