I am not a fan of FB. Lord knows they are arseholes.
I _do_ like these labels, I think they are good.
but
It is dishonest to say the least that imessenger only has access to just those details. To use imessenger, you need an icloud account.
Tie that to the location services and any payment information, Apple knows everything about you, even more than FB.
The issue is about trust. rightly people don't trust FB with their data. However I don't think we should be letting apple off so lightly, especially when they are pointing the blame at other people.
To be pedantic you need an Apple ID rather than a iCloud account to use iMessenger. So in theory payment information isn't included.
However once you've got someones email or phone number you can ultimately tie it to any other data when you've used it elsewhere - medical records, phone calls to prostitutes, hacker news posts etc.
I think the difference is that Apple don't (or claim to not) use that data to categorise you and serve ads like Facebook. Apple make lots of money from hardware sales, a few cents from aggregating data is a drop in the ocean and they can take 'the moral highground' towards privacy.
I think the difference is that you are paying Apple to not abuse your privacy. With Facebook, you know you are trading some amount of privacy, but these new labels make it clear just what that true cost is.
I agree with this take, and it's the same take I share with friends and colleagues. It's certainly better than FB.
However, are we sure that Apple, in 30 years, will be the same proponent of privacy that they are today? Even if there's a 10% risk that they won't, they'll have your same data then that they have now.
Strong encryption with user-owned keys is the only way you can mitigate against this scenario. I'm optimistic that we'll get there eventually, but we aren't there yet.
I am paying to trust apple with my data. Much more sensitive data than I share with Facebook.
I don't give facebook my health, location or payment details. Apple gets all of that and extracts a fee.
I don't give a shit about advertising, advertising is always about the aggregate.
What I care about is someone getting access to my data directly to do something with it. For me, my main fear is hackers and corrupt insiders.
Facebook is going to spend the next five years transforming from a naive company that is/was loosey goosey with peoples data, to I suspect a fee extracting privacy first AR platform. You might laugh, but look at microsoft, look how they have changed.
Granted I pay for an email service that could similarly abuse me.
I think the goal should be to create services/software that make it impossible for a company to abuse people, so we don't have to rely on their word, or have to worry about them changing their word later.
Intent matters, simply collecting data to support the features you are providing is not inherently bad. Collecting data for third party ad targeting on ther other hand...
I don't think intent matters as much as you think, because the government millitary complex can force you to give that info in the first place and then use it for very bad purposes, like china and USA has repeatedly. Gathering such info while being aware of such realities and very wealthy is pretty bad too.
I _do_ like these labels, I think they are good.
but
It is dishonest to say the least that imessenger only has access to just those details. To use imessenger, you need an icloud account.
Tie that to the location services and any payment information, Apple knows everything about you, even more than FB.
The issue is about trust. rightly people don't trust FB with their data. However I don't think we should be letting apple off so lightly, especially when they are pointing the blame at other people.