Nov 7th, 2019 - Category: Apple
With all the crazy news lately, a small item might have gone unnoticed: Apple has updated its privacy pages. It really is a small item because most people seem to find protecting their privacy online about as important as organizing their sock drawer. Yesterday’s article in The Verge “Apple’s new privacy pages are easier to read and look way better” gives the details and includes links to Google’s and Amazon’s privacy pages as well, but if you use Apple products take a look yourself. Apple makes it extremely easy to find. Just go to apple.com/privacy and their bold statement right at the top says it all.
Privacy is a fundamental human right. At Apple, it’s also one of our core values. Your devices are important to so many parts of your life. What you share from those experiences, and who you share it with, should be up to you. We design Apple products to protect your privacy and give you control over your information. It’s not always easy. But that’s the kind of innovation we believe in.
By comparison, Google makes it easy to find their privacy policies as well, just go to policies.google.com/privacy, but things are a bit different over at Google.
When you use our services, you’re trusting us with your information. We understand this is a big responsibility and work hard to protect your information and put you in control. This Privacy Policy is meant to help you understand what information we collect, why we collect it, and how you can update, manage, export, and delete your information.
Where Apple makes 10 points about how they don’t collect personal information and prevent other companies from doing so, Google goes to great lengths to explain in a friendly cartoonish way that they DO definitely collect personal information, use it, and indirectly help other companies get access to that information. To be fair, Google doesn’t provide information like “John Doe in Boise Idaho searched for macrame plant holders 27 times in the past week,” but there is a reason they made $120 BILLION in advertising revenue last year… So they state right up front that they do things like the following:
We collect information about your activity in our services, which we use to do things like recommend a YouTube video you might like. The activity information we collect may include:
- Terms you search for
- Videos you watch
- Views and interactions with content and ads
- Voice and audio information when you use audio features
- Purchase activity
- People with whom you communicate or share content
- Activity on third-party sites and apps that use our services
- Chrome browsing history you’ve synced with your Google Account
If you use our services to make and receive calls or send and receive messages, we may collect telephony log information like your phone number, calling-party number, receiving-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls and messages, duration of calls, routing information, and types of calls. We use various technologies to collect and store information, including cookies, pixel tags, local storage, such as browser web storage or application data caches, databases, and server logs.
Ugh, wow, gasp, but really “who cares about my data?!” (click on the link for why you might want to care). Google even has a cute video that makes it seem like “sharing is caring” when it comes to privacy.
Google is essential to the internet, there is no question about that. I still use Google Search, YouTube, Maps, News, and other Google products daily, but I do value my privacy as well so I take reasonable precautions such as not using Google Chrome, Gmail, and never logging into Google services when I use them. More suggestions can be found in my article from July, “Five Quick and Easy Suggestions for Protecting Your Online Privacy.”