Apple is one of nine different companies to be given the full five stars in this year’s “Who Has Your Back?” report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
“This is Apple’s fifth year in the report, and it has adopted every best practice we’ve identified as part of this report,” the digital advocates group’s report reads. “We commend Apple for its strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.”
Apple is praised for requiring a warrant before handing over content to law enforcement, publishing a yearly transparency report, informing users about government data demands, disclosing its data retention policies and content removal request, and opposing software backdoors which can be used for government snooping.
Other companies given five out of five stars by the report include Adobe, Credo Mobile, Dropbox, Sonic, Wikimedia, WordPress, Wickr and Yahoo. In other ratings of note, AT&T and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp received one out of five stars, Google, Microsoft and Amazon received three stars, and Facebook and Twitter received four.
While Apple also received full marks in last year’s EFF report, for the previous three years it was awarded just one one star.
The turnaround coincides with Tim Cook’s push to make Apple a privacy-oriented company — epitomized by his memorable statement that “you are not our product,” referring to customer data.
Apple has also put its name to various campaigns protesting mass government surveillance. Yesterday, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described Apple’s approach to privacy as, “a good thing for privacy … a good thing for customers.” Long may it continue!
You can check out the EFF’s entire 2015 “Who Has Your Back?” report here.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
6 responses to “Apple given full marks in new data privacy report”
Guess that was before the devastating security failure that exposes all passwords to attack? If hackers get data passwords, credit card #’s how can Apple claim privacy?
Apple today is not private nor secure
Yes it is. You are describing a bug that Apple will fix. Look at the categories above and you will see that your comment has nothing to do with the ratings.
Follows Industry “Best practices” ..not so much. They are the only ones with “shared” permission app structure. That is a core ide. In order for Apple to mitigate the current security breach it will require extensive OS rewrite on bot IOS and OSX…so as of now Apple is not Private nor Secure
A bug?…its a freaking enormous bug in fact worst security exploit I ever saw
Hard core apple basher much? Yes the flaw is there, but not easy to exploit, obviously, or it would have been found sooner. However while your bashing apple you might want to think of the 600 Million android phones with a serious security flaw in their keyboards that make it quite easy to steal data and actually install backdoor apps on those phones.
Bottom line is security will always be an arms race. For every hole plugged another will be found and then plugged. Apple as a company however has a better track record at fixing security problems than most others because they can control everything from the ground up.
However as the previous poster pointed out this article isn’t about the security of their operating systems. This article is about how they, as a company, handle user data and privacy. Those are two very different issues. Apple currently does have some of the best privacy practices from a users point of view.
There have been many articles written about this. One of the most telling things is the fact that, if Apple wished, they could make much MUCH more money with iAd than they do. They don’t get as much revenue or interest in it because they refuse to give advertisers as much user data as other companies such as Google will.
If Apple was a typical company only interested in the bottom line they’d grab the cash and not care about user privacy. But they’re not a typical company. And they’re in the enviable position of being the most valuable company in human history so they can afford to turn their back on that revenue for the sake of values they hold to be important.
OMG they only value Apple has is “margins and Profits” you blindly follow and spend you hard earned dollars on a company that wants nothing more than to earn abusive profits on those that buy their wares. Like at the cheapest band $2 to make $49 to buy for a $10 max retail item. Except Apple… fools, their OSs are at the deepest level INSECURE. shows they don’t care about the consumer at all.
I blindly follow no one. I look, investigate and make decisions based on my own views of what is important. I buy Apple for a few simple and practical reasons.
1) Their products hold their value longer and better than most other tech products. This is in part due to their construction and, like every other value assigned by humans, on their premium status. The status isn’t why I buy the fact that they hold value is.
2) Their products do what I want, what I need, and do it simply easily and for the most part effortlessly. I want my phone to work. I don’t want to spend lots of time playing with tons of settings and tweaking this and that. If I had valued that I would have more than likely chosen android before I bought my first smartphone.
3) Be it with their laptops and especially iOS mobile devices security was a huge selling point for me. Android has an abysmal record on this. This isn’t a slam on android. It has this flaw for the same reasons Windows did. It’s more open and it has a larger install base. These have their pluses, of course. But they also make it a dream for hackers. Again I wanted a phone i didn’t have to worry as much, again as much because there will always be security flaws on any operating system, about those things. I wanted a phone to just work
4) Apple as a company makes its money to provide the services I use from the hardware they sell. They’re not gathering tons of data about me to target me with advertising. Google does. I want as little to do with google as possible. For me, as a consumer, this was a factor. It’s not for everyone. But for me the fact that while yes, I do pay more for a product but it means that I’ve paid for the product and I am not being turned into the product through targeted advertising. I personally don’t want advertisers and marketers tracking my location, my searches, my contacts, my friends, etc for any reason. Apple doesn’t do this. Google does. Google always will because that’s it’s entire business model.
An Apple laptop for instance will cost more, but you get a lot of preinstalled and useful software with it. The operating system will be updated every year for free for at least 4-5 years after that. Windows can’t say that. Android phones are lucky if they ever get any updates because of the fragmented nature between Google developing it and manufacturers pushing it out to phones. They have a vested interest in not moving them out much because they want people to upgrade and get new phones. iOS 9 has been announced and it’s going to support iPads all the way back to the iPad 2. and iPhones all the way back to the 4s. That’s a 4 year old phone still getting the latest OS update. Android can’t touch that.
These are why people buy Apple. These are also why Apple products cost more. Years of continuing development and updating costs money. With Apple you pay once, upfront and in the open. With Google you pay with your data and your privacy for ever.