Apple Created the Privacy Dystopia It Wants to Save You From
Apple invented privacy problems on mobile devices. And now only Apple can fix them.
By Mark Wilson
“What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” The message was printed 14 stories high, in simple black and white, on the side of a building at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The proclamation was quintessential Apple: a bold spectacle, a well-timed verbal play, and a calculated jab at Google, Amazon, and every other competitor about to show off its latest products on the world’s biggest stage. It was also misleading. Apple, after all, practically laid the groundwork for the surveillance economy with its powerful App Store.
Through a certain lens, the iPhone is one of the most secure devices in the world. Its contents are encrypted by default. Any data that Apple collects through services such as Maps is assigned to random identifiers (rather than being tied to users’ IDs) that are periodically reset. Unlike Google’s Chrome browser, Apple’s Safari doesn’t track users across the web, which means the company could be leaving billions of dollars in revenue on the table by not harvesting users’ data.
But that doesn’t stop the 2 million or so apps in the App Store from spying on iPhone users…
