At WWDC 2019, Apple claims the convenience of connection without violating privacy

With its new connection with Apple – an alternative to the unique signature services offered by rivals Facebook and Google, unveiled at WWDC Conference – Apple says it offers a new way to secure your identity with your favorite apps or services.

But it's more than that. The connection is also a direct challenge to "paying a high price for privacy" for the convenience of a registration service, says Guy "Bud" Tribble, vice president of software technology at Apple. While rivals are watching you to keep an eye on your online activities and collect personal information, Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, have said that confidentiality is a priority. "fundamental human right."

"It's not rocket science to say," Hey, it would not be great to have this without the party, "" http://www.cnet.com/, "said Tribble in an interview after the presentation. new applause at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference Monday: "Our point of view is to give the user more control over things like their data."

As part of the connection service, Apple will also generate a random email linked to third-party applications if you do not want to give up your own email. In this way, app developers can stay in touch without entering your address. Sign In will work on Macs, Apple Watch and iOS, the mobile operating system that powers the iPhone and the iPad.

This is also part of Apple's current plan to make privacy protection one of its key selling points, unlike its competitors, who use authentication services to create a profile. users to better serve lucrative and targeted ads for certain functions. call monitoring capitalism. Since Apple derives its revenue from the sale of devices and services, not advertising, your information does not interest it as much.

It's a spotlight on Facebook and Google, who make the most of their money through lucrative personalized advertisements. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, have pointed out in their own conferences for developers in recent months that they also care about your data and are working to strengthen the protection of the confidentiality of their products.

Google declined to comment on Apple's connection feature, while Facebook did not do it either.

A natural extension

The logon is due in part to the fact that some Apple employees have begun to question these services and determine if they could do better. "Some of us have probably used social media as a single sign about ourselves," said Tribble with a chuckle.

Apple debuted by giving users more control over their computing, said Tribble, a member of the original Macintosh design team. Giving people more control over their data is therefore a natural extension, he added.

At the time, this meant simplifying things and making them easier to understand. With privacy, he said, it's no different.

Although Apple does not specify the number of developers that it expects to join, the policy states that any developer offering connections to Facebook and Google must also adopt the one from Apple.

Another WWDC announcement, an iOS 13 update that lets you let only one app track your location once, is a way to subtly show users how their location data can be used, said Tribble. Although the goal is to design user interfaces and experiments that ask for your permission whenever an application requests personal information and explains how that data is used, he acknowledged that "our work is n & # 39; Is never finished ".

But it starts with companies recognizing that their job is to help consumers understand what's happening in their data. Tribble think that Apple has led in this area.

"Apple has done more than most by pushing our industry forward and showing the example," he said.

Take privacy seriously

Apple reviews 100,000 apps a week and Tribble said the company was rejecting 40 percent of these apps, largely for privacy reasons. The company's priority is to remove apps that are trying to trick users or look for permissions on your phone that they do not have the right to ask.

This does not mean that there is no possibility of doing business with Apple. He spoke of a technique called "privacy-protected click-through attribution" or a way for Apple's Safari browser to track the advertisements you clicked on, while hiding your specific details when sending information to advertisers.

This is a middle ground between browsers that allows followers to exploit looser and more privacy-focused options like the Brave browser. This is also an example of the kind of innovation that helps protect your data even though a service is free, Tribble said.

"Confidentiality should be available in all devices and in all services," said Tribble, in response to an editorial by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, saying that "privacy should not be a luxury good", a Hit hard for Apple's high prices for its iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Tribble, for its part, supports the regulation on the protection of privacy and believes that the general data protection regulation of the European Union, which has just passed its first year of existence, constitutes a good model. He added that he hoped the US regulators would learn from it, noting that the GDPR "has done a lot of things".

Get home safely (kit)

Apples HomeKit Secure Video appeared in response to the explosion of smart cameras for the home market, said Tribble.

In the Apple system, the video goes through a HomeKit compatible device, which handles the detection and analysis of objects, then encrypts it and sends it to Apple servers. Unlike other smart video companies, Apple has no way of seeing video. The user can access the video with a single key to decrypt the footage, he said.

Similarly, the company also introduced its HomeKit Routers program, an agreement with router manufacturers to set up firewalls around home-connected devices.

"The last thing you want is a home with open light bulbs and switches on the Internet," Tribble said.

This is one of the many areas in which Apple is trying to put privacy protection at stake.

"We have been taking this approach for years," he said. "This is not something we proposed last year, which gives us a different perspective than some of the companies that have recently embarked on this adventure."

Queenie Wong and Richard Nieva of CNET contributed to this report.

The story published at 8 o'clock in the morning.

Updated, 11:25 PT: Adds background and details on Apple's policy.