this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 54 points 3 days ago (27 children)

Anything involving Copilot makes me happy to be a Mac user.

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good, it’s time to give Linux a chance. Look into Proton for gaming (it’s a translation layer, like WINE I suppose). And let’s stop acting like Macs are the odd one out. Macs run UNIX. Windows is the odd one out! ;)

[–] BaroqueInMind@piefed.social 60 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (11 children)

We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising. We may collect information regarding customer activities on our website, iCloud services, our iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store, App Store for Apple TV and iBooks Stores and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered non‑personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy. We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries. This information may be used to improve the relevancy of results provided by our services. Except in limited instances to ensure quality of our services over the Internet, such information will not be associated with your IP address. With your explicit consent, we may collect data about how you use your device and applications in order to help app developers improve their apps.

This is from Apple's privacy policy

It seems to me like they collect telemetry just like Windows, and of course some Mac apps do have advertising which is personalized according to the beginning.

Apple has been doing extremely invasive telemetry tracking of your usage since before the release of Big Sur. Gee, I wonder where Microsoft got the idea to invasively gather all this telemetry from the user in the first place?

[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Anonymised telemetry is different from collecting information to sell for marketing, though.

Of course, in the realm of privacy, everyone should know their own threat model. Anonymised telemetry is not a threat to me. But if it's a threat to you (nebulous term — the person to whom I am replying, or anyone reading), then none of the big tech companies offer viable alternatives. You (same audience) cannot say Apple's telemetry is a problem and then use anything from Microsoft, Google, or Meta.

For my threat model, Meta/Facebook has always been a bridge too far. Google has too, for the most part. I used to think Microsoft was fine, but no longer do. But, that's just me.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

There's basically no such thing as anonymized telemetry. The data provided is so rich, it is inherently identifying.

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