Video: Can Apple cure us of smartphone addiction?
The greatest commercial in Apple[1] history -- perhaps all history -- did not show an Apple product. The "1984" spot heralded the Macintosh as a tool to smash a society that, per its Orwellian inspiration, dominated by a Big Brother[2], was constantly surveilling the populace. These days, comprehensive tracking of activity comes from not (just) the government, but any number of companies that seek to target consumers for ads and offers.
Read also: Apple privacy update: Now it's easier to download all your data[3]
At WWDC 2018[4], Apple continued to emphasize that it values privacy over profit. Even before it delved into new Safari-based efforts to counter tracking efforts, the company took advantage of the keynote's imposing background screen to drive home that it puts customers at the center of everything. That's but one way to drive home the message that Apple is not conflicted when it comes to sharing personal data. That was just a warmup to a number of browsing features designed to hide Like and Share buttons that can drive user tracking and masking of identifying fingerprinting
But, like many companies, Apple has multiple constituencies. And despite the public attention it receives, WWDC is a time to communicate with developers, not consumers. And despite its stance, there's evidence that Apple's stance on privacy is not getting through, at least not in a way that engenders more trust[5] than consumers have in Amazon and -- gasp -- Google. As I recently wrote, there is a long history of measures[6] that Google has pursued to build trust among consumers despite its business model.
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