How Apple's efforts to bring privacy to the masses will change the web

Tim Cook

Apple has announced a swathe of upgrades for its tablet, phone and computer operating systems that could change the way millions of people’s data is transmitted over the internet – a boon for privacy enthusiasts, but a potential problem for advertisers, law enforcement agencies and governments.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday, the company announced that upcoming updates to its web browser will offer an anonymous browsing feature called Private Relay. This will disguise user details from website operators by using a series of intermediary servers. Software to do this, such as the Tor network, already exists, but Apple’s move will make this kind of obfuscation far more mainstream.

The voice-recognition assistant Siri will also process audio on the device, rather than sending it to Apple servers for analysis, and changes to Apple’s email app will stop senders tracking when a message has been read and the IP address from which it was accessed.

The changes have provoked frustration from people working in marketing who track users to build up a profile and better target them. Matt Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times, said that it will weaken the ability to provide advertising-supported services. He pointed out that around 50 per cent of email marketing is opened on an iPhone using the Mail app, so half of the data on users that was previously collected will be lost. (New Scientist, like most online publications, collects a variety of information about its readers.)

The new features are a continuation of Apple’s recent clampdown on invasive advertising habits. With iOS 14.5, the current version of its operating system, the company forced apps to tell users what they were doing to collect data on users and to seek their permission.

Alan Woodward at the University of Surrey, UK, says Apple is simply meeting demand from users growing increasingly concerned about privacy.

There are very few things you pay for on the internet, but the trouble is the old adage: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” he says. “I think it’s a way of differentiating themselves in the market by saying: ‘You’re paying us, we’ll protect you. We’ve sold you a vessel in which your life lives, we want you to feel that that is secure and private’.”

Woodward warns that the changes won’t be the end of the story, and will probably start a game of “whack-a-mole” with advertisers and marketers, where they try to find ways around the new features.

He also points out that the new features will be unavailable in several countries including China, Saudi Arabia, Uganda and Egypt, at the behest of those governments. China alone is the source of 15 per cent of Apple’s revenue.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 Artificial intelligence What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems , natural language processing, speech recognition and machine vision . How does AI work? As the hype around AI has accelerated, vendors have been scrambling to promote how their products and services use AI. Often what they refer to as AI is simply one component of AI, such as machine learning . AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms. No one programming language is synonymous with AI, but a few, including Python, R and Java, are popular. In general, AI systems work by ingesting large amounts of labeled training data, analyzing the data for correlations and patterns, and using these patterns to make predictions about future states. In this way, a chatbot that is f...
Read more
Image
  Meteorite-hunting drones could help find freshly fallen space rocks Meteorite are among the most important objects scientists can study to understand the solar system, but finding them is tricky and time-consuming. Now, one team of researchers is trying to speed up the process with drones. Robert Citron at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues have been trialling using drones and machine learning to find these rocks shortly after their blazing journey through the atmosphere. The NASA-funded study flew a camera-equipped consumer drone over a dry lake bed in Nevada, … Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2281804-meteorite-hunting-drones-could-help-find-freshly-fallen-space-rocks/#ixzz6zcmRBwFk
Read more
Image
  Israel used world's first AI-guided combat drone swarm in Gaza attacks     During operations in Gaza in mid-May, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) used a swarm of small drones to locate, identify and attack Hamas militants. This is thought to be the first time a drone swarm has been used in combat. Drones are usually controlled individually by remote operators, but a swarm is a single networked entity that flies itself using artificial intelligence . It can cover a wide area and keep operating even if it loses many units, and only requires a single … Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2282656-israel-used-worlds-first-ai-guided-combat-drone-swarm-in-gaza-attacks/#ixzz6zckcR3Ql  
Read more