Apple actually has a solid argument when they say "Our users are not our products". Very little of Apple's revenue comes from ads so they really have no need for the infrastructure. However, considering they are one of the largest companies in the world with hundreds of billions in the bank, I seriously doubt it would be very hard for them to setup that sort of infrastructure.

> Very little of Apple's revenue comes from ads so they really have no need for the infrastructure

However, they wish to carefully control the advertising on iOS, if you want to uniquely identify a user for retargeting purposes, well, tracking cookies are evil, but iAd is good!

https://developer.apple.com/iad/my-audiences/iad-my-audience...

Fond something near the end of that link:

>In the spring of 2015, iAd plans to provide developers with unique audience insights about the users in your segments, viewable in iAd Workbench—including their distribution by gender, age, geography, and iTunes Preferences. With audience insights, app developers can find new users with similar characteristics to their existing customers, and tailor messages for retargeting campaign

Did they abandoned this or not? Seems contrary to their current "we aren't using your data" mantra

They are definitely using our data, but probably not in the same way. More of a we won't use your data unless it's to improve your experience with our device.

I'm not saying it isn't a solid argument. Their PR people clearly thing it is the way to go, judging by how often it has come up.

You're right, it wouldn't be hard, but they aren't doing it. Why? Maybe because they wouldn't be able to use this talking point or maybe they plan to be a hardware/OS company forever and never expand their services? IDK

I would guess that Siri requires some beefy machine learning techniques.

> They don't have the technology/infrastructure to perform machine learning techniques that google employs. So they will say 'we think it's a feature that none of our services interoperate.'

You mean the machine learning techniques Google developed to better market people things?

This is like saying, Sweden doesn't have nuclear capability so it's opportunistic for them to claim they are peaceful. Only states that pour resources into building nuclear weapons can have a legitimate claim to being peaceful.

Look at Apple's approach to privacy for Maps, which uses randomized identifiers and trip segmentation so that Apple cannot reconstruct your trip. Or iMessage, which uses full end-to-end encryption. That's not Apple failing to catch up, that's Apple going out of their way to protect your privacy.

"the machine learning techniques Google developed to better market people things?"

That's a bit of a cheap swipe. Google's machine learning has been applied to things like spam filtering, image search, and speech recognition.

Why not both? I would consider an email provider that one, didn't run an ad network, and two didn't scan my emails at all a huge feature. Neither Google nor Apple fit both criteria however.

This doesn't have anything to do with the technical capabilities of each company, it has to do with the fact that my and Google's interests are not aligned. Google, like every other company, is going to do what benefits them the most and there's nothing wrong with that. But when what benefits them doesn't benefit me I have reconsider using their services.

>They don't have the technology/infrastructure to perform machine learning techniques that google employs.

Pretty sure Siri is machine learning...?

Even if it wasn't, they could just hire a bunch of PhD students, maybe acqui-hire a couple of tech companies with their ludicrous amounts of available capital and bam, they have their machine learning algorithm

Siri's voice recognition is awful compared to Google Now and Cortana. It has refused to recognize my accent ever, to the point where it seems almost racist.

Not that voice recognition products count as machine learning. Google has a growing neural network, Apple is not competing in that market at all.

> interoperate

That's what we're calling online profiling now?

>> interoperate

>That's what we're calling online profiling now?

My Google Now cards on Android say "yes it is". They are driven by email, calendar entries and phone sensors all tied to my profile and it's bloody magical. YMMV.