Software
Apple's latest Over Sharing ad tells us that it really wants to be seen as a privacy defender.
A guy cries in a bus full of people that he's been searching eight pages for divorce lawyers. A woman blithely advises her to log in details to strangers in a movie theater. A couple of colleagues speak loudly about a nearby colleague, and a woman uses a megaphone to give her credit card details to everyone in the earshot.
Some of them are humiliating, others are possible privacy infringements, but they are among the examples in Apple's latest Content Sharing ad, which re-emphasizes the company's focus — or at least its image — on protecting online privacy. The ad tagline, seen at the end, reads, Some stuff shouldn't be revealed. The iPhone helps to keep it that way.
It doesn't list any of its tech competitors who have made headlines about infringements, large-scale hacks, and even dubious privacy practices, but it's obvious who Apple is beckoning.
And it's far from the first time that Apple has publicly declared itself a pioneer in privacy. Its What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone billboard welcomed visitors to CES in 2019, and its "Privacy Matters" ad (If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on) followed a few months after an unfortunate FaceTime bug that allowed people to listen to iPhone video calls.
Last year's keynote, CEO Tim Cook and other Apple executives hammered away at the idea that all of Apple's services — its credit card, news service, and so on — were "designed to keep personal information private and safe. And, of course, Apple declined the FBI's offer to help unlock a suspect's iPhone in a 2016 San Bernardino shooting, because we thought it was wrong and would be illegal.
But it wasn't without its own share of security issues; in addition to the FaceTime bug, Apple was forced to apologize last August for secretly making human contractors listen to recordings of Siri's digital assistant on the iPhone.
Even, the Over Sharing ad reminds us how much of our digital lives and knowledge can be made public, or at least readily accessible to malicious actors, if we — and the technologies we rely on — are not vigilant about what we share and how we share.
