zlacker

>>gorman+(OP)
"20X more telemetry", in terms of data usage, is a pretty meaningless statistic on its own (unless it's large enough to affect your mobile data cap or something).

For instance, I would consider it a much bigger privacy violation for my phone to transmit my exact location every hour than my current CPU usage every 10 seconds.

>>terafl+U5
Which Apple is apparently doing - they send location, local IP, and nearby wifi mac addresses even when you're not logged in. Similarly Apple is collecting more data types than Google according to the research paper.

>>kllrno+2c
Please provide evidence of this because Apple's official documentation says otherwise:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203033

They do send nearly WiFi hotspots for crowd sourcing purposes but it is never in conjunction with your local IP address (which is an identifying piece of information).

>>threes+pn
Did you read the OP article? The researchers clearly outline what apple is phoning home. They even made a nice clean table showing what apple and google are sending back to themselves.

>>rOOb85+Gr
I read the article and it's wrong.

Apple does not explicitly "send" the user's IP address. It naturally is accessible on their end as a result of the TCP/IP protocol. But Apple has made quite clear that it does not use that information in any way.

>>threes+eB
The linked PDF (direct link for the truly lazy [0]) shows that every few minutes Apple sends binary data to its servers which includes the MAC address of nearby devices. (It's unclear if these are only devices on the same network, e.g. from arp, or any nearby devices that are broadcasting a static MAC address). Here, I'll even quote it for you. It's on page 7 at the bottom left, continuing on the top right:

> However, the geod process uploads binary messages to gsp85-ssl.ls.apple.com... While it is not clear what information is contained in this binary message, it can be seen to contain the MAC addresses of nearby devices sharing the same WiFi network as the handset e.g. f2:18:98:92:17:5 is the WiFi MAC address of a nearby laptop, 70:4d:7b:95:14:c0 the MAC address of the WiFi access point.

Idk what they do with this info, and I'd much rather Apple have it than Google, but you can imagine the "God mode" they could create at Apple HQ if they were so inclined. The data is absurd... imagine what you could do if you knew where billions of people were at every second of every day for years.

[0] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf