With Apple making very clear how strongly it feels about the privacy of customer data through the FBI case, it’s no surprise that the issue is a hot-button within the company. A Reuters piece shows just how serious Apple is when it comes to guarding personal data.
Any collection of Apple customer data requires sign-off from a committee of three “privacy czars” and a top executive, according to four former employees who worked on a variety of products that went through privacy vetting […] The trio of experts […] are both admired and feared.
One former employee said that debates over whether or not customer data can be used to improve a service usually take at least a month to settle, and some privacy issues are debated for more than a year before a final decision is reached. Key privacy issues are escalated all the way to Tim Cook.
It was a refusal to compromise on privacy that killed one of Apple’s products, says the piece, while others needed to be substantially reworked to achieve privacy sign-off …
The team running Apple’s in-house advertising platform, iAd, wanted to make available to advertisers data on the profiles of customers who had viewed the ads. The request was refused, and it was likely this decision that led to Apple closing its iAd App Network completely earlier this year.
The iAd team fought hard to give advertisers greater visibility into who saw their ads, those employees said. Their hope was to create anonymous identifiers so advertisers could discern which users had seen their ads.
But despite about a dozen similar pitches, the most executives would allow was a count of how many users had seen an advertisement, according to the former employees.
“It was so watered down, it wasn’t even useful,” one of the former employees said.
Siri, too, required major work to address privacy concerns.
Privacy leaders insisted that voice data on what users say to Siri should be stored separately from personally identifiable information, according to a former Apple employee who attended some of the meetings.
“That was a major back-end surgery,” the former employee said.
Reuters provides brief profiles of the three privacy czars.
Jane Horvath, a lawyer who previously served as global privacy counsel at Google, is the group’s legal and policy wonk, often channeling the views of Apple’s board and citing regulatory requirements, said former employees who have worked with her. She was hired to formalize privacy practices after the 2011 “locationgate” scandal, in which iPhones were found to be gathering information about users’ whereabouts.
Horvath works alongside Guy “Bud” Tribble, a member of the original Macintosh team who is venerated by employees as one of the few who “had been to the mountain with Moses,” as one former employee put it, referring to Tribble’s ties to the late Steve Jobs.
The third czar, a rising star named Erik Neuenschwander, scrutinizes engineers’ work to ensure they are following through on the agreements – even reviewing lines of code.
The FBI accused Apple of using privacy concerns purely as a marketing tactic; this pieces clearly illustrates that it is anything but.
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And this is a problem for Apple why? Apple does not sale data – they sale hardware – so they can afford to be strict with their data collection policies – I love it.
What you on about? Ever ran an app on your iPhone and adverts appear at the bottom of your screen? That appears because the developer has paid Apple money to use the information they have on you, including your location, so that they can target you with adverts. It’s called iAd, and it exists.
“The FBI accused Apple of using privacy concerns purely as a marketing tactic; this pieces clearly illustrates that it is anything but.”
Actually it strongly supports the idea that Apple uses ‘privacy’ to leverage sales.
In the example given, Apple pays a price of losing some advertising income in order to enhance marketing of hardware.
Of course when Apple obstructs law enforcement as a marketing tactic, the cost is more serious than a bit of ad revenue lost, but the cost is not paid by Apple.
You can argue that ultimately Apple believes that guarding customer privacy will make its products more appealing, but you cannot argue (as the FBI did) that the only reason it refused to build GovtOS was for the marketing benefit of taking that stand.
Yeah but it will only make the product more appealing if customer privacy is impossible to access. If, as the FBI are saying, they are able to access the iPhone without resorting to rewriting the OS then it is actually insecure & can be exploited, and Apple have made the stand for no reason at all. It’s gets worse though as well because ff the FBI access the phone and their IS information on there which prevents another terrorist attack on US soil, then the ONLY people coming out of it as heroes are the FBI. Apple will be sleighted because they will be perceived as protecting the rights of terrorists – which incidentally a substantial amount of the public already think.
What you have to do is question whether it really IS the rights of the American public at stake, or just rabid fanboyism and the defence of THE flagship American business. If the phone was made made by Samsung or LG, do you REALLY think the American people and Apple fanboys would be rising up in defence of said business? You know as well as I do that they would be clamouring for the FBI to crack the non-American phone for the security of the American people.
There’s an enormous difference between a technique the FBI can deploy, with intensive work and expert advice, and a backdoor that can be trivially deployed on any phone.