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Global smartphone sales are declining, so where does Apple’s future lie?
We discover if Apple is still the tech leader on keeping your privacy safely under wraps
Under the leadership of Tim Cook, Apple has taken unprecedented measures to ensure it protects user data and privacy. This happens on such a scale that other tech companies are being left behind. It’s only in the last few years that our eyes have been opened to private companies farming data and using that to target us. Take Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the storm surrounding election results, or one of the hundreds of hacks and breaches that make the news every day. The concerns we all have about our online footprint are very real, but if there’s one company that’s a beacon of light in this field it is Apple under Tim Cook.
Protecting your privacy
In January 2019 when the majority of Apple’s contemporaries were housed up in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronic Show, Apple put its point across with a billboard that said – in striking black and white – ‘What happens on your iphone, stays on your iphone’. Apple believes it’s the tech leader in this field, and with every right.
That billboard directed readers to
www.apple.com/privacy – a mini-site that Apple updates constantly to help educate its customers on how the company works to protect the user’s personal data across all of its products and services. You can even request a document on all the personal data Apple holds about you. Creepy? Maybe. But at least it’s transparent. There is rarely an Apple keynote that doesn’t reference the importance of privacy. “We believe your private data should remain private,” declared Apple software senior VP Craig Federighi on stage when announcing new privacy features in IOS and macos. “Not because you’ve done something wrong or have something to hide, but because there can be a lot of sensitive data on your devices and we think you should be in control of who sees it.” CEO Tim Cook has made it abundantly clear where he stands on the issue too, insisting privacy is viewed as “a fundamental human right”. In an American TV interview he called the issue as important as “some of the other civil liberties that make Americans what they are”. He added: “Our tact on this is we take a minimum amount of data from customers. Then, we work really hard to protect it with encryption and so forth.”
Weeding out privacy-invaders
There is therefore some ‘egg on the face’ when Apple lets something slip through its net. In the past month, apps such as Expedia, Hollister and Air Canada have been found to record activities on your iphone without asking for your permission via a loophole in the IOS screen recording feature. Apple’s response has nevertheless been swift and strong, releasing the following statement: “Our App Store Review Guidelines require that apps request explicit user consent and provide a clear visual indication when recording, logging, or otherwise making a record of user activity. We have notified the developers that are in violation of these strict privacy terms and guidelines, and will take immediate action if necessary.”
Going forward, these types of apps need to request explicit permission to record your screen, which is essentially a big thumbs-up for end-user privacy. Apple will also check for screen recording code more often before developers submit their apps to the App Store in an effort to weed out the privacy-invading code. A welcome intervention, we’re sure you’ll agree.
Best in the business
The problem is Apple’s views on privacy are not held by most of the tech world. If Apple see privacy as a fundamental human right, Google and Facebook seem to think the opposite. Their problem is they have a business model built around advertisers who want as much data about users as possible so they can better target them. That’s why Google would never build the type of anti data-tracking features that Apple does into its ecosystem. Apple doesn’t need to farm this data because it has a business model that is built on selling products with a big markup.
It’s easy for Apple to take the moral high ground, but all the evidence suggests that it remains the best in the business when it comes to protecting users’ privacy. In fact, a report in August 2018 by Douglas C. Schmidt, a computer science professor at Vanderbilt University, noted that Android devices send data to Google nearly 10 times more often than IOS devices do to Apple. Apple isn’t perfect, but it’s still a shining light when it comes to your data and privacy.