Apple has had a busy few weeks with the release of a ton of new products. The iPhone XS, XS Max, XR and the Apple Watch 4 were all rolled out at the same time and have a lot of cool features, taking technology and innovation to a whole new level. It’s awesome that we are able to do things like ask Siri what the weather will be like on the iPhones, track our heart rate on the Apple Watch 4, and process transactions with Apple Pay.
But there’s one glaring problem. It’s really convenient to be able to autofill our information when shopping online, but how much of the information that we share is stored and who exactly has access to it? Are we trading our safety for convenience?
Apple has been drilling it into us – pretty much the entire time that they’ve been around – that they are huge on privacy. They’ve convinced us that user data and sensitive information is their number one priority. They say that most of the data stays on our mobile devices instead of being collected on their servers and can only be accessed by the passcodes that we create.
Okay, but what about outside parties? Sure, they don’t sell our private information, but some of our info does get seen. When we send out that chocolate chip cookie recipe request to Siri, it goes to Apple and no one else, but they did let advertisers check out our search history from places like the app store so they can better market something to us. This was how it worked until recently.
With iOS 12, we know more about what Apple is doing. A new addition to the iTunes Store & Privacy policy says that the number of phone calls and emails that users receive will create a “device trust score” for making purchases, and that the information will only be stored for a fixed time on Apple’s servers.
This score will be used to determine whether or not a purchase was true or if it’s a fraud. While we could understand that this information could be collected from phones, Apple says this applies to our Apple TVs as well. Apple doesn’t go into detail about what other “information on how you use your device” will be used.
