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Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

doublelayer Silver badge

I agree that first-party data usage is less problematic than third-party data sharing, but that doesn't mean I agree with your acceptance. There's a reason that GDPR and similar legislation requires informed consent (and would actually matter if enforced). Just because I engage in a business relationship with you doesn't mean I know all the stuff you're planning to do with my data, and burying that information somewhere or waiting for someone to discover it later doesn't count as me agreeing to have it done.

There are a lot of cases where a company has a reason to collect a ton of information. I have, for example, engaged in a product testing situation where I was handed a prerelease device to attempt to use and all my reactions to the features and interactions with the device recorded for future analysis. This was supposed to help them improve confusing parts of the interface and judge what a specific user thought of the features they were going to make available. This was fine, because they told me that's what they were going to do. A company could equally well collect the data from users of the device after it's been sold, using the collected data to improve the next version, but it would be entirely unacceptable to collect anything like that without specifically informing the user of everything that was going to happen and getting consent for every part of it. Even if you don't share the information, you don't have the right to surveil everything I do for your own use.

If you want to collect ten types of information, then you need to ask ten times and you need to tell me what each type is and what you're using it for. In countries with satisfactory regulations, you should also be forbidden from denying me the service because I don't consent to the collection. If you want to share that information with others, then you have to ask ten more times for that part as well.

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