 If you care at all about giant corporations harvesting your personal data for nefarious purposes, you might have heard of one company that does things differently. One company that cares about your privacy and will protect you from evil corporations like Facebook and Google. It's Apple. You've probably seen some sort of advertisement from Apple talking about how much they care about user privacy. No more trackers collecting your personal data. They're not going to sell your personal data to the highest bidder. Your data stays on your device. That's iPhone. But how much do they really care about your privacy? Do they care? Or is privacy just the latest marketing buzzword that will help them sell more iPhones? It's become almost common knowledge at this point that Apple is the company you choose if you care about privacy. Well, let's see if that's true or not in this video. Now, for how much they claim to care about privacy, they're not always completely honest in their claims. If you've ever seen Apple's marketing, you know how much they love to talk about protecting you from online tracking and targeted advertisements. But what if they were caught doing the exact same thing? Let's take one example. A couple of years back in the Apple App Store, it was found that, among many other things that they were tracking, they track what apps you search for, and that this data was directly tied back to you. Now, this is a problem because to quote a Gizmodo article, this data can be sensitive, especially when you consider that merely searching for apps related to topics such as religion, LGBTQ issues, health and addiction can reveal details about a person's life. And it wasn't just the App Store that was tracking you either. There are Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, the iTunes Store, and Stocks apps, all collected similar data about you. And these analytics will report back all kinds of information. The Stocks app reported which stocks you are watching, stocks you search for, stocks you viewed, and timestamps for all of these. The news app phoned home all the articles you viewed. And of course, they also sent home a bunch of additional information such as your device, your screen resolution, ID numbers, your keyboard languages, all of which can be used to better track you using device fingerprinting. Now, if that wasn't bad enough, this was even if you opted out to collecting analytics. So you would go into the settings to disable the analytics Apple collects under the iPhone analytics option. And Apple claimed that turning this off would disable the sharing of device analytics altogether. And yet, even with it turned off, it still kept phoning home the data. Now, when you set up an iPhone, they'll ask you if you consent to Apple collecting analytics data. And you'd expect that if you said no, that they wouldn't collect any data, right? But researchers said that whether you consent or not made no difference at all in the data scent. Now, that's pretty hypocritical. It's also pretty illegal. And as a result, Apple was hit with multiple class action lawsuits. But the way they get around this in their own heads is to twist the definition of tracking a little bit. So normally you would think of tracking as collecting user data to better serve you advertisements, right? But Apple's definition essentially boils down to it's only tracking if you share that data with third parties. So if you just keep all the personal info yourself, it's not tracking, right? But this is a pretty slippery way to define things. So I'm not sure if they really care about protecting you from targeted advertisements, they just want to be the ones to do it. And of course, advertising is big business for them. They made roughly $5 billion in 2021 from advertising, which is small compared to other players in the space. But it's a part of their business they are already making big plans to scale up. And when Apple actually does roll out features to protect users' privacy, they're usually pretty half-baked implementations that don't protect you nearly as much as they claim to. So Apple recently rolled out Advanced Data Protection, or end-to-end encryption of iCloud data. Essentially, this means that data backed up to iCloud can only be viewed by you. Apple or anyone else has no way to decrypt it or to view it. Apple was praised for making this change. Now your photos, your notes, your iCloud drive, and your message backups can only be unlocked by you. This sounds pretty good, but like a lot of Apple's privacy promises, it has some holes in it. First of all, contacts, your calendar, and email can't be end-to-end encrypted. So it's still a lot of personal data that's still out there. Second, this feature is only opt-in, so the vast majority of users' iCloud data can still be decrypted by Apple. Now, some data is already end-to-end encrypted by default, like, for example, your health data and passwords, but there's a lot that isn't end-to-end encrypted by default. And another problem is that most people aren't going to enable these additional protections, since they require you to manually turn it on in the settings. And the issue is, let's say you want to end-to-end encrypt your messages, but you then send a message to someone else who doesn't have Advanced Data Protection enabled, which is most Apple users. Now it doesn't matter that you have end-to-end encrypted your messages, because if the other party hasn't, Apple will still be able to read through them, since now they're part of their backup. And of course, they'll also be able to send it to a government if they are requested to. Not only that, there's more holes in it. The backed-up iCloud photos are end-to-end encrypted, but the metadata is not, which can reveal a lot about you. So yes, they have done something to improve users' privacy. That much is true, but like a lot of Apple's efforts, the implementation is pretty half-baked, and it doesn't offer nearly as much protection as you would think. And I'm sure there's some people who think that you have nothing to hide, and you don't mind the government reading through all your text messages, because everyone knows that law enforcement like the FBI always has your best interests at heart. And you may be fine with this, but Apple can and has handed over info to authoritarian governments, like of course China. And if it doesn't affect you, it does affect thousands of political dissidents all over the world. It's just a very hypocritical position for Apple to be in when they care so much about privacy, well, unless they care more about making money. I mean, even Google, a company that is not exactly known anymore for not being evil, they pulled out of China years ago after not wanting to comply with authoritarian government mandates. So if you think that Apple protects your data when you upload it to iCloud, they only end to end in crypto fraction of the data in the cloud, which gives them access to pour through the rest of it whenever they want. Finally, we have to talk about one of Apple's most well-known privacy features. You've probably heard of Apple's app tracking transparency. You know the ask app not to track pop-up you get whenever you open up a new app on your iPhone now? Basically, all this really does is prevent apps from being able to use your unique advertiser ID. So normally advertisers can use your ID to identify you and track you across different services and apps. But hiding this ID from apps doesn't actually protect you against much tracking. Of course, if you log into something like Facebook, they can still collect all the personal data you give them just by being on their platform. That should be obvious. But it should protect you from third-party trackers, right? Well, technically, Apple doesn't want third-party trackers to collect personal data about users and apps. But in practice, a lot of apps just don't really care about Apple's asking politely to not track the users. In a study a couple of years back, lots of major apps still collected almost as much data even when asked not to track. And some apps started tracking you even more after you asked them not to. So Apple is basically just using the Honor system, which is not really that effective. And Apple says that it's not allowed, but it sounds like Apple isn't really that strict with a lot of apps. In 2021, the Washington Post flagged these findings to Apple, and Apple said that it was reaching out to these companies to understand what information they're collecting and how they are sharing it. But several weeks later, nothing appeared to have changed. Apps can also track individual users using a technique called fingerprinting. So even if they don't have your own unique advertiser ID, they can still tell it's you by collecting specific data about your phone. Apps can gain access to things like your screen brightness and volume down to 15 decimal places and free disk space on your phone down to the byte. The info is so specific that essentially no two people can have the exact same device settings. So they'll be able to tell that it's you. And although Apple technically doesn't allow this and they have taken steps to try to reduce it, it's not very hard to circumvent this. Though you're not allowed to collect this device data for tracking, it can be used for, as an example, fraud protection. Now marketers can and do claim that this is just to prevent fraud, but it can also be used to uniquely identify you for advertisements. Again, Apple says that this isn't allowed, but there hasn't been much in the way of policing. Now, maybe it was just a bad start for Apple, but a year later in 2022, according to the New York Times, it didn't look like much had changed. Sure, like a lot of Apple's privacy initiatives, you could say that things are marginally better, but the real tracking protection that this new feature gives you is not that significant. Worst of all, it gives users a false sense of security. If you see that Apple asked them not to track you, you'd probably think that you're safe from all these evil online trackers, never imagining that you're not actually. So I hope that I've shown you that most of Apple's so-called privacy protections are really ineffective at best and are much more about looking good than actually protecting users. It looks great in terms of marketing, but not so much in practice. But at the same time, I do have to give credit where credit is due, as much as it pains me to say. Because compared to as big as competitor, Google with Android, Apple is much better. As one example, Apple Maps are much more private than Google Maps, because Apple keeps most data locally on your phone instead of sending it all to their servers. It also end-to-end encrypts a lot of personal location data by default, like your favorite places, which is good. And that's just one example, because Apple phones home a lot less data than Android does to Google. This has been documented. Now, if you really want my recommendation as to which phone you should buy, I would much rather somebody use a custom Android ROM, like GrapheneOS, which is basically a de-Google version of Android. If you really care about privacy, this is pretty much as good as it gets if you still want to use a phone. Now, if you have the technical know-how to do that, I would say go for it. But I'm aware that this is out of reach for the average user. It's just too technical and too complex for them to handle. And so I do have to say, for the average person who doesn't want to go hackerman and install a custom ROM on your phone, and maybe you just want a phone that just works, Apple phones are still much better than Android. I've said a lot on this channel before that I don't think you have to be perfect in terms of privacy. A little bit can go a long way. And a lot of privacy advocates see things from an all or nothing perspective. Since Apple is not perfect on privacy, it's worthless. But you have to look at your threat level or the level of privacy that you care about. I've talked before at length about how the needs of a political dissident are going to be different than the privacy needs of your mom. Not everybody has a time or the needs or the resources to do something like install a custom Android ROM, which I totally understand. In this case, if you need a device and don't want to go overboard in caring about privacy, I do have to say that Apple is better by default. Android just phones home way more data and analyzes and collects data about everything you do. And of course, Apple still collects data but not as much as Google. They do run ads, but they are not primarily an advertising company. And thus they have less incentive to collect personal data. So I'll say this, but with a caveat. Apple primarily cares about privacy as a marketing term. Like any company, you should not trust them completely to have your best interests at heart. And if you have high threat level needs, Apple is definitely not the option you should choose. However, I would say that Apple's phones are better than Google's for normies. If you want a phone that just works, then the iPhone makes more sense. Now saying this kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth just because I don't really like recommending Apple out of principle, I can make a whole Louis Rossman tier rant about all of my complaints with Apple. But as far as privacy goes, they are definitely the better of the mainstream choices. Let's not get it twisted. But just know that in the background, Apple will still be collecting data about you. They'll just be a little bit quieter about it than Google. After all those targeted ads in the App Store are going to sell themselves. And the next time Tim Cook is on stage and starts talking about the amazing new privacy feature that just came to iPhone, I'd like you to be just a little skeptical about how much Apple really cares.