Apple products are private by design

Apple is ramping up the rhetoric on privacy, even as governments ramp up their rhetoric on surveillance, censorship and demand backdoors to erode privacy.

Apple’s new privacy ad

Apple’s new privacy ad puts it out there, detailing as it does numerous situations in which ordinary people don’t want their lives to become other people’s open books.

“Your privacy matters,” Apple states. “From encrypting your iMessage conversations, or not keeping a history of your routes in Maps, to limiting tracking across sites with Safari. iPhone is designed to protect your information.”

https://youtu.be/FEIveaF2arI

This is surveillance

Apple’s campaign is the first ever advertising blitz it has run on the topic of privacy, a matter the entire company is becoming increasingly focused upon,

“Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies,” Apple CEO Tim Cook toldus last year.

“Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence, and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false. This crisis is real. It is not imagined, or exaggerated or crazy.”

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The key message is that if privacy matters to you it is also important to consider which device you use and to take a deep look at the tech and business models used by the platform you are on.

Apple is making it quite clear that you can have both compelling services and smart devices as well as privacy, no matter what other platform providers claim.

The ad links up nicely to Apple’s ramped-up privacy pages and is one of multiple privacy protecting steps the company has taken recently.

I imagine we’ll hear of many more at WWDC 2019.

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