WATCH: Apple’s latest ad makes privacy funny (seriously)

Apple’s satirical privacy ad makes its point while making you laugh

Apple’s latest ad focuses on privacy, and while it’s actually pretty amusing it makes its point, explaining why smartphone privacy is so important.

Late state surveillance capitalism

Apple is on a mission to make advertising less intrusive and to protect people against privacy destructive software.

As part of this mission it has baked a host of pro-privacy tools inside its devices, Apple Pay masks your credit card number and means what you buy cannot be traced to you by anyone other than you and the vendor, for example.

Its latest funny and satirical ad provides a host of additional illustrations of this.

To make its point, it shows people shouting out the kind of personal information they share online that they never would share in public in the real world.

https://youtu.be/9HgAfEfc47U

These examples include examples of people telling the crowd around them things like:

“I browsed eight sites for divorce attorneys”, or a colleague telling the whole office loudly the name of a person in that office they dislike.

For me, the funniest moments include the man jogging while loudly speaking his heart rate “150, 151, 152” and a woman at a busy intersection using a loud hailer to share her credit card details. “My credit card number is,” she yells…

Here is the US version of the same ad:

https://youtu.be/-l61NE0eqkw

Privacy by design

Of course, Safari prevents ad trackers following your searches so others can’t figure out what you’re looking for by surfacing the ads you get in your browser, Apple Pay masks your credit card number, Health gathers and secures your data, and so on.

The point is about business models.

Apple doesn’t base its business on selling information about its users, offering instead devices, convenience, services and privacy. The company just focuses on making the planet’s best products and leaving our data alone.

Apple’s whole model is based on on-device analysis of the data it gathers about you, but this information is not shared with the company (beyond components required to make things work).

Of course, as more and more personal data is stored on our smartphones, the need for security and privacy will only increase. Do you want the photos you take of your kids falling into unknown hands, or for others to have unconstrained access to your financial data? Probably not.

The company’s promise is to continue to protect such privacy. And that’s a good thing. Let me know what you think of this video.

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