Apple's commitment to customer privacy is not, as the DOJ have claimed, a "marketing gimmick" -- the company, as it turns out, has three executives and one senior executive that act as "privacy czars" who analyze and question every step of any program or process that needs to collect personal data on customers -- an initiative that crippled iAd to the point where the company has all but abandoned it, and has even limited Siri and Maps, according to a report from Reuters.
The three executives who serve as the
"policy" czars on customer privacy are former Google global policy counsel Jane Horvath; software manager Erik Neuenschwanderand, who reviews the code of programs to ensure they comply with the guidelines, and Guy "Bud" Tribble (a long-time Apple veteran who was on the original Macintosh team and currently serves as VP of software technology). A variety of senior vice presidents or even Apple CEO Tim Cook himself will help the group in the face of difficult or complicated privacy considerations.
Generally, Apple is reluctant -- and growing increasingly leery -- of utilizing customer data for purposes such as targeted advertising or "personalized" suggestions, a policy that continues to differentiate it from the leading companies in tech, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Product managers must get the "privacy czars" to sign off on any use of customer data. In many cases where the use of data is unavoidable (such as determining the user's location in order to use Maps), the preferred option is to keep the data on the local hardware rather than transmit it; if it must be stored, encrypt it without a way for the company to decrypt it.
In the case needing to have data to show publishers (for News) or advertisers (previously needed for iAd), the company refused to use any personally-identifying information, instead providing not just anonymized data but -- in an abundance of caution -- aggregate group data (such as "10 million people read this story") to prevent advertisers, developers, or publishers from connecting "anonymous" data to profiles gathered from other sources that could re-connect the data to specific users.
The czars' zeal in protecting customer data has thrown up obstacles, such as disallowing an iAd proposal to use the iTunes user database to target iAds in apps -- even though the users would have been anonymous. As a result, iAd could only tell advertisers how many people had seen an ad, but nothing about demographics. Advertisers were unhappy, and iAd employees were frustrated. Eventually, Apple
gave up on in-house iAd staff and turned the platform over to app developers to run themselves.
Another example from the Reuters report suggests that "major back-end surgery" was required on Siri, which was purchased from another company in 2010, in order to conform to existing Apple policies such as not transmitting personal data, keeping search records private, and that voice data be stored entirely separately from any sort of personal identifier, such as a requesting iPhone's IMEI number or IP address. Likewise, Apple chose to keep Spotlight search logs private as well.
This commitment to user privacy has hobbled the company in some areas compared to its competition, such as how Google's search app can offer predictive guesses at what users are about to ask
based on collected data, such as whether they are driving or walking, what commonly-visited destinations they seem to be headed towards, and past searches -- all of which and much more the company collects and analyzes to give advertisers more information, to produce targeted advertising, and to use the data collected to research new ways to find out even more.
This is also the
modus operandi of Facebook, and both companies have been attacked by Cook and Apple because of it. Cook has repeatedly called companies like Amazon and Facebook to be more transparent about what they know about their users and to require a higher level of awareness when getting consent, and has said that Apple strives to know as little as possible about its users other than what they must gather in order to provide services such as Maps or Find My iPhone. The company has a dedicated
privacy page on its website that details exactly what, when, and why Apple collects any data from users.
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