In a very short passage of the opening keynote of the Worldwide Developer Conference, vice president Jennifer Bailey, head of Apple Pay and the Wallet app, announced that by the end of the year in some US states it will be possible to use the iPhone as an identity card: with iOS 15 you will be able to scan the document and store it securely in the application where we already keep the digital credit cards, concert tickets, boarding passes for air travel. The Tsa, explained by Apple, is already collaborating on a system that will be able to recognize this type of digital document.
It was a very short passage, a few tens of seconds which many did not give weight, above all because it concerned novelties limited to the American market. Yet that announcement shows how Apple’s focus on privacy, which has always been motivated as a matter of principle (“we think that privacy is a human right”, the managers of Cupertino often repeat), is providing the company with a competitive advantage that competitors will hardly be able to fill. If we go, as is predictable, towards a tomorrow in which our smartphones will increasingly become the safe in which keep our digital lives safe (Green Passes are a dress rehearsal, for example), Apple devices will have years of features designed exactly for this future. Functionality grafted onto an anomalous value system among the big tech companies, which up to now have cost Apple time, money and gun battles with competitors like Facebook, which owe their fortunes to user profiling for advertising purposes.
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The new operating systems for iPhone, iPad e Mac thus continue in the already deep groove traced by iOS 14 with new features such as the privacy tabs in the App Store and the App Tracking Transparency, a feature that allows you to block advertising profiling in the iPhone and iPad apps via a simple popup.
With iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey, Apple will introduce a new one privacy report in settings, will allow Siri to work without sending audio to remote servers and above all it will lock emails against the infamous tracking pixels, a move that will put a spoke in the wheel of the direct marketing and newsletter market.
Emails will not be able to track us
The set of novelties to protect emails from wild profiling is called “Mail Privacy Protection”: the new versions of the mail app for iPhone, iPad and Mac will be able to automatically disable the so-called “invisible pixels” with which companies collect personal information such as the IP address and the message opening status. In this way the device address cannot be used to track the user on other sites or applications, and the newsletter sending systems will not be able to verify whether we have looked at the email or not. The blocking the reading of the IP address now it also applies to Safari, where the anti-profiling feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention has been around for a few years.
The privacy report
As part of the anti-tracking functions, the Safari browser also offers the possibility of check which and how many “trackers” have been blocked on a particular site. In the name of transparency, iOS 15 introduces a similar report for applications as well (a similar function, called Privacy Dashboard, will also be available on Android 12). It can be accessed from the Privacy item of the Settings, and it will show this information:
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When and how many times apps access the microphone, the geolocation and other private information to which the user has granted access
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The web pages visited via the application’s internal browser (like links opened on Instagram without leaving the app)
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Third party domains contacted silently by the app, in order to understand with which services the application shares user data
Siri works on devices
Another important novelty concerns Siri, which on new operating systems will be able to process a subset of requests directly on the device, without sending the audio to Apple’s remote servers. The way the company of Cupertino handled recordings of requests to Siri in the past has been the subject of criticism and offered the side of the detractors of Apple’s privacy policy. This update also has the benefit of making Siri more responsive in everyday use. Among the requests that the voice assistant can process directly on the device there are commands for music playback, those for activating timers or alarms, starting a call to a contact, opening specific applications.
There is one though: the “on-site” voice recognition it is a high-intensity process, which therefore requires a powerful chip. As such, the feature will only be available on iPhones and iPads that have at least an A12 or higher chip. In other words:
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iPhone XS and XS Max or later
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iPad Mini 5th generation or later
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iPad Air 2019 or newer
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iPad 2020 8th generation or later
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A kind of VPN
More privacy-related options will arrive on iOS 15, iPadOS 15 or macOS Monterey only as part of the new iCloud + service, which is the name Apple has given to all paid versions of iCloud. The prices are the same that are now paid on the basis of the additional storage space, therefore 99 cents for 50 Gb, 2.99 euros for 200 or 9.99 euros for 2 Tb; alternatively, iCloud + will be included in Apple One, which combines various Apple services in a single subscription.
iCloud + will introduce a function called Private Relay, with which it will be possible to surf anonymously and encrypted: when the service is activated, the address of the requested site is encrypted, the IP address passes from a first Apple server, which replaces it with another address from which the geographical area of the user can be derived, but not his actual position; from here the request passes to a second “relay server” which decrypts the requested address and routes the visit to the corresponding site. It is a system that could resemble a VPN, but in fact it is not, as explained by Apple: this is because while the companies that manage the VPN servers are able to read user information before obfuscating it, with the double system private relay no one in the middle between the user and the site can rebuild the original encrypted request, not even Apple. Furthermore, unlike a VPN, the Private Relay function shouldn’t slow down browsing and is compatible with apps such as Netflix or Prime Video, which usually crash when they notice a VPN is being used.
With iCloud + it will also be possible to generate random emails for subscribing to Web services. All emails can always be kept under control on iCloud, Mail or Safari, and will direct all messages to the user’s main email, without third parties being able to view or record it. Finally, the other novelty concerns the videos of the security cameras compatible with the HomeKit secure videos: with iCloud + the footage will be saved in an end-to-end encrypted manner and will not contribute to the consumption of the storage space of the plan chosen by the user.
When do the new features arrive?
The new privacy features will be part of the iOS 15 per iPhone (compatible with all smartphones running iOS 14), iPadOS 15, WatchOS 8 and Monterey, all coming this fall. Two of these, namely the app privacy report in the settings and Hide my email, will arrive in the following months, with a major update of the various operating systems.
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