They deserve a lot of slack. Apple's privacy approach may not be perfect but they are head and shoulders above just about every other major tech company.
I've written many privacy policies - for privacy-focused companies and for companies seeking to get away with the absolute bare-minimum. One of the best "quick and dirty" ways to assess a company's privacy policy without actually reading the whole thing is to count how many footnotes the document has. All of the important information that a company has to disclose but would rather not is hidden in the footnotes.
Apple's privacy policy[1] has zero footnotes. Google's privacy policy[2] has 51.
Certainly! I contemplated explaining a bit further about Google's footnotes but thought I might sound crazy.
Google actually takes the extra step of obscuring the footnotes to look like hyperlinks. For example, if you click "ads you'll find most useful" under "We want you to understand the types of information we collect as you use our services" you'll see that it pops out as a footnote rather than linking you to a new site.
Because I often found myself looking for footnotes to find the begrudging disclosures and because I found more and more footnotes hiding as hyperlinks I made myself a little browser extension to highlight html elements that are probably footnotes as most are still pretty obvious from the properties. For example, from Google's privacy policy:
<a class="g1mG8c" href="privacy#footnote-useful-ads" data-name="useful-ads"jsaction="click:IPbaae(preventDefault=true)">ads you’ll find most useful</a>
I'm undecided whether this is a style decision or another attempt to hide the ball. Google used to publish a pdf version which made it much easier to see the footnotes but I haven't been able to find a current pdf version in years.
It looks like the PDF version is available at the top of your linked page under the link "Download PDF" (https://www.gstatic.com/policies/privacy/pdf/20190122/f3294e...). The footnotes are all tacked on to the end of the document there, but they're hard to make use of out of context.
It's frustrating that the footnotes contain both important disclosures like "we assign you a unique identifier to track your activity if you're not signed in to a Google account" but then use the exact same format to say "a device is a computer that can be used to access Google services."
Makes it harder to identify the important bits.
You know, it’s only just occurred to me that all this time I had been googling to find a pdf of their policy but I never actually looked on their page. Thanks! What a major facepalm on my part.
And it is frustrating for sure. Not all footnotes are bad but all the bad stuff is usually in the footnotes!
They deserve a lot of slack. Apple's privacy approach may not be perfect but they are head and shoulders above just about every other major tech company.
I've written many privacy policies - for privacy-focused companies and for companies seeking to get away with the absolute bare-minimum. One of the best "quick and dirty" ways to assess a company's privacy policy without actually reading the whole thing is to count how many footnotes the document has. All of the important information that a company has to disclose but would rather not is hidden in the footnotes.
Apple's privacy policy[1] has zero footnotes. Google's privacy policy[2] has 51.
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
[2] https://policies.google.com/privacy#intro