Apple poses a false dichotomy between "privacy" and "competition"

Back in September, a Congressional committee investigating anticompetitive conduct by America's tech giants sent a letter to Apple (among other Big Tech firms) asking it for details of business practices that seem nakedly anticompetitive; Apple's response seeks to justify much of that conduct by saying that it is essential to protecting its users' privacy.

In particular, Apple claims that its decision to limit apps that compete with its own offerings to access the full suite of location data generated by Iphone owners' devices was a pro-privacy measure -- and the fact that it shut rivals out of a market Apple was seeking to dominate is merely an unfortunate side-effect.

Apple continuously gathers and stores its users' location data (and the company has previously been caught lying about this) but companies like Tile (makers of Bluetooth based location tracking stickers for commonly lost items like keys) cannot access this data during setup even if an Iphone owner wishes to share it with them (users can undertake a complex procedure after the app is set up to activate continuous location data access).

This is particularly worrying, given Apple's history of using App Store data to pick competitors to clone and force out of the market.

Apple is also far from a perfect steward of its users' privacy: in setting up an Iphone, you "agree" to thirteen separate forms of location tracking, including location tracking for the purpose of ad targeting. Apple uses these tracking features to power a product that competes directly with Tile. Read the rest