At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference for 2021, the company announced major privacy features coming to its operating systems like iOS 15 and iPadOS 15. Here is what Apple users can expect.
iOS 15 Privacy Features
- App Privacy Report: With App Privacy Report, users can see how often each app has used the permission they’ve previously granted to access their location, photos, camera, microphone, and contacts during the past seven days.
- Siri Audio Processing: With on-device speech recognition, the audio of users’ requests is processed right on their iPhone or iPad by default. This addresses one of the biggest privacy concerns for voice assistants, which is unwanted audio recording.
- Safari Private Relay: Private Relay ensures all traffic leaving a user’s device from Safari is encrypted, so no one between the user and the website they are visiting can access and read it, not even Apple or the user’s network provider. All the user’s requests are then sent through two separate internet relays.*
- Hide My Email: Built directly into Safari, iCloud settings, and Mail, Hide My Email also enables users to create and delete as many addresses as needed at any time, helping give users control of who is able to contact them.*
- HomeKit Secure Video: Apple users can connect more cameras in the Home app, while maintaining its end-to-end encrypted storage for video footage.*
*These features are coming to Apple users in the form of iCloud+. It’s not a new service however; they’re included in a regular iCloud subscription, and the prices haven’t changed.
Andrew:
Those two ‘phhht’ sounds you might have heard during the privacy presentation during WWDC were two different groups of people pooping their pants.
The first were advertisers during the App Privacy Report and the Hide My Email segments. If anyone were so inclined as to let an app track them, this report will likely make them disallow tracking across the board. And what about that pixel-spotting/nixing capability built into Mail, eh?Methinks I also heard one high-pitched adolescent screech during that same segment rising out of Mountain View; that would have been Mark Zuckerberg. Fortunately, the Health App will be upgraded with trend monitoring for things like heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rates, which the Zuck might want to share with his doctors; and maybe even activate that fall detection option for those possible fainting spells when he gets those upcoming quarterlies on ad revenues. (And they thought that opting in for app tracking was bad!)
The second group of panty-poopers were those spooks working under authoritarian regimes tasked with tracking their citizenry, dissidents and persons of interests alike, when they heard about Safari Private Relay (those windows flying open may have given away their locations, for anyone looking). One wonders if, perchance, certain countries (not mentioning any by name like TURKEYCHINAIRANPUTINSPLAYGROUNDakaRUSSIAJUSTSAYING) might just ban Safari as a browser. It will be informative to watch this space, because if no one raises a stink about this feature, it would suggest that effective countermeasures are already in place, and over-match this consumer-level privacy feature, at least in those countries that believe privacy is best defined by the state.
Yep. There be plenty people pooping their panties today, and nary a sweet-smelling tuchus amongst the lot of ‘em.