I've been seeing comments on HN praising how Apple respects users' privacy etc. Though I have a genuine question: how can we be so confident that Apple follows their claims while their software remain closed-source?

For client-side Google software like Android/Chromium at least we got to fork and remove the evil bits; we have built thriving communities based on that and everyone's got an alternative to Google. In the case of iOS/Safari do we trust Apple-provided binaries solely based on claimed policy / reputation?

Also, Apple sells the default search provider space on their OS to Google for ~9B/year.

So, does it really matter if Apple doesn't directly operate their advertising business and instead outsources it?

Perhaps research “Differential Privacy” to better understand what they are actually doing.

You are seemingly suggesting that they do Google-style data collection where data is attached to a specific user. It’s a disingenuous interpretation of their privacy policy (both the marketing version and the legal version.)

https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...

What should actually be eye opening is how Apple actually does protect privacy. They should be applauded and not condemned.

Brin and Page pretty much say it's inevitable that a commerical search engine will succumb to "evil". The only solution they present is an academic/non-profit run search engine.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (scroll down to "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives")

So you're not going to apply the "if it's free, you're the product" logic for DDG as well?

Well, the obvious reason is that it may not be possible to get “big” as a search engine, without chipping away at the privacy gaurantees. Even if they get the users, can they sufficiently monetize them without turning into google?

This is incompatible with dominant funding models: private VC funding requires that the non-failures get exploited enough to make up for the failures. Publicly traded shares make it impossible to prevent shareholders who think that the company could grow to 10x from buying out those who think that it can or should only grow to x. Employee-owned coops will see their de-facto ruling bureaucrats seek to rule a bigger organisation, because that's the kind of personality who rises into those positions. The only funding model that has a chance to stay "happy-sized" (and where it's even possible that claims like "we care for our customers" are not lies) are owner-run bootstrapped shops and they often enough do stay that way. But for the same reason they hardly ever make it into the news.

What does services actually consist of? From [1], it looks like the major components are the app store, iTunes/Music (purchases, I assume) and the iCloud? I'm not seeing the data dependency that would incentivize Apple to look to Google for advice, at least not in this category.

The closest might be recommendation systems, but afaik even Netflix only collects from its own information pools, and the main chunk of it is probably for their custom shows; Amazon definitely doesn't track that much data about their users, because their recommendation system might actually be useful if it did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Apple_Inc._services

Apple has nearly 1 billion iOS users and 70 million MacOS users. If Apple had invested more heavily in their MacOS ecosystem, rather than letting products like the Mac Pro rot for half a decade, they may have eaten at the marketshare of their competitors.

As is, many of the Mac diehards I know have migrated their kids off the platform in the past year or two, and some have made the leap themselves. Its a sea of change from just a few years ago.