alt Hacker News"Harvesting user data" doesn't make money. The reason people think this is that on HN people have main character syndrome that makes them think their personal data is interesting, plus an assumption that making money is evil therefore anything you can think of that is evil would make money.
(Google and Facebook don't make money by "harvesting" or "selling" user data, they make webpages you spend a lot of time on then put ads on them.)
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The data that Google and Meta harvest are your interactions on other websites and apps that are loading a Google or Meta JavaScript, or have a back-end data integration with them.
I don’t know if Apple has client-side ad scripts like those, but in decades of building websites I’ve never been asked to implement one.
If it isn't worth anything then why do they want it?
No, I think the reason people on HN think this is because Apple, Google and Microsoft have all been caught harvesting user data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Pretty much nobody's personal info is valuable by itself, but it's EXTREMELY valuable in aggregate, because it lets you target advertisement. Like, so valuable it's on the order of tens of billions.