Apple backs up privacy chest-beating with critical new feature

Mike Feibus
Updated

No tech company has been louder lately about claiming to care more for your online privacy than Apple. And at the company’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference Monday in San Jose, executives continued to beat the privacy drum loudly.

“At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told WWDC attendees, pulling out the go-to mantra CEO Tim Cook and other Apple execs have been reciting for years.

Of course, Apple isn’t the only online company to hop on the privacy bandwagon. Indeed, if there was a theme to this spring’s developer conference season, it was that:

  • “Privacy is a human right,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, once again told attendees at the cloud company’s annual Build conference May 6.

  • “Privacy must be equally available to everyone in the world,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a day later in a New York Times op-ed piece to help kick off the company’s I/O conference.

  • “The future is private,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the crowd at Facebook’s F8 developer gathering in late April, which seemed to be a tacit acknowledgment that, for now at least on Facebook, the present is not.

You’d have good cause to challenge whether Apple is deserving of the privacy crown it’s bestowed upon itself. Just last month, for example, a Washington Post investigation revealed that while Apple may take pains not to track you, the apps you download from their App Store don’t hesitate – relaying location, IP address and personal identifiers like name and email address at an astounding rate of 1.5 GB per month.

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But know this: Apple showed at an otherwise mundane, incremental WWDC that it’s practicing what it’s been preaching, with strong new privacy features woven into the portfolio, everywhere from the Mac to the Apple Watch. Consider:

Apple Watch. An aural health monitor that listens for dangerously high noise levels – without recording anything,

Maps. A long-overdue update, which will share data, if you choose – but the default is to keep your locations, searches and destinations private,

iOS 13. Anti-tracking protection that keeps snoops from monitoring your location, shopping preferences and other information from your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, and

HomeKit Secure Video. It analyzes security camera data locally, sending much less private information to the cloud.

One new feature in particular really starts to set Apple’s privacy protections apart from the pack. It’s called Sign in with Apple.

At first blush, Sign in With Apple sounds much the same as Sign in With Google or Sign in With Facebook: a convenience that takes the drudgery out of setting up yet another new login, in return for the increasingly unpalatable tradeoff of opening yet another window into your online soul.

But it’s not. For starters, Apple pledges to not track you with Sign in With Apple. More than that, though, the feature will generate a random email address for each login. You’ll receive emails from the sites you sign up for, of course. But the sites don’t know your real address.

That’s huge because it eases myriad privacy and security problems. See, your email address serves as a critical link between what different databases know about you. Without a common email address, aggregators may not be able to connect, for example, your internet searches from one database to your credit card purchases from another.

It also neutralizes a powerful hacker tool. Hackers assume that some of us – and you know who you are – use the same email address and password for many of the sites we frequent. That’s dangerous because once they snag your information from one, they start poking around on other sites to see if they can break into accounts with more valuable personal assets, like utilities, banking and cellular carrier websites.

With unique email addresses for every account, inevitable security breaches won’t give cyberthieves much ammunition to help them break into other parts of your life. So hackers wouldn’t get very far, for example, if they made their way into Facebook’s store of hundreds of millions of unencrypted logins, because you use the address they snagged, 4795659@privaterelay.appleid.com, to log into Facebook – and nothing else.

Setting up unique email addresses is something I’ve done – and have advocated – for years. For Apple to save the time and effort by doing it for you breaks new ground.

Because while privacy may, in fact, be a fundamental human right, as Apple execs are wont to say, having a company like Apple do the dirty work to help secure that right for you is truly a privilege.

Mike Feibus is principal analyst at FeibusTech, a Scottsdale, Ariz., market strategy and analysis firm focusing on mobile ecosystems and client technologies. Reach him at mikef@feibustech.com. Follow him on Twitter @MikeFeibus.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Apple backs up privacy chest-beating with critical new feature