I’m reading Breaking Away by Maurice E. Stucke.This part…

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Notes by Axbom

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I’m reading Breaking Away by Maurice E. Stucke.

This part about #Apple and #privacy is concise and well-written.

Apple and Privacy

Apple's CEO testified before Congress in 2020 that privacy is a foundational principle that touches everything Apple does:
"We build products that, from the ground up, help users protect their fundamental right to the privacy of their personal data."

If that is true, why would Apple make Google the default search
engine on all Apple devices, including its personal assistant Siri, for the past 15 years? It is not because Google is the most privacy-sensitive search engine. If Apple wanted to protect us from surveillance, it could have chosen DuckDuckGo. Instead, to secure these defaults,
Google pays Apple on a
"revenue share basis." It is worse than Apple receiving a fixed sum because the revenue sharing agreement aligns Apple's and Google's incentives.Under this arrangement, if you search for something on your Safari browser, you probably use
Google's search engine. And Apple gets a significant percentage of Google's monopoly revenues from search advertising. So the more
people use Siri, Spotlight, or Google on their 1.4 billion Apple
devices worldwide, the more personal data that Google collects, the more advertising revenue that this data helps generates, and the more money Apple receives as a result. And the monopoly profits are
in the billions. In 2019 Google reportedly paid Apple $12 billion to be the default search engine on Safari, 160 which is significant by itself and relative to Apple's 2019 net income of $55.256 billion.

6 Jun 2022, 09:25

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