Apple's Privacy Rules Leave Its Engineers in the Dark (theinformation.com) 57
Privacy is one of the selling points of Apple products. But for employees who develop these products, it can be a pain. The Information: Apple doesn't collect a lot of customer data from its services, including Apple Maps, the Siri voice assistant and its paid video-streaming service, according to more than a dozen former employees. And the customer data it does collect from products like the App Store and Apple Music aren't widely accessible to employees who work on those and other products, these people said. That makes it difficult for Apple to mimic popular features developed by its competitors, which collect more data and have fewer restrictions on employee access to such information, they said.
Look at Apple TV+. The paid video-streaming service, unlike its bigger rivals, doesn't collect demographic info about customers or a history of what they have watched, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation at Apple. That means Apple TV+ employees can't analyze how customers move from one piece of content to another, making it next to impossible to recommend more videos to them based on their preferences -- a contrast to Netflix, Disney and other streaming services, which use such data to get customers to watch more videos. [...] From Apple's app recommendations to new features for Siri and the company's Goldman Sachs-backed credit card, Apple engineers and data scientists often have to find creative or costly ways to make up for the lack of access to data. In some cases, as with Apple TV+, employees simply have to accept limitations on what they can do.
Look at Apple TV+. The paid video-streaming service, unlike its bigger rivals, doesn't collect demographic info about customers or a history of what they have watched, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation at Apple. That means Apple TV+ employees can't analyze how customers move from one piece of content to another, making it next to impossible to recommend more videos to them based on their preferences -- a contrast to Netflix, Disney and other streaming services, which use such data to get customers to watch more videos. [...] From Apple's app recommendations to new features for Siri and the company's Goldman Sachs-backed credit card, Apple engineers and data scientists often have to find creative or costly ways to make up for the lack of access to data. In some cases, as with Apple TV+, employees simply have to accept limitations on what they can do.
Oh no. (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway...
Re: Oh no. (Score:2)
Novel idea - ask the users what they want.
Either you are a leader or a follower. Looking at others makes you a follower.
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Novel idea - ask the users what they want.
Their complaint seems to be Apple won't even allow developers to ask users what they want. This could be solved by making users opt in to movie / TV / music recommendations, making it clear their activity would be stored and analyzed to provide those recommendations (and used to improve the recommendations of all users who opt in). But for these developer complaints to be valid, Apple would not even be open to doing this.
Re: Oh no. (Score:2)
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The last thing companies want is for users to tell them what they want. Users will get what they're told and they'll like it. The metrics don't lie.
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The gold standard for gathering user feedback is to do it in person: invite people to come along and interact with your app, then record them doing it. That's more expensive than just keylogging them, but it offers one critical advantage: you can ask them *why* they do things instead of having to guess.
Too much UI design these days is done by taking aggregated reports and guessing what they mean.
Re:Oh no. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I've worked in the medical device industry, where you are forbidden by law from collecting customer data. I have seen it before but you're making all sorts of legal agreements before you can look at the data that arrived on a broken device that needs analysis. I've worked for places where the customers have big critical infrastructures, and they won't share their data with your except the small support group which has gone through legal agreements. I've worked with big national banks and walked through their server rooms (tempting red buttons... must not push...), they're not sharing data either.
The point is, you can get a lot of stuff done, make a lot of money, keep the customers happy, all without grabbing sensitive or personally identifiable data.
The point aobut Apple TV not being able to collect demographic data is just whiny. You can get the necessary data by anonymizing it. It's not like Netflix actually has good suggestions, and Youtube is outright stupid at what it puts in the recommended list.
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he point about Apple TV not being able to collect demographic data is just whiny. You can get the necessary data by anonymizing it.
The article is paywalled, so I cannot read if there are more details, but the complaint seems to be that the data isn't stored at all, not that the developers simply cannot access it. I have worked in financial services and work in healthcare now, and at all companies I have worked with they stored everything they could think to store but they carefully guarded who could see it. Or at least the larger companies protected it (fairly) well.
If the data itself is not stored at Apple, no amount of anonymizing is
Re: Oh no. (Score:1)
Privacy, what a concept (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Privacy, what a concept (Score:4, Insightful)
They’re rich enough to not do a lot of the things they do anyway. See: the app store 30%.
So, is it truly a core belief like they say? Or do they really see it as that much of a competitive advantage?
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I wonder how much of a competitive disadvantage it is. TFA mentions that they don't get as much feedback for Apple Maps, which is generally thought to be inferior to Google Maps.
Some stuff is down to gathering data from users, such as Google Maps ability to show when places are busy in real-time, or show traffic in real-time. That kind of data collection seems like a decent trade-off for users, assuming Google sticks to what its privacy policy says and keeps it anonymous and not stored without permission. A
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Re:Privacy, what a concept (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not supposed to be solved, since it isn't broken.
No, you don't have access to what Aunt Judy told her Siri yesterday.
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Re: Privacy, what a concept (Score:2)
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The problem to be solved is how do you continue to improve your product when it has privacy features that prevent you from seeing how people actually use it.
Of course nobody needs to know what Aunt Judy said to her Siri. But engineers working on the product do need to know how people are using it, if it's working as intended, etc. and this can be done without violating people's privacy.
There are already some solutions. I'm going to mention two of them below that are relevant to this article but there are ot
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It's interesting to see how Apple, to some extent, actually protects the privacy of its users and doesn't always use data it has to get a competitive advantage. A more evil company would be hoovering that data and exploiting it as much as possible.
Odd. From what I've read, Apple Music does basically hoover up your listening data, keeping a record of every artist you've ever listened to. You can delete artists, of course, but your listening is still being tracked.
So if this story is true, then it seems like they're drawing arbitrary lines in the sand here.
It seems more likely that Apple TV+ just doesn't have enough content to be worth bothering to implement that sort of recommendation algorithm. By my count, they have only 10 comedy shows in total.
Re: Privacy, what a concept (Score:1)
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A lot of it seems like just marketing to me. If you actually look at the Apple TV App privacy policies, they seem to do the same stuff everyone else does. Whether they gather the data through the app side or the service side doesn't really matter; they are still gathering what you watch, using it for ads, and providing data to partners (companies that provide the content and buy ads).
"We use information about the movies and TV shows you purchase and download to offer advertising to ensure that Ads in the Ap
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A lot of it seems like just marketing to me. If you actually look at the Apple TV App privacy policies, they seem to do the same stuff everyone else does. Whether they gather the data through the app side or the service side doesn't really matter; they are still gathering what you watch, using it for ads, and providing data to partners (companies that provide the content and buy ads).
From what I could gather from teh summary (TFA is paywalled), the issue is not data collection but that Apple doesn't make the data freely available internally to all the product teams.
Re: Privacy, what a concept (Score:1)
F'n Paywall (Score:2, Insightful)
Good! (Score:3)
Re:Good! (Score:4, Interesting)
Recommendations on Netflix and Disney aren't really that accurate anyway.
I can only talk about Netflix, and their recommendations are mostly shit.
1. They keep recommending the same movies I already watched on their platform, almost immediately after watching them. WTF.
2. They keep pushing series, despite me mostly ignoring any series which is not finished (because I don't want to watch something that would be abruptly canceled, or invest time in watching something that's good for 5 episodes and shit for 50). Yes, I know series make most money, I just don't want them.
3. They keep peddling "Top 10 watched today in $OWN_COUNTRY" - which is mostly a list of retarded movies.
Acceptable uses of data (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course not collecting it in the first place is even better, for peace-of-mind, and to make sure it doesn't get stolen.
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Actually Apple does collect data. I have seen requests to share certain data with Apple for product improvement purposes. In some cases I may have approved it (I can't remember). Other developers, including open source developers, often do the same thing. And these developers are often people who I trust. These are all opt-in requests, of course.
Of course Apple (and probably others) restricts that data to employees who have a clearly defined need for it. To do otherwise would open them up to serious liabil
Re: Acceptable uses of data (Score:1)
I don't mind some data (Score:5, Interesting)
I honestly don't mind a company using my data to make my experience better. What I mind is when they weaponize that data against me for other things like monetary extraction and privacy violations.
Unfortunately, corporate execs can't be trusted to just use it for experience, as time has proven.
Re:I don't mind some data (Score:5, Interesting)
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds to me like Apple (Score:3)
Programming is hard, oh noes... (Score:2)
Sorry, Apple devs, your current "problem" sounds like a boon for users. If you don't absolutely need the data, you shouldn't try to collect it.
No one should care that this stance makes it hard to engineer certain types of widgets - not your users, not your engineers, and not your management.
Once you lose customer trust, you'll find yourself burning cash should you ever want to get it back.
Tread carefully.
Re: Programming is hard, oh noes... (Score:2)
I don't think Apple's doing this (Score:4, Interesting)
That makes me wonder why, and I've got a theory (ok, a baseless wild guess). I think Apple is especially worried about regulation because they tend to cater to a wealthier audience. Figure top 5% or 10%. And those folks tend to have the ear of Congress. My guess is their privacy focus is less about a real commitment to privacy (they're a mega corp after all, and that data is valuable) are more a fear of regulation.
That's important because if that fear goes away they'll start doing the same things everybody else does. They kind of have to, since if they can get away with it then that raises shareholder value. But again, only if they can get away with it.
It's one of the few times when the rich are actually useful, since them protecting their own hides trickles down to us. What da ya know, trickle down economics works!
Although if they could segment their customer base by earnings....
Re:I don't think Apple's doing this (Score:4, Interesting)
That makes me wonder why, and I've got a theory (ok, a baseless wild guess). I think Apple is especially worried about regulation because they tend to cater to a wealthier audience. Figure top 5% or 10%. And those folks tend to have the ear of Congress. My guess is their privacy focus is less about a real commitment to privacy (they're a mega corp after all, and that data is valuable) are more a fear of regulation.
That's important because if that fear goes away they'll start doing the same things everybody else does. They kind of have to, since if they can get away with it then that raises shareholder value. But again, only if they can get away with it.
It's one of the few times when the rich are actually useful, since them protecting their own hides trickles down to us. What da ya know, trickle down economics works!
This is probably part of their reasoning, yes. Another big part is that their biggest competitor is an advertising company, and anything that they can do to make advertising less effective hurts their competition disproportionately.
Apple also frequently ignores open standards in favor of proprietary solutions in an anticompetitive way, and the result is that a lot of their privacy-protecting features don't fully work cross-platform (FaceTime, group iMessage, etc.). So again, they provide privacy protection in a way that is carefully designed to hurt competitors, even though doing so harms many of their users in the process. But they keep doing it because it pays off. The single-platform limitation of their group iMessage end-to-end encryption has been cited as a big part of why so many teens use iPhones, for example.
And of course, Apple never lets privacy cost them a sale, so Apple doesn't ever bother to implement straightforward privacy-protecting features like supporting multiple users on a single device (except under MDM), work profiles, etc. that other platforms implemented many, many years ago.
So I agree with you that Apple's privacy-focused behavior is far more spin than reality, and that they have strong ulterior motives for doing so. The way they cherry-pick which privacy-protecting features to implement makes it pretty obvious that they aren't doing this entirely out of benevolence, though I'm sure many of their engineers believe that they are.
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The funny thing is that the fight is mostly one-sided. Google expends a fair amount of effort on making their iOS experience good, and nearly everything Google does is available on iOS nearly simultaneously with Android (Google Voice, Docs, etc.), whereas almost everything interesting that Apple does is iOS-only, or is opened up to Android only many years later, begrudgingly, because of user complaints (e.g. opening up FaceTime in a very limited way during the pandemic).
Basically, Apple acts like a monopo
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... makes it pretty obvious that they aren't doing this entirely out of benevolence, though I'm sure many of their engineers believe that they are.
There ought to be a course in organizational psychology and ethics, topic centered upon your statement.
Re:I don't think Apple's doing this (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, I really do think Tim Cook has at least SOME mind for privacy. As a gay man, he's probably more aware of the privacy implications of unfettered access to data than most. I don't think that makes him super altruistic or something, but I think at the very least, it's a little easier for him to justify this stance to himself and to stakeholders. It's mostly about the capitalistic benefit that it gives them to be able to market they're privacy-minded, but I do wonder if it would be a concern at all if he were a straight guy.
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That makes me wonder why
It's because they're incompetent.
No, really.
If you go back to I think 2012 when the whole "privacy" marketing thing started, you'll find it originates from an earning call where Apple listed as a risk that they didn't collect as much data as Google did, so Siri was worse at basically everything because of that. (Worse at voice recognition, worse at recognizing requests, worse at coming up with answers.)
Somehow the press managed to report on this as Apple being better at privacy than Google. After watching i
Advertising at its finest (Score:1)
Everyone understands that this is a covert ad for how good Apple is at privacy, while slamming their competitors, right? Right?
So Summary? (Score:2)
Re: So Summary? (Score:1)
Tracking ids and phoning home (Score:2)
So, does that mean apple will remove the IDFA tracking from devices that has the sole purpose to cash in on user data ( https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com] )? Or does it mean that they will stop the 'Gatekeeper' software from phoning home every time you launch an app?
The data about which videos get played in groups could easily have been captured anonymously. If you use Apple TV+, you know that apple put extremely little effort into the user experience there. Did they also make a glitchy app for privacy reaso
Wait ... they don't know? (Score:1)
What a setback /s (Score:2)
Oh no, how did Apple ever create great products without all of them phoning home?
*Looks at Apple II*
*Looks at iMac*
*Looks at iPod*
*Looks at iPhone*
*Looks at Magic Mouse*
Ok maybe not that one, but you get the idea.
Re: What a setback /s (Score:2)
Nope. (Score:2)
I still don't trust them.
So Apple actually has PII rules (Score:2)