Apple has been hit with a class-action complaint in the US accusing the iGiant of playing fast and loose with the privacy of its customers.
The lawsuit [PDF], filed this month in a northern California federal district court, claims the Cupertino music giant gathers data from iTunes – including people's music purchase history and personal information – then hands that info over to marketers in order to turn a quick buck.
"To supplement its revenues and enhance the formidability of its brand in the eyes of mobile application developers, Apple sells, rents, transmits, and/or otherwise discloses, to various third parties, information reflecting the music that its customers purchase from the iTunes Store application that comes pre-installed on their iPhones," the filing alleged.
"The data Apple discloses includes the full names and home addresses of its customers, together with the genres and, in some cases, the specific titles of the digitally-recorded music that its customers have purchased via the iTunes Store and then stored in their devices' Apple Music libraries."
[...] Additionally, the lawsuit alleges the Music APIs Apple includes in its developer kit can allow third-party devs to harvest similarly detailed logs of user activity for their own use, further violating the privacy of iTunes customers.
The end result, the complaint states, is that Cook and Co are complacent in the illegal harvesting and reselling of personal data, all while pitching iOS and iTunes as bastions of personal privacy and data security.
If you are not paying for it, you are the product. But, just because you are paying for it, does not prevent you from being the product, too.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @10:10AM (2 children)
Apple's biggest differentiator from Google and friends is their privacy and lack of tracking (to whatever degree that is actually true). If they lose that, they may as well start selling ads and tracking to the highest bidder. At which point, they are competing on price/features which will lead them in a race to the bottom line with Google. Apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc are cross platform so they can't really compete on App availability either.
Apple really needs to hold onto and embrace the privacy angle. They have HSMs protecting your data from government probing, they purportedly (didn't) track you and share your data.
They've already cannibalised their professional Macintosh market by shitting all over the pro versions of their Apps in favour of consumer targeted features. 15 years ago they were the defacto platform for creative design, video and photography. Apple Aperture was deprecated for Photos which is not even close to feature parity. Final Cut X was a regression and took about 5 years to get to feature parity with Final Cut 9. The completely deprecated iPhoto without a decent way to transfer event tags over to their new Photos App.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @12:01PM
Gimp overtaking Photoshop measured by number of professional users
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday May 30 2019, @01:58PM
...and by not producing a Mac Pro that's worth buying for many years now.
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Entropy is a bitch.