Buried in the new Apple Iphone and Apple TV privacy policy is an
unannounced program that uses “information about how you use your
device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you
send and receive…to compute a device trust score when you attempt a
purchase.”
The measure is billed as an anti-fraud system and Apple claims that its
surveillance is “designed so Apple cannot learn the real values on your
device.”
Though Apple doesn’t provide any details on how this works, the company
has previously deployed a privacy measure called “differential privacy”
that allows for some aggregate data-gathering and analysis that
theoretically protects the subjects’ privacy – however, Apple’s
differential privacy implementation was fatally flawed,
a fact that was slow to come to light in part because of the company’s
notorious secrecy and its hostility to independent repair and
unauthorized analysis of its security measures.
Apple’s locked-down systems are often a useful line of defense against fraud, theft and surveillance – but as the company’s record in China shows,
this control is a dual-edged sword. By locking its Iphones to its App
Store, and then capitulating to the Chinese government by banning secure
VPNs from the Chinese App Store, Apple has made Chinese mass
surveillance and retaliation against political dissidents much easier,
and made evading surveillance and retaliation much harder.
Apple’s privacy policy also adds that the Trust Scores “are stored for a
fixed time on our servers.” However, this fixed time is not defined,
nor are there any promises that Apple won’t change the duration in
future – indeed, as the Chinese experience has shown, states have
enormous influence over how technology is designed and deployed.
amusedAnarchist 