Home > News

Study Shows Your Private Data Is Most Safe with Apple

By Laura Tucker
Apple Personal Data Safe Featured

It’s difficult to know who to trust with your private data. Certainly, we’ve been warned against sharing it with the big five tech companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter. Apple claims they protect your private data more, but do they really? One study says they do, at least in comparison to the other four big tech companies.

Also read: Advertisers Jumping from Apple to Android Because of Privacy

Where Is Your Private Data the Most Safe

There is no shortage of news stories showing which tech company is now exploiting your private data. Google and Facebook seem to be the ones we hear about most, though there are stories in the news about all of them, most recently Twitter, with its former head of Security sharing a whistleblower account.

Trading and investment website StockApps.com published a study showing which among the big five tech firms were collecting the most and least personal data. Not so surprisingly, Google is collecting the most, and Apple is collecting the least personal data.

Apple Personal Data Safe Online
Image source: Unsplash

Apple only stores the information it needs to maintain its users’ accounts. While that’s great to know, it’s also important to realize that a major reason behind this is that it doesn’t maintain a website that relies on advertising – the opposite of Google and Facebook.

In terms of the types of different information collected, Apple collects 12, Facebook 14, Amazon 23, Twitter 24, and Google 39.

Again, Google isn’t a surprise, but 39 different types of information are, along with Twitter collecting more than Facebook. But look at how many formats Google has to collect your data: Search, Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, Maps, Workspace, Android, etc.

Personal Data Options

What may give people the most pause, however, is that Google keeps location data on users. And that’s a reason for many iPhone users to stick with iOS Maps.

Certainly, search data is a real concern as well, which has made DuckDuckGo extremely popular, both the search engine and the fairly new browser.

Apple Personal Data Safe Google
Image source: Unsplash

If you don’t want any company keeping data on you, there really aren’t many choices. Certainly, if you want to be on social media, you need to realize you’re giving up the exclusivity of your personal data. It would be difficult, but you could find a way to avoid Google, Apple, and the rest of the big five, but the smaller replacements you end up with could also collect your private data.

But the only way to be 100 percent sure no tech company is keeping your personal data is to stay off the Internet, email, mobile phone, etc. Read on to learn how to remove all of your personal data from the Internet.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.