A new report suggests that Apple is engaged in an internal debate about the appropriate boundary between privacy and security, even as it continues its public fight against federal government efforts aimed at forcing the company to break into its encrypted products.
According to four former employees who spoke with Reuters, the issue is directed by three “privacy czars” who develop standards used by the company. Those include Jane Horvath, the company’s former global privacy counsel; Guy “Bud” Tribble, a member of the original Macintosh team; and Erik Neuenschwande, who scrutinizes code developed by the company’s engineers to ensure compliance with standards.
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“Debates over new uses of data at Apple typically take at least a month and have dragged on for more than a year,” a former employee told Reuters. They said the company’s practices mean it does a better job of protecting customer privacy than tech giants like Facebook, Google, or Twitter. While those companies also have review processes in place, they are also guided more largely by Federal Trade Commission regulations.
But that strict process has cost Apple advertising revenue, the former employees said, in the form of iAd, a service that sought to creating targeted advertisements by collecting data from users who used Apple iTunes. The company limited data that the service was allowed to collect to only the total number of users who had viewed an ad over it.
“It was so watered down, it wasn’t even useful,” one of the former employees said.
The company also engages in other unusual practices that are more well-known. Those include isolating types of data so they cannot be used to form profiles on customers, and keeping customer data on user devices rather than in the cloud.
Apple CEO Tim Cook explained some of the principles behind the standards in a letter to customers last month.
“Smartphones, led by iPhone, have become an essential part of our lives. People use them to store an incredible amount of personal information, from our private conversations to our photos, our music, our notes, our calendars and contacts, our financial information and health data, even where we have been and where we are going,” Cook wrote.
“All that information needs to be protected from hackers and criminals who want to access it, steal it, and use it without our knowledge or permission. Customers expect Apple and other technology companies to do everything in our power to protect their personal information, and at Apple we are deeply committed to safeguarding their data,” Cook added.
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He concluded, “Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us.”
