“The story of Facebook’s first decade was one of relentless, rapacious growth, from a dorm-room side project to a global service with 8,000 employees and 1.35 billion users, on whose unprotesting backs Zuckerberg has built an advertising engine that generated $7.87 billion last year, a billion and a half of it profit,” Lev Grossman reports for TIME Magazine.
“I asked him about Ello, an upstart for-pay social network built on the premise that it doesn’t show you ads and doesn’t harvest your personal information. When a social network does those things, Ello’s manifesto argues, ‘You’re the product that’s being bought and sold,'” Grossman reports. “Zuckerberg’s take was, as usual, practical: whatever ethical merits it might have, the business model won’t scale. ‘Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don’t do that by having a service people pay for.’ I suggest that Facebook’s users are paying, just with their attention and their personal information instead of with cash. A publicist changes the subject.”
“But before that happens Zuckerberg also notes — and it was the only time I saw him display irritation — that Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote something similar in September in a statement spelling out Apple’s privacy policy: ‘When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product,'” Grossman reports. “The shot was probably meant for Google, but Facebook was definitely in the blast radius. ‘A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers,’ Zuckerberg says. ‘I think it’s the most ridiculous concept. What, you think because you’re paying Apple that you’re somehow in alignment with them? If you were in alignment with them, then they’d make their products a lot cheaper!'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple doesn’t make junk. That’s why their products aren’t priced like junk. Great customer experiences aren’t cheap. The price of Apple products has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the company is more aligned with their customers than the insatiable Facebook/Google data leeches are with their hosts, err… “customers.”
An advertising business model can be in alignment with customers until it goes too far, crossing the creepy line in invasion of privacy.
On September 18th, Apple CEO Tim Cook has posted an open letter on Apple.com. Here it is, verbatim:
At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled.
Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services like Apple Pay. And we continue to make improvements. Two-step verification, which we encourage all our customers to use, in addition to protecting your Apple ID account information, now also protects all of the data you store and keep up to date with iCloud.
We believe in telling you up front exactly what’s going to happen to your personal information and asking for your permission before you share it with us. And if you change your mind later, we make it easy to stop sharing with us. Every Apple product is designed around those principles. When we do ask to use your data, it’s to provide you with a better user experience.
We’re publishing this website to explain how we handle your personal information, what we do and don’t collect, and why. We’re going to make sure you get updates here about privacy at Apple at least once a year and whenever there are significant changes to our policies.
A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.
Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.
One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether.
Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.
Our commitment to protecting your privacy comes from a deep respect for our customers. We know that your trust doesn’t come easy. That’s why we have and always will work as hard as we can to earn and keep it.
Tim
Apple’s “Privacy” webpages are here.
Source: Apple Inc.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
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Edward Snowden’s privacy tips: ‘Get rid of Dropbox,” avoid Facebook and Google – October 13, 2014
Apple thinks different about privacy – September 23, 2014
Apple CEO Tim Cook ups privacy to new level, takes direct swipe at Google – September 18, 2014
A message from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy – September 18, 2014