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Apple’s ad network gets ‘preferential access to users’ data’ vs Facebook, Google

(www.forbes.com)
113 points blinding-streak | 2 comments | 10 Aug 20 14:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.484s | source
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jeffbee ◴[10 Aug 20 15:06 UTC] No.24110022[source]▶
Apple exempts all their iOS software from their own privacy scaremongering. iOS never pops up a scary dialog warning you that Camera has accessed your location twice in the last week, even though Camera accesses your location every time you start it. There is a completely separate iOS privacy regime for Apple's own apps.
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wlesieutre ◴[10 Aug 20 15:42 UTC] No.24110468[source]▶
And Apple is 100% sure of exactly what happens with that location data.

I'd be happy to get some limited exceptions to this, like "3rd party camera apps can get pre-granted location access, but only if the developer agrees that the location data will be used for nothing but EXIF tags, and if it is ever found to have left the device the developer gets delisted from the app store."

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1. fragmede ◴[10 Aug 20 16:43 UTC] No.24111199[source]▶
There isn't a box inside of Apple HQ marked 'location data, do not eat', so Apple isn't actually 100% sure where the location data is. There are numerous safeguards, both in their device and the online platform to try and make sure it never leaks, but no one other than their marketing team would say 100%.
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2. wlesieutre ◴[11 Aug 20 18:36 UTC] No.24124055[source]▶
That's true, I shouldn't say 100%. But the location data is in my iCloud Photos box, which I think Apple will at least internally take a hard look at anything that wants to access it.

If the iPhone calculator app team said "We're going to turn this into a social calculator and it's going to use your photo library to automatically identify receipts to calculate tips and splits, and we're going to do the image processing on the server and make a database of where we identified your receipts to help with identifying restaurant payment locations," somebody higher up would tell them "No, we need to do receipt recognition all on-device." That makes it a lot easier to avoid accidental data leakage.