Following up a bit more on this, Apple on Tuesday updated its privacy policy web site, detailing items like its policy on encryption and changes related to iOS 9, such as the way it targets stories and advertising in its News app.
“We knew coming in that building a personalized news product could be very sensitive — and the first thing we thought about was we really don’t want to associate news with your personal Apple account,” Apple’s senior director of global privacy, Jane Horvath, said in an interview with the Washington Post.
The updated site explains that while the News app collects data on a user’s reading habits, the user is not tracked by their Apple ID, only a unique identifier found within the New app. Users can also choose to reset their News history.
Other changes to the language on the web site emphasize the impotance of the technology in protecting things like financial transactions and reiterate Apple’s claim that it can’t unlock iOS 8 or 9 for other parties, a point that has generated anger from some in government. Public figures such as FBI director James Comey have claimed that such intense levels of encryption interfere with law enforcement, and argued for the creation of backdoors, despite concerns those same holes could be used by hackers and other malicious groups.
The rest of the site generally attempts to distinguish Apple’s approach from that of Google and Facebook, which are largely advertiser-driven and regularly track users and their browsing/reading habits. The site details that because Apple relies on hardware sales, the company has been able to limit and anonymize tracking in many cases.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via AppleInsider and the Washington Post