Privacy-Reviewing Apple’s Privacy Policy
As the World’s first trillion-dollar company, it is safe to say that Apple is a household brand. Quite literally, in most households at least one person will own an Apple product. I, for example, am writing this very blogpost with the help of my trusty MacBook. Because so many people use Apple products, and are thereby subject to Apple’s policies and guidelines, I thought it would be especially interesting to examine Apple’s privacy policy in this blogpost.
In the very first paragraph of Apple’s privacy policy, it is stated that “You may be asked to provide personal information anytime you are in contact with Apple or an Apple affiliated company.” Even though we probably all know this, it’s made clear from the get-go that Apple and its affiliates will have access to our personal information. In the same paragraph they explain how there is of course an option to opt out of sharing personal information; this may, however, mean that certain services provided by Apple will no longer be available to you. In a way I definitely understand that Apple is providing a service and that one thing they expect in return for that service is our date, but it still seems wrong to me that they threaten “not to provide certain services” if we were to not grant them access to that data. The data collected is for example name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, device identifiers, IP address, location information, credit card information and profile information.
The privacy policy then goes on to discuss how Apple uses our data. According to the policy, Apple uses our data to keep us up to date on new Apple products and updates, for anti-fraud purposes, to verify our identity, to send information about purchases, etc. Our information can also be used to verify our age in order to determine appropriate services or for internal purposes, like product development and auditing. As you can see, some of the things our data is used for are relatively self-explanatory, while others such as “internal purposes” are far removed and hard to grasp for us. This is something I’ve noticed throughout the entire privacy policy: much of it is written in a way that doesn’t necessarily make sense to the average consumer. Oftentimes, the sentences are ambiguous and difficult to decipher, making the entire privacy policy far removed from the reader.
Another large part of the Privacy statement is about cookies. Something I found very interesting is that information collected by cookies and other technologies are not even treated as personal information. Cookies also help us a great deal, since they remember personal information such as passwords when we are using websites and internet services. One part of the privacy policy I didn’t really understand was: “You have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information. Apple does not sell your personal information.” This basically says that we can chose to not have our personal information sold, but then it goes on to say Apple doesn’t even sell our personal information.
I decided to interview my roommate and ask him about some of the topics I talked about.
I figured that he, like most people, had never read a privacy policy in full. I also agree with him that its unrealistic to expect these big scale companies not to have access to our personal information in one way or another. I then asked him about third parties having access to our data and he said he thought it was ok, since it was tied to the service Apples is providing us. He also said that these third parties probably don’t really care about us or what we do, but rather see us as data points in a big net of information.
I feel like we all know a lot of what was said in the privacy statement, maybe not the details but definitely the general idea. I believe most people have probably never read the privacy statement, so it was interesting to actually read an entire privacy policy and I now have a better idea of what kind of information exactly is being collected. Thinking back on the article “Why the First Amendment Doesn’t Really Apply to Social Media” written by Stephany Bai, I can definitely see how with all the information these tech giants have on us it might not actually seem like we’re free or able to exercise our freedom of speech due to their influence. It was informational, but a large portion was phrased in a way that made it seem like Apple didn’t really want me to understand what they were saying. Especially the one statement about selling our information makes no sense to me and I feel that if Apple actually wanted their users to understand the privacy policy they would phrase it in a different way.
Sources:
Apple Privacy Policy: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
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