I also remember Steve Jobs say on stage that Apple tracks user behavior on their devices to inform their business strategy. “We know , we see the data” or something along those lines.
All of Apples moves into services and many other interesting business decisions may theoretically be attributed to their surveillance of potential competitors on their devices.
I would be curious to see the scale of their internal “tracking”
Not sure why you're being downvoted - the current number one story on HN [1] is a list of IOS 0-days, one of which shows that the analytics data is collecting and reporting health metrics like heart rate, menstrual cycle length (?), and other somewhat less unusual information.
. . .During device set up, with soft language, amidst a slew of other settings that have a “default” big blue button that consents while a tiny text link that goes into “customise” settings.
You should read the requirements and the user flow for App tracking transparency. Apple prohibits the permission dialog from firing more than three times in a long window. The default big button is negative consent. The language is “Ask app not to track”
It’s ridiculous that the owner of the platform gets to suppress competition that way without regulators getting involved.
If you're happy with that, then the same standard should apply to all apps on their platform.
In reality, Apple adopts exactly the scummy UX practices for their permissions flow during device set up that they go out of their way to prohibit third party developers from using.
They use language such as "share device analytics with Apple" which is broad amd covers pretty much everything while they have mandated under penalty of an App Store Ban, the explicit call out of every single use case of every single permission not just in the permission flow but also on the App Store page.
While here we are, with no idea about the usage of core Apple "Analytics" for the things we know about, leave alone the undocumented data access such as their "Find My" network basically giving them the real world secret peer to peer network to identify everything from all the devices in your immediate neighborhood to every single person you've met within range of their proprietary radios carrying a compatible device.
We don't know, because they refuse to have any transparency into their internal use of their data collection and analytics and id' argue, they can simply slip an update with an undocumented library that sends data off over this network even when you have everything turned off and permissions unconsented to because there is NO PERMISSION CONSENT for the Find my network as a simple example.
"Privacy" from everyone who isn't Apple isn't "Privacy", it's an exploitative commercial practice that disadvantages competitors directly and disenfranchises customers for sheer lack of knowledge of the unknown infinity amount of ways this may be abused right now that we have no way of opting out of or discovering.
All analytics data collected by your iPhone is viewable under Settings -> Privacy -> Analytics & Improvements -> Analytics Data, or via a computer. None of it is hidden from you. And they have published privacy labels for their own apps a long time ago, so there's nothing inconsistent here.
It may help reading the whole comment. The analytics logs on device are not the complete picture of device information sent back to Apple servers and used for intelligence on device use.
All of Apples moves into services and many other interesting business decisions may theoretically be attributed to their surveillance of potential competitors on their devices.
I would be curious to see the scale of their internal “tracking”