Apple vs. Android: The Privacy Battle Heats Up

Yesterday, the US Department of Justice published a series of documents in its antitrust trial against Google, including records revealing that Apple made its default search deal with the Chocolate Factory despite significant privacy concerns.

Among the documents provided by the Department of Justice on Thursday was an internal Apple PowerPoint deck that was introduced into the case when Apple's SVP of Services Eddy Cue testified in September.

Cue allegedly told the court that Apple struck a $18 to $20 billion arrangement with Google to make the search giant the default engine on Apple devices since there was no viable alternative engine.

However, as the now-public - but heavily redacted - presentation deck demonstrates, Apple judged Google far from perfect in terms of privacy. One slide referred to Android as "a massive tracking device" - no way, really? - while others highlight how much better Apple thought it was doing on privacy than Google when it came to how the two handled data from user accounts, maps, searches, and ads.

Remember that Apple has an operating system (iOS) and browser (Safari) that compete with Google's Android and Chrome, so it's not unusual to hear Cupertino disparage its Silicon Valley neighbor.

Apple's slides also include a frequently quoted statement from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: in 2010, the CEO told a Washington policy gathering, "Google's policy is to get right up to the creepy line but not cross it."

The 2013-era slides outline Apple's general approach to privacy at the time, in a typical modest form. It's mostly about keeping people's Siri and Maps usage distinct from advertising, whether targeted or not. Apple alleged that Google did exactly the reverse, combining all of its user, service, and advertising data.

The thing is, Apple speaks about how much it values privacy safeguards and how Google is a jerk with people's data, but look at how it operates in practice. While Cupertino has baked a reasonable level of information security into its software and hardware - just look at this Apple PDF - it can be accused of being two-faced.

As we saw during the trial, Apple was happy to accept tens of billions of dollars each year to ensure Google remained the default search engine in Safari, raising issues about Apple's dedication to privacy, which it emphasized heavily in 2014.

Another exhibit made public by the Department of Justice this week was an email chain from 2016 in which Google discussed [PDF] a request from Apple to make search data sharing reciprocal.

"We met with Apple yesterday, and they had a new request on the data set request section," Google's then-president of global and strategic alliances, Daniel Alegre, wrote.

"They want it to be reciprocal, which means they want to know which links in Google.com results were clicked on, or how long it took Google to answer the user's query." Their motivation was to improve the user experience using this information."

Google refused to share the information with Apple, characterizing it as "secret sauce." Another exhibit [PDF] demonstrates how important user experience was to Google search - almost entirely.

"People ask us to find documents relevant to a query billions of times per day." What's odd is that we don't genuinely understand documents," the presentation's slide captions indicate. "Aside from some basic information, we rarely look at documents." We observe people... This, oversimplified, is the source of Google's magic."

While Google is the one on trial here, the documents disclosed by the DOJ this week do not depict Apple in a favorable light.

While quoting Steve Jobs on Apple "taking[ing] privacy extremely seriously," the iGiant appears quite content to let Google do the heavy labor while collecting billions of revenue. It's even more suspicious that Apple approached Google for reciprocal data sharing - we tried to obtain some answers but haven't heard back.