Having worked at Apple, I will say I firmly believe they do not sell data. I worked in data science and we had the shittiest inference because we had essentially no access, even internally, to longitudinal or cross-app user data. Best we had was 15 minute rotating sessions for a single app. There are internal teams dedicated to deanonymizing data to try to narrow down users - if they can successfully do so, and relevant fields that lead to deanonymization get permanently purged from internal logging.
I can’t speak to the current architecture but Apple has shown a consistent willingness to sacrifice access to user data in the name of selling privacy instead at a premium price (you could argue precisely because no one of their competition have any meaningful posture on this). I do believe they are quite serious in their commitment to that, as they have found this strategy to be more valuable than the data itself.
But sending sensitive private audio recordings to the lowest bidder is par for the course?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49502292
This comment makes it sound like they sold private recordings to whomever was willing to pay for them, but they paid third parties to evaluate Siri recordings.
Don't really agree with that, that would have been highest bidder if anything.
And it wouldn't have been much worse compared to be as careless as they have been.
> Having worked at Apple, I will say I firmly believe they do not sell data.
Selling data is so shabby! Why sell when you can just give it away to letter-soup friends?
Because that's not legal, so they sell it to third party data brokers and it gets resold to someone the TLAs can buy it legally from.
Illegal to share data with entities that are themselves law enforcement, and which they are known to be demanding, not just asking to share out of good will?