but at least Apple has a track record of respecting privacy.

...to keep the same amount of data for themselve.

Don't kid yourself. Apple collects the same amount as everyone else does. And if either get hacked, it doesnt matter if they keep it or sell it.

They say they don’t associate the data they collect with anyone. There’s no way to trace back to my device.

A parent shouldn't be letting their single digit aged child have unsupervised access to the Internet. Agreed that they shouldn't be publicizing it, but this idea that parents should be letting their kids have secrets when they're so little is one way dangerous adults take advantage of kids.

"Oh yeah we collect data. Anonymously."

That has literally the same energy as some other user pointed out here about Valve and Gaben with their brain implant.
Gaben is the harbinger of light for many but us still a billionaire that got the money from somewhere. Thus is also evil. Just not as much as, for example, Bezos.
Apple is evil. At least equal to Google in different aspects.

Stop cheering for anti-consumer companies.

A Torment Nexus sounds cool

60% of people in UK are certified morons. Slightly higher than I expected.

My phone runs open source ROMs. I don't have a TV, but I do have an nVidia streaming box -- I don't assume anything I watch there is private. My doorbell is an electromechanical device hooked to a simple wire.

That doesn't work. Data can and has been deanonymized previously. It's still very much unsafe if it falls in the wrong hands

My parents' ISP router has Alexa integrated into it

That depends on the kind of "smart".

I have a bunch of IKEA "smart" light bulbs, but they are connected through a Sonoff USB Zigbee dongle. And all of it is controlled through the open-source zigbee2mqtt and home-assistant.

No one, but myself and my family, have any control or ownership of any of those devices.

They do, so far. I test these machines for privacy claims as a hobby and have been a bit surprised to find Apple stuff mostly delivering on those claims. I’m used to seeing a lot of dark patterns in testing and it’s made me expect the worst, but so far they’ve followed through on (in particular) their end-to-end encryption and on-device processing guarantees. Security audit failures so far have appeared to be engineering oversights, and the ones I reported have been patched already.

The majority of user data they collect appears to be optional analytics and diagnostics that are properly encrypted and anonymized using the same pooling strategy used for their built-in VPN service. They recently started doing processing off-device for some new features related to the Apple intelligence thing (I haven’t gotten around to testing most of that) but otherwise anything siri-related is indeed processed locally. You can toggle a setting to allow anonymized siri recordings to be sent to Apple for quality control but they ask you permission each time you reset a device and re-confirm when you install updates, which IMO is adequate.

Edit: Yes this is the opposite of what the other guy said. He is, to put it delicately, talking out his ass. There are good reasons to hate Apple, such as the fact that it’s a massive soulless corporation raping the planet to make luxury electronics for affluent consumers, but for most of the rabid apple conspiracy theorists I find online the reasons seem to be far more selfish and petty than that.

Its easy, people simply dont even think that it could be used to spy on them. Its just handy and funny tool. There is HUGE problem in the world with majority still naively trusting corporations to such extent saying anything to contrary seems like you are some conspiracy nut. Or if they don't trust them naively, they are so apathetic that they just think their information leaking doesnt matter, it can't be stopped anyway and that they just dont care about it.

Something really should be done to start having people care about things again, otherwise everyone will lose all rights to privacy eventually.

*until the ZigBee alliance is purchased by a large corporation.

wait that happened when it merged into the Connectivity Standards Alliance in 2011.

my point is that merging home utilities with any technology is like drinking bleach. a small amount won't kill you, but a large enough dose over time will.

being in the tech sector myself along with watching what the tech oligarchs are doing should warrant at least some caution.

IMO anything that is associated with corporate interests cannot be fully trusted. I understand that IOT cannot exist without corporate buy-in, but at the same time I think it should be acknowledged that anything that cannot exist without corporate interference is damaging to consumers.

I mean, I have some, because I already know my phone is spying on me even more aggressively.
I don't have any illusion that I had privacy in the first place

I dont know about other models but I think I have managed to limit how much my phone (fairphone) spies on me quite decently.

I installed application called ReThink, which is basically a firewall and I can block even google services with it. I know it works because its really pain in the ass when I want to use their services like calendar and i have to temporarily unblock it. It can also block ads by completely blocking internet for programs that dont really need it. I have also removed/disabled anything extra and removed permissions to anything that absolutely doesn't need it. It also alerted me to that stupid google safetycore spyware being installed (by blocking and informing about newly installed program) so i managed to remove that immediately.

At least according to the logs the phone seems secure, since nothing is being allowed to connect anywhere that shouldn't be allowed. Can't do much to occasional breaches due to restarts or temporary allowings, but I dont think such sparse information is much use or it might require more effort to utilise.

It doesn't really matter whether Zigbee was merged into something else, because it simply doesn't have any technical means of phoning home. It simply can't access the Internet.

There's no intermediate corporate owned servers, there's no proprietary software.

So it doesn't really matter what the corporation does because it can't affect my "smart" devices.

I honestly thought this was !nosleep@lemm.ee for a second

"Pizza Over Privacy", a Stanford study... https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/pizza-over-privacy-paradox-digital-age
Basically, people trade their privacy for convenience and don't consider the long term cost.

They do, so far.

They do, so far as anyone is aware.