What you need to know
- Craig Federighi sat down with Fast Company to talk about privacy after his WWDC keynote.
- The executive talked about Apple's vision for privacy going forward.
- He also touched on some of the new features in iOS 14.
Craig Federighi talked a lot about new privacy features across all of Apple's software updates this year. To bring some context to what he and Apple are thinking about when they build these features, the executive sat down (virtually) with Fast Company to talk about what was just announced.
Federighi started off by saying that one of Apple's greatest contributions to humanity will be their ability to show that great user experiences don't have to come at the cost of privacy.
"We hope to build a lot of great products that bring customers a lot of joy every year ... But in the fullness of time, in the scope of hundreds of years from now, I think the place where I hope people can look back and talk about the places where Apple made a huge contribution to humanity is in helping people see the way of taking advantage of this great technology without the false tradeoff of giving up their privacy to do it."
One of the new privacy features in iOS notifies users if an app is accessing the camera or the microphone. Federighi says that he has received many emails from customers worried that an app was watching or hearing them, and while that is not the case, he says that the feature exists to provide extra assurance of that fact.
"Now, in many cases, this, in fact, was not happening ... We know it was not happening. But they believe it is. And so, providing that peace of mind through a recording indicator that will always let you know whether an app, at that moment, is accessing your camera or accessing your microphone is important."
Federighi says that Apple, as a company, strives to obtain as little information about their customers as possible. Without the data existing in the first place, Federighi says, the data can't be compromised.
"We believe Apple should have as little data about our customers as possible ... And so we seek to gather as little data as possible to deliver (services), because we believe the mass centralization of data is inherently a risk to customer privacy. And so data we don't have, data that no one else has, is data that can't be breached or data that can't be misused."
You can read the full interview at Fast Company.
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