Apple hasn’t changed its privacy policy in over a year – but on Tuesday morning the company updated its website with a fresh explanation of what that policy means, product by product, service by service.
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“You don’t have to sign in to use Maps, and it only knows you by a random identifier that resets itself frequently as you use the app. Maps is also engineered to separate the data about your trips… into segments, to keep Apple or anyone else from putting together a complete picture of your travels”. “App slicing is now unavailable for iOS 9 apps due to an issue affecting iCloud backups created from iOS 9 where a few apps from the App Store would only restore to the same model of iOS device”, Apple wrote in a Developer blog post.
If you are an Apple Watch wearer, Power is a really convenient app to have for checking your iPhone’s battery.
Apple is also expected to offer a Google Street View-like feature of its own soon, as company-branded vans and cars equipped with 3D camera gear used for mapping recently roamed the streets of the US and the United Kingdom It may take a while to catch up to Google in terms of Street View maps, but Apple nonetheless seems to be making notable progress with its Apple Maps. Apple’s revamped privacy website addresses new features in iOS 9 like the News app, which watches what users read in order to recommend stories and sell targeted ads.
“Since our business doesn’t depend on advertising, we have no interest in doing this – and we couldn’t even if we wanted to…” A “Manage Your Privacy” section details how to adjust your exposure to data sharing and any potential scams, and there is also a section dedicated to explaining how Apple works with governments, though that remains largely unchanged from a previous update in 2014.
“Encryption protects trillions of online transactions every day. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be”. It turns your data into indecipherable text that can only be read by the right key…
“Apple does not know what devices you’re controlling, or how and when you’re using them“. The Device Account Number is encrypted and “walled off from your iOS device and Apple Watch, is never stored on Apple Pay servers, and is never backed up to iCloud“, according to information on the company’s privacy site.
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His research has found privacy does matter to users, even if they often feel resigned to being tracked anyway.
