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Can You Hear Me Now?
Posted Oct 3, 2015 by Natasha Lomas (@riptari)
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Fear Of Failure May Ensure It
[554281668_27f80808f2_b.jpg?w=738]
It’s been a pretty big week for tech + privacy, with Apple overhauling
the privacy-related info it pushes out to users — sharpening its
pro-privacy positioning as a marketing differentiator for its devices
and services. And NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden stepping into
the public arena by joining Twitter as, well, himself — with the
verified account status to prove it.
(Who knows if Snowden was lurking on the service under an assumed name
prior to uncloaking as @Snowden. Someone has probably DMed him to ask
but he clearly has a big backlog of messages to get through…)
On the surface the two events may not seem much related but pro-privacy
moves by mainstream tech giants can absolutely chart a link back to
Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the extent of government intelligence
agencies’ dragnet surveillance of the online sphere.
Snowden’s big reveal crystalized all those vague yet disconcerting
digital sensations prior to then — feelings of being tracked from web
service to service, stalked by online ads, and nagging questions about
why a simple service needed so much personal data — into the concrete
certainty of the systematic scope and scale of an industrial
surveillance complex with its fingers in all of the mainstream consumer
tech platforms. And a private sector user-stalking operation in the
digital business sphere to match.
The thing with such gigantic secrets is, once revealed, there’s no way
they can slink back into the shadows.
It’s no surprise then that Apple’s new privacy pages have an
entire section on government information requests — in which the
company states categorically:
Apple privacy
Such public declarations are absolutely progress. While we cannot know
for sure that Apple’s hardware and software lacks government backdoors,
given these are hermetically sealed proprietary products that don’t
allow an open source route for third party audits, the company is on
the public record with an anti-backdoors statement — so has chained
its corporate reputation to the digital privacy rights cause.
Apple is also making some very clear privacy commitments to its users.
This is also progress.
Its privacy page states:
At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect
your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict
policies that govern how all data is handled.
Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our
hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services
like Apple Pay. And we continue to make improvements. Two-step
verification, which we encourage all our customers to use, in
addition to protecting your Apple ID account information, now also
protects all of the data you store and keep up to date with iCloud.
We believe in telling you up front exactly what’s going to happen to
your personal information and asking for your permission before you
share it with us. And if you change your mind later, we make it easy
to stop sharing with us. Every Apple product is designed around
those principles. When we do ask to use your data, it’s to provide
you with a better user experience.
That’s not to say that Apple’s services don’t have insecurities —
pretty much any software of the modern era contains bugs and flaws that
can lead to exploits and data leaks. (Remember last September’s iCloud
hack?)
But the point is one of principle. Apple is making a pro-privacy
stance, which stands in stark contrast to much of the consumer tech
industry’s wonted ways in recent times — where overreaching T&Cs and
vaguely worded privacy policies have all too often required users to
sign over any expectations of privacy for the ‘privilege’ of using a
certain service (even, in some cases, when they’ve paid for the service
in question — so this is not just a case of privacy being the ‘price’
of using a free service).
Apple making a robust pro-privacy stance sets a new privacy benchmark
and puts pressure on those tech business models that have been built on
mining personal data in the digital shadows. Of which there are, of
course, many. But perhaps things are set to change on that front. Such
a high profile company shining a disinfecting spotlight on the value of
personal data makes those companies with less clearly worded privacy
commitments seem a whole lot more murky — even if they’re not actually
doing anything too outlandish with the data they gather. And when there
is enough pressure, well some pretty unexciting base materials can
transform into something valuable.
Apple choosing to champion privacy is a marketing strategy that’s
both timely and savvy. Of course it aligns with the company’s premium
hardware business model. And it allows them to put clear blue water
between how they operate and their main, ad-powered competitors’ big
data mining operations. It also puts them on Snowden’s side of the
fence; on a principled, public stage, championing the rights of online
users not to have their every action data-mined for profit — or fed
into Kafka-esque government surveillance apparatus on a ceaseless and
hopeless quest for crime-preventing omniscience (Minority Report was
fiction, yo).
And while Apple’s own privacy practices should still absolutely be
scrutinized — yes it’s great that they obfuscate your mapping data so
they don’t have an absolute view of your start and end points, but why
are they retaining user maps data for two years? — they are effectively
asking all of us to ask questions about how they operate and what they
do with our data. To continually hold them to their apparently high
standards. And yes, that is progress. Because it applies industry-wide
pressure and works to counter the pro-surveillance narrative that
claims users don’t care about privacy anyway. Bottom line: Plenty of
users do care — and certainly they do when you inform them exactly how
much invasive snooping is going on. As Snowden has said, we need to
have the debate about what’s acceptable and what’s not — and the simple
fact is you can’t do that without being fully appraised of the facts.
A more cynical view on Apple’s stance might be that it’s using privacy
as a strategy to shield itself against a relative competitive weakness
vs the kinds of big data powered services that companies with a greater
overview of their users are able to launch. Google, for instance, has
been using user data mined from usage of multiple Google services to
power its predictive Google Now feature for several years, touting the
convenience of notifications that really know your habits and patterns
(because, well, Google reads your emails, knows what’s in your
calendar, looks at who’s in your photos, and so on…). With the rise of
wearables and a growing Internet of Things, more and more personal
data-points can be added to such systems to power apparently more
powerful predictions. And yet there’s a gigantic trade-off in privacy.
The best personal assistant in the world would literally be
a mind-reader but who would actually want to employ such a person? What
cost incremental convenience?
Meanwhile Apple debuted an update to its Siri voice assistant at its
developer conference this summer — called Proactive — which also aims
to surface some Google Now-ish predictive smarts. So it’s also moving
towards joining more dots about its users’ lives. However Apple’s
version of this predictive assistant puts in a privacy check and
balance by doing only local on-device processing — meaning it’s not
sucking your personal data into the data-mining cloud to power this
feature. So the user gets incremental convenience without an
eye-wateringly costly privacy price-tag.
These sorts of pro-privacy, data obfuscating approaches perhaps take
more engineering effort to develop. So might be slower to bring to
market. They might also be less compelling from a user point of view if
they aren’t able to be quite so pin-point accurate — given they are
likely working with a more partial view of the user, rather than nosing
through your emails. But if the user understands the value of their
privacy they will also understand the value of a personalized service
that does not require they strip entirely naked in order to use it.
Apple is betting that tech users will — at the end of the day — prefer
to keep their clothes on.
Another thing to note here is that data protection laws vary in
different regions. Failure to gain proper consent for how user data is
processed is a recurring theme of many U.S. tech giants doing
business in Europe. Facebook and Google have both faced legal
challenges in the region over such privacy issues. And the Europe
Parliament is in the midst of reworking the bloc’s data protection
rules — with larger penalties for privacy infringements likely coming
down the pipe. That might well be another trigger to push tech
companies to clean up murky privacy practices. Lurking in the shadows
to eschew scrutiny no longer looks a viable strategy in the
post-Snowden tech world.
Another important development triggered by the Snowden revelations is
also coming to a head next week. On Tuesday Europe’s top court, the
ECJ, will rule on whether the ‘Safe Harbor’ agreement that governs data
sharing between Europe and the U.S. affords Europeans enough privacy
protections — with the possibility that the court might invalidate the
current agreement. U.S. tech companies offering consumers services in
Europe but processing user data back in the U.S. rely on this agreement
for continued operation of their businesses.
The agreement has, in any case, been in defacto crisis ever since
Snowden revealed the extent of dragnet government surveillance programs
— since the NSA was shown to be hoovering up data from consumer
services that were apparently signed up to the privacy covenant of Safe
Harbor. How could European’s personal data shipped across the pond
still be considered ‘safe’ in an era of systematic mass surveillance by
the U.S. government?
European privacy campaigner Max Schrems has led a legal challenge on
this front, challenging multiple U.S. tech giants for sharing data with
the NSA in the Irish court — which referred the case to the ECJ, with
a decision now imminent. At the same time, the European Commission is
continuing to review the Safe Harbor agreement with a view to updating
the framework given the ugly fact of mass surveillance. How exactly
they will do that remains to be seen. But the ECJ ruling may overtake
the politicians, in any case.
In an influential opinion written by the top advisor to the ECJ earlier
this month, ahead of the court’s final decision next week, advocate
general Yves Bot argued that U.S. mass surveillance has indeed
invalidated the Safe Harbor agreement. It’s not clear how the court
will rule but they typically lean towards following the AG’s opinion —
so at very least these are interesting times for data privacy. Some big
implications for how cloud-based tech businesses operate are in the
process of being determined.
One thing is amply clear: the privacy debate is here to stay. And for
that we must thank Mr Snowden. Looking ahead, a digital era where users
understand the value of personal data and where tech businesses
compete to protect — not exploit — privacy sounds pretty exciting to
me. That’s the dream.
Yes, Mr Snowden, we hear you.
Can you hear me now?
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 29, 2015
Featured Image: Philip Kromer/Flickr UNDER A CC BY-SA 2.0 LICENSE
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* Apple
+ Founded 1976
+ Overview Apple is a multinational corporation that designs,
manufactures, and markets mobile communication and media
devices, personal computers, portable digital music players,
and sells a variety of related software, services,
peripherals, networking solutions, and third-party digital
content and applications. Apple provides many products and
services, including iPhone; iPad; iPod; Mac; iPod; Apple TV; …
+ Location Cupertino, CA
+ Categories Hardware + Software, Consumer Electronics,
Computers, Electronics, Retail
+ Website http://www.apple.com
+ Full profile for Apple
* Edward Snowden
+ Bio Edward Joseph is an American computer professional who
leaked classified information from the National Security
Agency (NSA) to the mainstream media. He is a former system
administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency and a
counterintelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA). He later worked for Dell assigned as a contractor to
U.S. National Security Agency facilities in the …
+ Full profile for Edward Snowden
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