When looking at the communications of the major players in the operating system market (for both computers and smartphones) there are one company that repeatedly talks about privacy more than the others. The company I am thinking about is Apple. Their continuous talk about privacy got me curious, how do they handle their users privacy. And when curious it’s time to investigate, so I dug into their Privacy Policy (Updated June 1, 2021), and my thoughts resulted in this blogpost.
The first thing that springs to mind is how well Apple documents what information they collect. This is quite a low bar, but it is nice to see an easy to find list of data collected. In addition Apple clearly specifies that they do not sell any data from its users, something that should be greatly appreciated.
Apple does not sell your data including as “sale” is defined in Nevada and California.
The following sentence in the privacy policy caught my attention:
Apple does not use algorithms or profiling to make any decision that would significantly affect you without the opportunity for human review. At first glance this seems like they do not use algorithms on your data, but upon further review this is not true. Instead it just specifies that there is an opportunity for human review. As I understand it this means that if you are not happy with the outcome of this algorithm you can request a review.
Overall the privacy policy is quite good, it shows the overall intent from apple when it comes to privacy. If they live up to their promises is hard to validate, but the policy gives me hope that major companies can take an interest in privacy and not sell the data they collect.