Spend a few minutes browsing Apple’s privacy pages. Privacy is a big issue and Apple has clearly made protecting user privacy a primary design pillar in its products. That’s great for consumers, but privacy also offers a significant competitive advantage against competitors like Google and Facebook.

As an example, take a look at this excerpt from the Privacy Built In page:

Some companies mine your email for personal information to serve you targeted ads. We don’t. To protect your privacy even more, all traffic between any email application and our iCloud mail servers is encrypted. We’ve also updated our mail servers to support encryption in transit with other email providers that also support it.

From Seeking Alpha (free reg wall):

Apple takes pains to highlight how its business does not depend on datamining its users because it sells no advertising.

What if Facebook and Google adopted similar policies with regard to datamining their users? What happens to the value of their advertising business model if the data used to target those ads is no longer captured?

Companies like Google and Facebook have built their business models on mining user data. They can’t simply pivot away from this dependence to follow Apple’s lead.

Protecting user privacy is good for consumers and offers Apple a strong competitive advantage.