Privacy or Improved Service

Apple and Google. As Paul Nickinson wrote in his blog:

“Apple makes a kick-ass product. Google makes killer services.”

Combine the two and you get a “phenomenal Google experience on the iPhone”, as Rene Ritchie put it.

And yet Apple keeps sniping at Google, especially on the data privacy front. Like the time when Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook wrote in a public letter:

“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 read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.”

To which Ben Thompson says sarcastically:

“You can almost hear it now:

How admirable! Golly gee, Apple is such a better company than those hypocritical evil-doers at Google! Why can’t everyone treat customers so well? Apple good. Google bad. Facebook worse.”

Thompson then goes on to point out:

“User information of this type isn’t important to Apple’s business model, so they “choose not to retain it.” There’s nothing worth praising here – or denigrating – but it’s worth acknowledging. In the meantime, though, Apple will happily score rhetorical points in the court of public opinion for a decision that wasn’t difficult at all.”

Besides, as Dustin Curtis says, Google doesn’t use our data only to target better ads at us:

“The same information Google uses to target advertising is also used to make its products, like Google Maps, so great.”

Nick Summers cites a recent example:

“One of the biggest problems with voice search is that, for consistent results, you have to use specific words and phrasing…Well, Google is making it a little easier now with location aware queries. It means that your Android or iOS device will take your current position into consideration and pair your questions to nearby points of interest.”

And so as Curtis says:

“The fundamental privacy question changes from, “Do you respect my privacy?” to “Is the user experience improvement worth the security risk to my private information?”

Most people seem to be saying Yes to the latter. As Ben Evans wrote in a byline to a link to another article:

“This reminds me just a tiny bit of Nokia and RIM dismissing the iPhone because its battery didn't last a month - sometimes the right tradeoffs become the wrong tradeoffs because the possibilities change.”