Bored with mainstream media these days? Of course you are. Fox News is the most mainstream media available these days and they’re totally immersed in politics while real news and reading fun is about Apple and privacy.
Say what? Privacy is fun to read? Say it ain’t so! OK. It ain’t so. Privacy Policy makes for some very boring reading. Who bothers, right? Well, not bothering is what got Facebook into trouble recently and with a snap of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s fingers, privacy has become a thing.
Privacy X 5
Likely you’ve read the headlines about Facebook’s privacy problems. Perhaps you’ve read of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s snarky view of Facebook’s business model (hint: he doesn’t like it). Yet, both companies have updated their respective Privacy Policy pages to account for their collective stance on the subject.
Facebook is all apologetic while Apple is a bit more self righteous. Check out Privacy from Apple and you’ll be treated to five pages of privacy details. Uh huh. Five pages.
Privacy – Apple products are designed to do amazing things. And designed to protect your privacy. At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. And so much of your personal information — information you have a right to keep private — lives on your Apple devices.
I like that. Of course, Apple’s business model doesn’t depend much on making you a part of the product the way Facebook and Google do, but it’s nice to know Apple cares so much about not caring about your privacy.
Wait. There’s more.
Our Approach To Privacy – Your personal data should always be protected on your device and never shared without your permission. So we build encryption, on-device intelligence, and other tools into our products to let you share what you want on your terms. We also use techniques like Differential Privacy to improve user experiences while protecting the information you share with Apple. Differential Privacy adds random information to your data before it’s analyzed by Apple, so we can’t link that data to your device.
Alright. I like that, too. After all, Apple has a lot of places where we store, uh, um, our private parts– encryption, Apple Pay, Messages, FaceTime, Health app, Safari, iCloud, etc. That section is lengthy, as are most privacy statements, but the language is simple and straightfoward.
And there are plenty of pictures along the way.
Manage Your Privacy – Thanks to Facebook, Apple has become a bit more transparent about how our private information is stored. Transparent? OK, maybe translucent.
Think Face ID and Touch ID and complex passwords, auto unlock, Apple ID, two-factor authentication, phishing safeguards and much more. Easy reading. Plenty of pictures.
Transparency Report – Apple receives various forms of legal process requesting information from or actions by Apple. Apple requires government and private entities to follow applicable laws and statutes when requesting customer information and data. We contractually require our service providers to follow the same standard we apply to government information requests for Apple data. Our legal team reviews requests to ensure that the requests have a valid legal basis. If they do, we comply by providing the narrowest possible set of data responsive to the request.
Translation: “We’ll cough it up if it’s legal.”
Finally, there’s the actual Apple Privacy Policy.
Privacy Policy – Your privacy is important to Apple. So we’ve developed a Privacy Policy that covers how we collect, use, disclose, transfer, and store your information. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our privacy practices and let us know if you have any questions.
A moment? I don’t think so, Tim. Pictures were replaced with more legalese, so this is a comprehensive privacy policy that looks and feels much like any you’ll read anywhere else, including Facebook. You won’t finish the Privacy Policy in a moment and none of it carries the caveats in even Facebook’s newest and somewhat more information privacy policy.
Humans are complex creatures. We make complex devices and complex policies. More transparency (translucency?) and simplicity will benefit everyone. But if Apple is making the process simpler and easier to understand in five full pages of policy– for a company that doesn’t need as much customer or user information as Facebook– then maybe this is the best humans can do.
