Be still...
... my aching sides.
Apple is expected to unveil new products that will use the latest version of its iOS operating system, including new iPhones, on 9 September. But app developerswill be prevented from making sensitive user data available to third parties using the "HealthKit" platform. This is according to the latest version of the firm's …
Would anybody trust Apple given the games that they've played in the past with the likes of location data? And for that matter why trust any US company with health data when they've already been accused of ignoring the safe harbour provisions that they're supposed to be abiding by?
And don't get me started on 'medical research' and the ways in which that term can apparently be stretched into meaning almost anything people want it to.
Where the game they played with location data being... failure to empty out a cache and, additionally, not requiring that iOS backups are encrypted by default.
With the net effect that personal data might be easily obtained because (i) it was still recorded even when long stale; and (ii) users who would have enabled encryption had they known might not have done so because they didn't know the personal data was there.
It's cock up, not conspiracy. The evidence in support of that proposition is that the cache data was never sent to anyone. Apple didn't harvest this data. It never even received it.
So if you're asking: who would trust Apple to store personal information securely? Yeah, hopefully nobody to whom the issue is particularly critical. But who should take Apple on its word that it's going to block apps that try to profit from your data? Well, I think everyone. Apple's track record on blocking apps based on policing, and over-policing, of internal policies is very strong...
As the article says:
Whether or not Apple is actually selling customer information to third parties isn't quite so clear cut. The company collects customer data to track purchases and make future transactions easier, but its policies only say that it can share some information, not that it does.
So we don't know in this case whether they are selling the data.
Not that I would fully trust either but I'd be a lot more confident with Apple having my data than Google given that selling my data to advertisers / random people in the street is pretty much Google's entire business model.
As mentioned above the Apple "location tracking scandal" was a location cache file that was not being cleared properly and this issue has been fixed for a couple of years now. While the cache file itself it was fairly easily accessible by gaining access to an unencrypted backup or to the device itself there was never any evidence of it being uploaded / transmitted anywhere else.
... but a nice marketing coup. It's not like Apple could do anything against it without giving up basic principles.
It'll just change the business model of those companies slightly.
Instead of creating a hype to be bought by some larger company of insane amounts of money, startups now hope to be bought by an insurance company for insane amounts of money because that way the data will be bought with them.
However, they will not be able to "sell an end-user's health information collected through the HealthKit API to advertising platforms, data brokers or information resellers", according to the licensing agreement.
Why let Third-Party Devs steal your all of the Pie when you can keep it for yourself....