Apple considered switching to DuckDuckGo from Google for Safari - Bloomberg News

bathalumang_peppa@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1175 points –
Apple considered switching to DuckDuckGo from Google for Safari - Bloomberg News
reuters.com
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Doesn't Google pay billions to Apple for the top spot? Why would they want to lose that stream of free cash?

If the goodwill they garner from that makes APPL go up because it matches the privacy expectation they are branding themselves with, they might be making even more money anyway.

Exactly. They are trying to win the privacy game, so a small sacrifice now could turn to be quite profitable.

Privacy theater*

Partially, but also partially it's legit. I generally don't have much positive to say about Apple, but they make pretty things and the privacy is generally better than most.

Of course, you pay through the nose for it.

It's not privacy but exclusivity of data collection to apple

I believe they've been externally audited before, but I'm not positive.

Audited for what? And I don't think they have.

Audited for what telemetry is transmitted from an iPhone or Mac during use, what information is possible to harvest by a third party app, and whether or not purpose-made experimental data is made available to advertisers.

It looks like no official (that is, authorized by Apple) audits have been done, at least that I can see. But privacy research firms have done it, and the consensus appears to be that Apple is not great, but better than Google, Amazon, and Facebook. For what it's worth.

Could be that Apple will acquire DuckDuckGo. A little hasty to presume it I suppose, but Apple has to wonder how much money they are leaving on the table by taking Google’s payments. If Google will pay them more than $9 billion/year just to be default—what does that say about how profitable Apple’s absolutely huge and locked-in base can be?

Could apple be using the press as part of their bargaining strategy with google over the default search engine fee?

How is Apple going to monetize DuckDuckGo to make up for that $9 billion, without compromising their other efforts w/r/t user and data privacy?

How much do they monetize Apple Maps for? Sometimes companies just buy something to be a service supporting the thing they actually sell.

Rhey are going to sell ads on Apple maps.

Source?

Edit: I googled it. There is no source, basically just a guy claiming that would be logical for them to do but his timeframe is already proven wrong and Apple hasn’t announced anything.

efforts

I think the appropriate word here is marketing. There's no real privacy in an Apple device.

A Washington post article I was reading yesterday said google pays apple $19 billion this year to be the default browser on iPhones.

There is a big anti trust case against Google right now and this arrangement with apple is one of the topics of interest. If Google loses they could be forced to stop paying.

Who says they're not negotiating a larger stream of cash?

With DuckDuckGo?

No, with Google. If Google pay Apple more, they might be more willing to overlook the reasons they're looking to switch.

This whole thing is just negotiation theater. Apple never intents to switch.

Yes exactly. They just want to adjust the price.