More than three years have passed since Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, from the Brussels stage to the European Parliament, invited by the then European Data Protection Supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, launched his appeal for a federal privacy law in the States United. An important stage given that the occasion was the fortieth international conference on privacy. Last year, however, on the occasion of the CPDP, another high-level conference on the protection of personal data, he went online to propose Apple’s vision in this sector and to launch lashing statements towards those competing companies that do everything to obtain the data of its users. At the time, the controversial iOS update was about to be launched which would give Apple users an immediate tool to block the tracking of what they do online. This new option, then introduced in April 2021 for everyone, cost Google and social media a good ten billion in lost advertising revenue in the first six months of use alone, with American users joining rates of 96%.
The battle over data
Also this year Tim Cook took to a similar stage at the Global Privacy Conference of IAPP, the international association of privacy professionals with nearly 75,000 members worldwide. In the fifteen minutes he spoke, he declared how important it is for Apple to protect privacy, a fundamental right that in turn enables other rights such as freedom of expression and self-determination. “Privacy gives us the freedom, the freedom to make mistakes and correct ourselves, to be ourselves without fear of our every move being recorded,” Cook said. He then added that if the technology is neutral, without being good or bad in itself, it is true that it reflects the expectations of those who use it and those who build it.
This is why Apple says it is at the forefront of the battle in the name of privacy, “to protect its users from surveillance by all those companies that under the excuse of better serving users with more precise search results, do not believe they should ask. permission before doing so “.
Cook went on to say that another foundation needed to protect privacy is security. Without security there can be no privacy and for that Apple applies the principle of data minimization, asking only the necessary data and encrypting them by default on the iPhone.
Competition and privacy
But it is on the third point that Cook presents his criticism to lawmakers. In fact, despite being a strong supporter of the GDPR (the European regulation on the protection of personal data) and similar legislation adopted and being adopted all over the world, he does not see as positive the direction that some are taking in the name of a more competition. In fact, both in Europe and in the United States they are working on the idea of opening the App stores. Every company has an Achilles heel and if for Facebook and Google it is privacy, since it affects advertising sales, that of Cupertino is competition, because it would create a breach in its “walled garden”, where everything is integrated and all Apps have to go under its magnifying glass. Indeed, as was later revealed by the hearings of the lawsuit against Epic, the company that produces Provided and that for over a year is no longer in the App Store, the percentage of 30% of revenues, or 15% for revenues of less than a million dollars, that all companies must pay to stay on the App store, would be needed precisely to ensure that safety. Cook cited as an example of the effects of the lack of ex ante control over apps what happened on other phones where, during the early years of the pandemic, it was possible to download bogus versions of contact tracing apps, resulting in unauthorized sharing of their personal data.
Freedom or security?
For the CEO of Apple, leaving the freedom of choice to users to opt for other apps that have not passed their sideloading is not a wise choice, but it would carry more risks than benefits. It cannot be said that there is no grain of truth, which can be connected to the education and perception that the mass has of smartphones (easy to use and safer), but it is true that freely downloading software from the internet is what it has always been done on all computers, including Apple’s Macs. Users know that if they download it from the App Store on their computer they are safer while if they download it from an unknown site they are at greater risk. This could be the same for smartphones. The truth, however, needless to deny it, is that this change would not have so much an impact on the store’s security alone, but on the entire Cupertino business model.
The issues of data protection, privacy and competition in the data economy will be increasingly intertwined in the coming years. Finding the perfect match for businesses and legislators of all latitudes will be the next challenge.