App Store Search Queries Appear to Violate Data Minimization Practices ⇥ mastodon.social

Mysk:

This is an example of what the App Store app shares with Apple when you search for an app. Everything you type in the search field is recorded as an event and associated with your Apple ID before it is sent to Apple. […]

Data is sent to Apple in near real-time (the difference between the Event Time and the Post Time).

I can understand why Apple would want to correlate typed text with autocompletion or suggestions. I can also see why Apple would want to attach completed search queries to an Apple ID. I disagree with both of these things, but I can understand wanting to know whether helpful recommendations are appearing soon enough, and making results more relevant to a user. In theory.

What I cannot understand is why Apple wants to record all typed text and completed queries and correlate those to millisecond-level time codes and attach all that to someone’s Apple ID. This is the very opposite of data minimization — a reality which is unfortunately common among Apple’s services. It is not “tracking” by the company’s definition, which is exclusively concerning third-party sharing, but it violates the spirit of user privacy.