How Apple ensures the user’s privacy?
Everyone one of us is concerned about his/her privacy, especially in this era, where all of us are connected via internet and data is very important.
If you disagree and say “ if I don’t have anything to hide, then why should I be concerned about privacy or security? ”, I would suggest you go through this article.
As technology advancing day by day, many Spying Softwares are there in the market, which is commercially available and used by the government and organisations for surveillance.
In the same way, there are also some company which spends much of their time and effort in thinking about privacy and security. And providing powerful security features to prevent anyone except you from being able to access your information (without your knowledge).
Apple claims that they are committed to protecting their customer’s data. Their products and features include innovative privacy technologies and techniques designed to minimise how much of our data they or anyone else can access.
Apple has spent a lot of time and money to build security features into their products. These devices encrypt data by default, which means that if you have a password on your device and someone tries to get into it, they’re going to have a really difficult time, whether that someone is an employer, your partner or a government agency.
Let’s have a look on their products and how they protect our privacy :
Safari — the browser :
Safari is a browser that includes state-of-the-art features to help protect your privacy, defending you against cross-site tracking and minimising the data passed to third parties.
It works by separating the third-party content used to track you from other browsing data, so you won’t get the advertisement based on your browsing history.
Safari minimises the amount of data sent to third party search engines — it won’t share cookies or your precise location, which may happen if you search by other means.
Maps — by Apple :
This helps minimise the amount of data sent to Apple servers. Personalised features are created using data on your device. And data that is sent from your device to the Maps service is associated with random identifiers so Apple doesn’t have a profile of your movements and searches.
Maps don’t need sign-in. The data that Maps collects while you use the app like search terms, navigation routing and traffic information, is associated with random identifiers, not your Apple ID.
End-to-end encryption: Maps keeps your personal data in-sync across all your devices using end-to-end encryption. Your Significant Locations and collections are encrypted ends to end so Apple cannot read them. And when you share your ETA with other Maps users, Apple can’t see your location.
Photos:
The Memories and Sharing Suggestions features in the Photos app use on-device intelligence to analyse your photos using Face recognition and scene and object detection are done completely on your device rather than on the cloud. So Apple doesn’t know what’s in your photos. And apps can access your photos only with your permission.
iCloud Photos: If you choose to back up your photo library to iCloud Photos, Apple protects your photos on our servers with encryption.
Sharing Control: Apple let you decide if you want to include the photo’s location, edit history and depth data when you share a photo or with an app.
iMessage and FaceTime:
Messages and FaceTime conversations are encrypted end to end, so they can’t be read while they’re sent between devices. Messages are encrypted on your device so they can’t be accessed without your passcode. iMessage and FaceTime are designed so that there’s no way for Apple to read your messages when they’re in transit between devices.
This means if the police are investigating you, and they go to Telecom Company and they say, “Hey, last week A and B exchanged messages, can we get a copy of them?” company will say they don’t have them because the messages are transmitted in a way that the phone companies cannot read them.
There are many other products and have a lot of privacy features provided by Apple (you can check out here).
For Apple’s customers, this is a great thing — but Apple devices are expensive. Not everyone can afford to spend $600 on a smartphone.
So this isn’t just a privacy issue or a cyber-security issue. It’s really an issue of equality and justice, because if the poor and vulnerable in our societies are using devices that do nothing to protect them from surveillance, and the rich and powerful are using devices that do nothing to protect them from surveillance, and the rich and powerful are using devices that make them essentially off-limits to the government, that creates a system of surveillance inequality, and further perpetuates the existing problems of inequality that we have in our society.
We hope we will overcome this economical differences and we will overcome these privacy issues at a reasonable price, so everyone can avail this.
You can read from the official source, from where I have learnt.
