I have been reading even more than usual lately about technology and its role in transforming our lives, especially in the form of smartphones, which more than 80 percent of American adults now own and use on a daily basis. Over time I have come to feel strongly about the philosophical differences between the major marketers of said gadgets: namely Apple and Google. And it will come as no surprise to longtime readers that I think Apple makes the smarter smartphone.
Not only am I a longtime user of Apple products—including desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones—but my experience is supported by extensive research also. And given even cursory research, it quickly becomes apparent that relative to both privacy and security, Apple’s iPhones are superior to Google’s Android smartphones. Apple profits from its products and services whereas Google profits from selling users’ personal data to the highest bidder.
As Nicole Aschoff writes in The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New Gilded Age, “Google recently stopped scanning people’s emails for the purpose of selling ads, but it still scans and saves them, forever. Every search you’ve ever made, every bookmark, every download, every click…is saved. If you have an Android phone, Google can access every single thing on it, including all the apps you use, your webcam, and your microphone.”
Today, roughly 82 percent of smartphones worldwide run on Google’s Android operating system and Google controls 97 percent of the mobile search market. And according to research by Vanderbilt University professor Douglas Schmidt, Google’s Android phones monetize users’ private lives at an average of more than 10 times the rate of Apple’s iPhones. Also, Chrome on Android vacuums users’ personal data at a rate of almost 50 times as much as Safari on iPhone.
According to security experts, contrary to Apple and its iPhone, Google maintains very little control over software updates, and Android users are basically at the mercy of their carriers and phone manufacturers when it comes to getting updates or new operating system versions. It is very similar to the dynamic between Microsoft branded software and the various computer manufacturers. The strength of Apple is its integration of proprietary software and hardware.
Allow me to step off my soapbox here and close by saying that this blog was originally hosted for a dozen years by Google and I used their search engine until I realized that their corporate motto of “Don’t Be Evil” was ultimately a smokescreen to turn users’ data into dollars. So the byword is “buyer beware” even if you own an iPhone but use Google branded services. As the adage admonishes: “if the service is free, then you are the product.”