For Google, Android—the operating system it built, which now powers a majority of the world’s mobile phones—is a means to an end. It’s a way to push Google’s various services deeper into our lives, collect as much data as possible, and then build intelligent and automatic experiences.
- via The New Yorker

I was talking with a few co-workers about the old Android-vs-iOS debate. Everyone besides myself could be classified as “normal people,” and I was very interested to hear what they thought about topic.

To my surprise, the general consensus was that Apple is the company that has all of our data and “probably wants to make a microchip they can implant in our heads to record our thoughts."

WTF?

I recoiled at this proposition, especially considering it’s exactly the opposite of what I expected Google is the company that reads your email to run ads, they have Google Now that taps into even more of your app/location/text message data, they have Google Photos that reads all your personal photos and analyses their content, and they have Now on Tap coming soon that will send any data on screen to Google. Google collects a ton of data from you so they can run better, more targeted ads. It’s said that Google is an advertising company first and foremost, and that’s a pretty fair assessment. But to most people, the impression is that they’re the cool company that gives you free stuff.

Meanwhile, Apple is a computer hardware company that makes money when you buy one of their products, not when you use their apps. Apple made a point of driving this point home again and again at last week’s WWDC keynote. Yet there are still people who think that Apple is a data-hungry company. Even when I brought up the fact that your fingerprint is not stored online anywhere, but on a “secure element” on the device, they respond “they’re probably lying about that."

Were this a debate online, I might have kept at it, but you just look like a dick when you do this in real life, so I backed off. Has anyone else heard this from people in their lives?