Apple has made plenty of sly digs at Android over the years, but an internal presentation that has now surfaced sees the company proclaiming that Android is “a massive tracking device.”
Coming out of the ongoing Google antitrust trial, an internal Apple presentation has surfaced (via The Verge) in which the company called Android a “massive tracking device.”
Top comment by Warren Skipper
As the article says, all phones track you. The differences lie in how and where. GPS is in all phones so in the general sense, your phone always knows where you are. As for other tracking:
Android tracks you through the Google services you use. However, Google provides robust security controls that let you see and edit all of that data. Also, that data is used to personalize Android. Two examples are "Your Timeline" in Google Maps and Google Assistant. There are countless other ways. Therefore, the data you restrict or delete will affect your Android experience.
Apple is a bit different, the biggest place they track you in iOS is through the app store. However, Apple gives you no control over any of that data. Also, in comparison to Android, very little of it is used to personalize iOS. Therefore, users have a similar experience across all of their devices.
Both companies track you in order to advertise: Google, advertises in search, Google Play Store, etc and Apple, in their app store. Neither companies sell your data, instead they keep it locked away internally so companies pay them to advertise to you for them.
Quite simply, your data is no more or less secure with either companies. It all comes down to which (ecosystem) experience you prefer.
The presentation in question was regarding a push within Apple to start “Competing on Privacy.” The slides, made in January 2013, dove into how Apple’s competitors (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft primarily) handled privacy matters and user data. A “privacy timeline” includes some 2000s and 2010s events that made headlines regarding privacy, such as Google’s Street View cars recording private Wi-Fi networks and Instagram’s aim to use user photos in its ads, as well as Google’s privacy policy move to combining user data across services. Apple went on to compare how its products handle privacy differently from Google and others. We’ve embedded some of the slides below.
The presentation culminates in the full-page statement below, where Apple says that “Android is a massive tracking device.” The slideshow is partially redacted and abridged, which leaves out the context of this statement, but it’s certainly a bold way to talk about a competitor.
Of course, all mobile devices do a whole lot of tracking, whether it’s Android or iOS.
However, it’s hard to argue that Apple hasn’t taken this sentiment from a decade ago and run with it. In iOS 14.5, Apple doubled down on privacy by introducing a system permission for tracking for advertising and such, which led to massive declines in tracking on iPhone. Android still does not have a similar feature, though the company has reportedly looked into it.
More on Android:
- Apple Watch support for Android was ‘nearly complete,’ canceled to protect iPhone
- Google uses search revenue to strongarm Android OEMs into pushing security updates
- Here’s every smartphone set to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 so far
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