The tech world went mental last week when it turned out your iPhone is a digital stalker, recording your every move, and that the file that held the location database could be accessed by a third-party desktop application. People got terribly angry about the whole thing, tweeting about it (with geo-located tweets), while checking into Foursquare, and then additionally yelling about Apple on Facebook (next to the bit where they’d left their personal details online for everyone to see).

And, yes, I’m being flippant (again), and, yes, this iOS problem is clearly some kind of stupid bug where cache isn’t being flushed, and, yes, Apple should perhaps make the ability to turn off such data collecting more discoverable (tip: if you’re the kind of person to wear a tin-foil hat, turn off Location Services in the Settings app). But Marco Arment makes a few really good points about this Apple privacy snafu in his piece Privacy and incentives.

His main argument is that Apple largely doesn’t give a crap about your data, because it doesn’t make (much) money out of it, and that Apple’s always been good at protecting privacy. You might PFFT loudly at that, but bear in mind what’s happening in digital publishing on the iOS platform: publishers are mostly pissed off at Apple not providing access to user details, not the 30 per cent cut Apple takes.

Arment continues, arguing hugely popular websites are far worse than Apple when it comes to privacy. He cites Google and Facebook, but adds that many other web services

make money overwhelmingly from advertising. Advertising can be far more lucrative when it’s targeted well, so there’s a huge incentive for these services to collect as much data about you as possible, store it forever, and indirectly sell it to advertisers by selling targeted services and “eyeballs” to them.

People forget that the customers of Google and Facebook aren’t the users as much as the advertisers; but Apple’s customers are the people who buy the kit. Apple sees content providers as facilitators, adding value to the things Apple itself then sells to its customers. This is a big difference, and a big part of the reason why I don’t think Apple’s suddenly decided to become Big Brother; like Arment, I think the location database issue is a bug, and it’s one that will be squashed in an upcoming iOS release.