Differential Privacy

Researchers at three universities have accused Apple of taking an ‘immense risk’ with the security of user data thanks to what they say is a poor implementation of differential privacy.

Differential privacy is a method of allowing Apple and other companies to analyse user data in a way intended to be completely anonymous. Enough noise is injected into the data that it is supposed to be impossible to match any of that data to a specific individual.

However, security researchers have for the second time questioned how well Apple’s implementation works in practice …

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An Apple software engineer recently revealed that Apple is now rolling out its use of differential privacy to cover both web browsing and health data, as it now uses the technique to process millions of pieces of daily information from device users.

Differential privacy has so far flown largely under the radar, so we thought it would be a good time to look at what it does and how it works – and to ask how comfortable you feel about its wider use by Apple …

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When Apple released iOS 10 last September, they pushed in a small change when connecting to wireless networks. Tucked away under the Wi-Fi settings, iOS now warns users when connecting to insecure networks that it exposes a user’s network traffic. The easy answer to this is to simply not connect to public wireless networks, but that’s something that most people will just ignore. If users won’t stop connecting to insecure public networks, they could at least start using VPNs and Apple could make it easy to do that.

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