INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
It not infrequent these days if you&re a big tech company to receive a brusquely worded letter from a group of Senators or Representatives
asking you to explain yourself on some topic or another
One recent such letter sent to Apple and Alphabet asks specifically about practices meant to track users or their interactions with the
phone without their knowledge or consent
Luckily Apple has much to be proud of on that front.
Apple philosophy and approach to customer data differs from many other companies on
these important issue,& preened Timothy Powderly, Apple director of federal government affairs, in the company response to the House Energy
and Commerce Committee questions.
We believe privacy is a fundamental human right and purposely design our products and services to minimize
our collection of customer data,& he goes on
&The customer is not our product, and our business model does not depend on collecting vast amounts of personally identifiable information
to enrich targeted profiles marketed to advertisers.
To whom could Powderly be referring
The Committee questions were perhaps spurred by
reports of unwanted collection of audio data from the likes of Amazon Echos and other devices that listen eagerly for the magic words that
So the actual queries were along the lines of: when a phone has no SIM card, what kind of location data is collected; whom does that data go
to and for what purpose; does the device listen when it has not been &invoked&; and so on.
Apple responses, which you can read here (thanks
CNET), are blessedly free of the kind of half-answers that usually indicate some kind of shenanigans.
The answers to most questions are that
users who have Location Services enabled on the phone will collect data depending on what wireless options are selected, and that data is
sent to Apple in anonymous and encrypted form… and ''this anonymous data is not used to target advertising to the user.
iPhones only
listen in with a short buffer for the &Hey Siri& wake-up call, and queries to the virtual assistant are not shared with third
parties.
Unlike other similar services, which associate and store historical voice utterances in identifiable form,& the answer goes on,
throwing shade all the while, &Siri utterances, which include the audio trigger and the remainder of the Siri command, are tied to a random
device identifier, not a user Apple ID.& This identifier can be reset at any time (turn Siri and Dictation off and on again) and any data
associated with it will disappear as well.
Apple has its flaws, but its privacy settings are thankfully not among them
It true what it says: it not a data-monger like Google or Facebook, and has no need to personally profile its users the way Amazon does
It may sell increasingly iffy hardware at truly eye-popping prices, and it may have lost its design edge (been a while now), but at least it
isn''t, in this sense at least, evil by nature.
