Ondrej Holzman Privacy protection is starting to become a separate product from an additional topic at Apple. CEO Tim Cook constantly mentions his company's emphasis on maximum privacy protection for its users. “At Apple, your trust means everything to us,” he says.
This sentence can be found at the beginning of the "Apple's Commitment to Your Privacy" text that was published as part of an updated, extensive subpage on Apple's website concerning the protection of privacy. Apple describes in a new and detailed way how it approaches privacy, how it protects it, and also how it approaches government requests for the release of user data.
In its documents, Apple lists all the "security" news that the new iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan systems contain. Most Apple products use an encryption key that is generated based on your password. This makes it even more difficult for anyone, including Apple, to access your personal data.
For example, the functioning of Apple Maps is very interesting. When you have a route looked up, Apple generates a random identification number to download the information through, so it doesn't do so via Apple ID. Halfway through the trip, it generates another random identification number and connects the second part with it. After the trip is over, it truncates the trip data so that it is impossible to find the exact location or start information, and then keeps it for two years so that it can improve its Maps. Then he deletes them.
With competing Google Maps, something similar is completely unrealistic, precisely because, unlike Apple, Google actively collects user data and sells it on. "We think people want us to help them keep their lives private," he declared in an interview for NPR the head of Apple, Tim Cook, for whom privacy is a basic human right.
“We think our customers are not our products. We don't collect too much data and we don't know about every detail of your life. We're not in that kind of business," Tim Cook was alluding to Google, for example. On the contrary, what is now an Apple product is the protection of the privacy of its users.
This has been an increasingly hotly debated topic in recent years, and Apple has made it a point to explain to its users where it stands on the issue. On its updated website, it clearly and comprehensibly explains how it handles government requests, how it secures its features like iMessage, Apple Pay, Health and more, and what other means it uses to protect users.
“When you click through that, you'll see a product that looks strikingly like a site trying to sell you an iPhone. There are sections that explain Apple's philosophy; which practically tell users how to use Apple's security features; that explain what government requests are about (94% are about finding lost iPhones); and which ultimately show their own privacy policy,” writes Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch.
Page apple.com/privacy it really resembles the product page of iPhones, iPads or any other Apple product. In doing so, the Californian giant shows how crucial user trust is for it, that it can protect their privacy, and that it tries to do everything in its products so that users don't have to worry about anything.
At least someone didn't do data mining on such a scale. Even the effort is appreciated. Others like MS and Google don't deal with it at all, they monetize your data and still pretend that it's for the greater good.
Yes, I expect such behavior. I praise
I agree. Google pissed me off the most last week by asking me for Google Maps for Apple Watch (so that I could use it on AW) to enter where I live and where I work on the map via my Google account!
It would be good to add that Apple did not do this because it is a saint and that perhaps the private customer is really close to its heart. He does it in order to differentiate himself, which is good as a pig's PR compared to his competition, especially Google. He does it because his attempts in online business are shorely like paper, see iAD system. If, by nature, the business was based on data collection (advertising, search engine), as Google has, then of course it is a different book.
I absolutely agree. It's their way of marketing that they know will make more money than selling your data for targeted advertising.
I honestly don't care though - if Apple's pleading protectionism is making even US government agencies angry, where Apple is fighting to release every bit of its customers' data, I feel like it's working well - I'm happy for it.