Why would anyone trust Apple with its data?

Several segments of the main presentation of the Apple Global Developer Conference today revealed that Apple was rushing into spaces where other technology companies had already deeply undermined the ability of their customers to trust them. The presentation has doubled Apple's recent advertising campaign on the topic of privacy, but the problem of this type of privacy has never been the company's intention. it is that they seem unable to withstand the intense attraction of customer data profitability. As Apple launches into services as hardware sales slow down, recent betrayals by other technology companies who have implicitly or explicitly promised to pay close attention to their users' data are becoming increasingly important. more.

As a cornerstone of its new data service, Apple plans to start offering a "Connect with Apple" feature, which seems to work a lot like "Connect with Facebook / Google" to create accounts on services, thus avoiding users to create. a separate username and password This sharing of account information, connecting to applications using a centralized / verified identity, is the scenario that leads to the infamous Cambridge Analytica jailbreak information from Facebook users.

Apple did thrilling promises throughout the presentation that it intends to protect the information of its users; In the case of "connection with Apple", Apple plans to generate separate random contact emails for each application and each user. Thus, when users want to break their connection to an application, Apple simply removes the identity of random messaging for the user. there is nowhere to go for communications. This is a fairly innovative and user-friendly implementation of existing technologies, to the point that it is useful to ask why other companies do not protect users, if it's that simple.

In the same vein, Apple has finally added the monitoring of the menstrual cycle to its Health app, which is an important oversight, even if it allows users to track sexual activity (and view it as a hilarious bar chart). Apple rushes back to where competitors have weakened on privacy: Dozens of time tracking apps are available on the iOS App Store, but many have recently been criticized for being left with room for maneuver to collect and share user data with users. third parties, including employers and insurers.

It is no secret that technology companies are interested in consumer data because it is extremely valuable information for a number of industries that manage a large amount of wealth, such as insurance. and financial institutions. unequal medical history is already there. Apple launches into these blatant data transfer services while promising to protect customers' data and offering itself as a safe alternative, but this decision may not be as clear as Apple seems to think, because Apple does not may not be sufficiently contrasted with all the other giants who have recently copied it with their customers' information again and again. In January, Google was fined $ 57 million in Europe for failing to disclose how and why it collected data about its customers. Facebook is still waiting for the judgment of the Cambridge Analytica incident, which revealed the publication of 87 million pieces of information, but plans to pay between 3 and 5 billion dollars to the FTC. For its part, some indicators indicate that Apple is not perfectly configured to protect customer data: Washington Post The survey showed that thousands of trackers within iOS apps were pinging an iPhone while its user was sleeping. The story shows that Apple may not have a better understanding of user data than Facebook has done with its third-party apps.

There is growing and justified mistrust of gigantic technology companies, which extend to hardware, software and services, from email to cloud storage, from grocery delivery to media production. There is also a history long enough to allow enough companies like Apple to show that they are absolutely terrible for maintaining integrity: Google has silently moved away from its "Do not be mean" mantra a long time ago, and if Facebook did not do it. Do not do the same thing with "Move fast, break things," he too would have aged badly. The two companies are now hiding behind smoke screens "We do not sell your data" and "everything is anonymous" (anonymisation does nothing and neither Facebook nor Google need to openly disseminate the data of people to reveal sensitive information about them). The truth is that once these companies had gathered enough data to identify the movements and needs of their users,

Even if Apple says that it will protect the data, why should we trust it? Time and time again, it turned out that the problem was not to trust a business at the moment, but to trust it once the sensitive information was in relative openness; when data is so valuable and tempting to technology companies, it's almost impossible to keep the data private.