Written on: January 24, 2017.
One of the defining characteristics of Tim Cook’s leadership of Apple over the past five years has been his commitment to protecting its users’ privacy. The topic has been mentioned again and again in WWDC keynotes, product launch announcements, and in a letter to Apple’s customers accompanied by additional information on Apple’s approach to privacy. Perhaps most famously, Apple stood up to the FBI in early 2016 when it was asked to help break into a phone used by a suspected terrorist, prompting another Tim Cook letter on the subject.
It’s clear that Tim Cook feels very strongly about protecting user privacy, and that he has made this a priority in the way Apple hardware, software, and services are designed. Hardware features such as Touch ID and the secure enclave which protects its user data, and approaches to cloud services which keep data on user devices are intended to help safeguard privacy and secure that data. Apple sees its commitment to privacy as a positive differentiator against major competitors – notably Google – which have ad-based business models and therefore have to gather and make use of individual user data in order to make money.
There are two big questions around all of this: firstly, whether users actually care about this approach; and secondly, whether Apple’s strict approach to privacy prevents it from providing the best possible services. It’s worth addressing both of those.
I’m actually in the middle of conducting a survey on user attitudes towards privacy and security now, and should have some solid data shortly to answer the first question in depth. But from other surveys I’ve done as well as from observing behavior on both a large and personal scale, I’m convinced that the answer is far more complicated than a binary yes/no. Some users care deeply about their privacy and refuse to engage with any service which would collect and use personally identifiable data, while other users are entirely willing to trade some user privacy for either free services, better targeted advertising, or more effective personalization of services. There’s a spectrum here, and people lie along every point on that spectrum. As such, for some people Apple’s privacy stance is critical and a key reason why they buy Apple products and use Apple services in preference to those provided by Google or others. On the other hand, there are others who simply don’t care about the privacy tradeoffs and for whom Apple’s stance seems entirely academic.
That leads us to the second question, because quite a few observers have suggested that Apple is actually making its services poorer by not collecting individual profile data in the cloud and applying much more powerful computing power to it in order to personalize and improve its services. Apple would respond by saying that device-level collection is fine for profile building and keeps the data out of both Apple’s and third parties’ hands entirely, and that it uses techniques such as differential privacy to aggregate user data in a way that preserves the value of large data sets in the cloud without making any of the data personally identifiable. It has also made its devices increasingly adept at performing computing tasks which others perform in the cloud, notably facial recognition.
On balance, Apple’s stance is a competitive benefit for at least some users, many of whom are at any rate more likely to be willing to pay a premium rather than preferring the lowest possible cost, so there’s likely a good alignment between those who prefer to pay for privacy and Apple’s base. However, it has little appeal for at least some users, who either prefer free services or the benefits that come from being profiled and targeted in a highly individualized way. Apple undoubtedly has at least some disadvantages versus its competitors in providing such personalization, but for now those are at least as much about will as any insurmountable barriers flowing from its privacy stance. (See Apple Doesn’t Get Services)