Apple’s approach to privacy is one of the great prides of this company. However, engineers and others involved in product development say getting to this point has come at a high cost.
Lack of access to usage data means that product development teams can’t deliver the kind of highly personalized features they would and would like. Some of these choices that they would like to make are completely impossible, because a relatively young privacy watchdog tells them it’s not possible.
privacy is priority
There’s nothing really surprising about Apple downplaying its data collection. Nor has it been in the fact that have great and strict internal controls about how such data may be used. We have already learned in 2016, for example, that all use of customer data within the company requires the approval of three “privacy czars”. However, the article Information it is a simple, but interesting, look at the challenges this has posed for the company’s own engineers.
It can have a huge impact on the ability of Apple applications to be able to offer individualized services. Compare Apple TV+ to Netflix, for example:
Check out Apple TV+. The paid video streaming service, unlike its big rivals, doesn’t collect demographic information about customers or a history of what they’ve watched according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation at Apple. That means Apple TV+ employees can’t analyze how customers move from one content to another, making it almost impossible to recommend more videos based on their preferences, which is in contrast to Netflix, Disney and other streaming services that use those. data to get customers to watch more videos.
It is important to mention that the application can show you your own history. However, it seems that this has been done in a way that Apple does not have access to that data.
Apple maintains protection on all data
some other ideas they have to be discarded completely because they contravene their own privacy policies of the company. For example, Apple assures its customers that while it analyzes Siri requests to improve performance, your Siri voice profile is not actually linked to your Apple ID.
In 2019, employees explored whether a customer could use Siri to purchase apps and other services online using their voice. Something similar to how customers often use Amazon to place product orders using their voice assistant. Alexa, according to a person with direct knowledge of the project. The effort has stalled in part because of strict privacy rules that prevented Siri from linking a person’s Apple ID to their voice request. Apple’s media team in charge of the project hasn’t been able to find an alternative way for users to reliably bill them, the person said.
Apple can then use aggregated data, employing techniques like differential privacy to break the link between users and their data. However, some experts maintain that these protections are not always up to the mark. The article also described how Apple acquires anonymous data for analysis.
But Apple employees have said that those new to the company have to adjust to an environment in which they are kept in the dark about using its products. As well as where a junior member of a privacy team can veto a data access request. This can happen even for top managers of the company.
