If Facebook made a mixed reality headset packed with a dozen cameras that not only scanned your living room, but also your eyeballs, would you wear it?
If Amazon.com Inc made a journaling app that prompted you daily to give behavioral data, would you dish?
If Google made a watch that asked you to log the peaks and troughs of your moods to build a picture of your mental health, would you give that information away?
Illustration: Yusha
If you answered “no” to these questions, you have also highlighted the unique position Apple Inc has carved out for itself. It has spent the past decade building a reputation for protecting its customers’ privacy — and it is increasingly putting that to the test.
At its World Wide Developers Conference last week, the company announced new products that would process more personal information about consumers than ever before, from retinal scans to mental health data.
The company’s new Journal app, which is to come out in September, prompts users to write about their experiences throughout the day based on where they have been, what music they have listened to and what exercise they might have done.
A new feature in Apple’s Health app encourages people to log their daily emotions on their iPhone or Apple Watch. The goal is to “enable users … to better care for their mental health.”
That, along with all the private footage processed on the company’s new headset, is an extraordinary level of personal data to trust a single tech company with.
However, privacy advocates last week were like mimes in a library — completely silent. No complaints. That is because Apple, with its estimated 2 billion active devices across the world, has built some of the highest levels of consumer trust in the tech industry, and there seems little to worry about.
The company is so well respected for its approach to data protection that Anthropic, one of the world’s most cutting-edge artificial intelligence companies, borrowed text from Apple’s Terms of Service to morally steer its own “ethical” competitor to ChatGPT.
Five years ago, at the height of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, the idea of selling a computer that scanned your retinas, or an app that tracked your mental health, would have seemed deeply invasive.
However, Apple can pitch such services, which need that data to become more personalized, because the company does not collect it or repackage it for advertisers, the longstanding business model for social media and online search firms.
Apple can maintain its reputation for privacy because it is a devices company, meaning its apps process information on devices themselves, rather than on servers in the cloud. An array of increasingly powerful proprietary chips, like the R1 that powers the sensors and cameras in the new Vision Pro headset, make that possible.
Apple has been upgrading Siri to take more commands offline, utilizing its Neural Engine in iPhones and iPads with the A12 Bionic chip or later versions. In contrast, Amazon’s Alexa only works when its devices are connected to the Internet.
The optical data that Apple collects through the Vision Pro is encrypted, stays on the headset and is not shared with Apple or with third-party apps and Web sites, the company said last week.
The same goes for the reams of new behavioral data that its Health and new Journal app would be collecting.
In the company’s conference keynote video, Apple emphasized its commitment to user privacy more than usual, flashing an animation on the screen of the Apple logo turning into a padlock with a satisfying “clunk” noise several times throughout the presentation.
It seemed as though Apple’s leadership knew that the tradeoff for processing more personal data was reinforcing its privacy and security standards.
To that end, the company announced rules for developers, making it harder for them to do device fingerprinting for targeted advertising purposes, and which also increases the amount of work they must do to show users how they are collecting their data.
There is just one oddity in all this, which did not get any mention at the conference: Apple’s quiet efforts to build a bigger targeted advertising business.
Apple puts display ads on its App Store and also on its News and Stocks apps, and the company is planning to expand those ads to other pages on the App Store.
Apple’s advertising unit has been growing and gaining more internal clout.
Bloomberg last year reported that Apple is planning to grow its annual ad revenue from US$4 billion to the double-digit billions over the next few years.
Research group Evercore ISI estimates that revenue could hit US$30 billion over the next three to four years.
The data that Apple uses for targeted advertising is processed by the company and not shared with third parties —which is what Facebook does — but that personal information is still flying around an enormous internal ecosystem.
Although the company has said that three-quarters of its mobile users have personalized ads turned off, that still leaves hundreds of millions of others whose personal details are being used by Apple to show them ads in the App Store. They are likely to see such advertisement more as the company’s ad business grows.
For now, Apple seems to be striking a workable balance between processing much more personal data and using it within its own walled garden.
However, as its ad business grows, and it invites more third-party developers onto the Vision Pro platform, Apple is likely to be under greater pressure to keep that balance in check. It might get harder too.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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