Apple exec goes in-depth on data minimization and more to celebrate ‘Data Privacy Day’

Today marks Data Privacy Day in many countries around the world, with the goal of raising awareness and promoting privacy and data protection best practices. In honor of Data Privacy Day, Apple’s head of user privacy, Erik Neuenschwander, has joined Rene Ritchie for an interview diving into Apple’s own beliefs on privacy.

In the interview, Neuenschwander explained that one of the key focuses for Apple is making sure that new features and products are designed with privacy in mind from the very beginning.

It’s very important that we’re engaged both to help with issue spotting and to talk about really where we see the risks of the data, or where we see increased sensitivity around attacks that can be mounted on top of data. But at the same time, it’s a partnership with the teams because they’re the ones coming with where they want their domain expertise to take their feature in the future.

It leads to much improved and richer functionality for users. And what we bring along with them is looking at how we can take the increasing use of privacy-preserving technologies and the increasing power of our devices to bring that functionality forward with a very light touch on the users’ data.

Neuenschwander also spoke on the practice of data minimization, something that Apple has adopted across all of its products and services:

Data minimization is when we think about how to stop collecting the data in the first place and only collect what’s necessary to provide that product or service. And we really put that at the foremost of the design of a feature that we look at, because if you just avoid the data collection upfront, then that is a great way to be privacy-respecting to the user by leaving them in control of their data.

A way that we do this is through on-device intelligence, and we’ve actually over the years even improved our hardware, and made changes to the hardware of our devices that allows us to do more of that processing, to give users great experiences on their device, by processing the data on their device.

The full interview is worth a watch and can be found below.