Apple WWDC Privacy Update

20 minute read | Last updated 4-Jun-2019 |  Apple

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Bad Robot Transcript

Morning, everybody. How you doing today in this episode of the show. We’re going to recap some of Apple’s latest privacy announcements. So this week in California Apple has pulled in thousands of developers worth annual worldwide developer conference over the course of a few days at developers get to talk to Apple software engineers and platform Engineers directly as they give out a series of talks to explain how the software development kids and various features within the operating systems work as part of its conference.

They always have an opening keynote that happened yesterday with a host of Apple leaders on stage talking about the upcoming new versions of Mac OS of iOS of TV OS of watch it and the new iPad OS which is basically an iPad only for core subset of iOS, so we get all these cool features to hear about what’s coming out in the fall and developers get to start playing with these features now so that by the time when we get the new OS on our devices, there are apps ready to go to leverage these features and time and time again Apple hits on a key message of Privacy that’s what I wanted to reach out for you today.

See Apple’s model is very different than Facebook’s or Google’s or even something like Twitter or any of the other social networks are big media Giants. I’m Apple makes money selling devices and they firmly seem to believe in their privacy message, which is fantastic. But let’s be cynical for a minute.

Even if they don’t this is how they make money. They make money by selling us more devices. I’m selling us IMAX telling us everything they can which is great because their model is not around selling our data and they’re reinforcing that at time and time again, in fact years Craig federighi talkin about that very thing as part of the Apple keynote.

So you can see from that short clip that on the slide. They’ve called out a number of features. They’ve built in to the devices and into the software in order to respect privacy. What are the key things is that data is processed locally for machine learning models have anything that is sent to the cloud is sent to your iCloud account and which has limited access and limited has a significant set a restrictions around it.

And which is something is going to be more more critical to understand moving for but Craig goes on further to talk about I’m specifically around location privacy. Let’s see what he has to say about that. This is a great announcement at the switching to allowing apps to use your location just want is critical.

We’ve all had those apps really similarly in Mobile Safari when you’re maybe looking for a store and it’s like what we want to use your current location and it won’t let you type in a postal code or an address and doing a one-time Grant is really really critical. Also ceiling off.

Loophole around pinging Wi-Fi networks and pinion Bluetooth networks and then comparing that to a back-end database that is a really important move towards privacy the great to see these kind of initiatives for Apple, but they wouldn’t even one step further at least in the keynote. I’m sure they went several steps further as we’ll find out over the next few days when they talk more about the changes upcoming to Safari but here’s an interesting new announcement.

Now that’s absolutely huge. We’ve all seen the proliferation of all these sign up account that they sign in with your Google account sign in with your Twitter account sign in with your Facebook account. And theoretically we have some controls in those instances when you’re signing up with Facebook. You can actually go in and say don’t grab these permissions but nine times out of 10 or probably ninety-nine times out of a hundred those apps and then fail and won’t allow you to actually create an account because you didn’t give them all the information they requested now the documentation is available for signing with apple, and there’s a lot of requirements of the developers side to implement some pretty strong Auntie tracking and privacy protections and that’s a really positive thing.

It goes even further though, and this is a really really clever addition to the feature but not for the reason they stayed on stage. So this concept of a random address that forwards unique address. It’s really really interesting because what it does is it reduces the blast radius of you signing up for new accounts because every time you sign up for new account using this method Apple actually generate a brand new unique random private ID to forward to your account.

So for every app that you signed up using this method you’re going to get a unique email address. Now that’s been a long time who knows people of work around this and done it themselves, but that’s been a gap because while you’re supposed to use a different password for every site, you’re always using the same email.

This will help you reduce that even further that the potential risk, but there is a flip side risk on your part because when you get that email in your inbox, you’re going to have to reply a house that email and hide your initial am your real address. Just something to look out for now.

The good news here. Is that most apps send. What information to and from a no reply address to have to take steps to contact them? Anyway, you seem to make sure that use the same Shadow address here but is a fantastic way to protect your privacy is another step forward.

This is a great Phim the keno does that every chance? They have the kind of hit. Hey, we’re doing Step 2. We’re taking steps were making developers take steps to protect your privacy. And that’s a really really positive thing. Now I mentioned before how apple has a tendency to push for on device processing.

This is part of the reason why Siri is not nearly as good as OK Google or Alexa is because all the processing in the model is done other devices. So when they trade new models, they pushed by they have to push updates down to the devices and fire system updates in order to get better Siri understanding and the funny thing is is in my experience series actually really good at understanding me.

It’s the back in searches that really suck. You see this most commonly an apple music if you ask for a specific album by specific artist Siri types it out correctly, but then it won’t actually find the thing that it knows you’re looking. So there’s definitely a some gaps here and there is a lack of quality compared to some competitors, but that’s the trade-off for privacy because on device processing means that everything stays here and at worst is pushed up to my iCloud account, which is actually encrypted with my credentials as well.

And Apple has severe restrictions around how they can access that account. But here’s a new feature. They’ve announced that follows this model and you can see from the illustration in the key know why this is so important. That reinforces that Phim again of on device processing and backing it up into your iCloud account, which is locked down this again great moves for privacy, but it highlights how critical it is to understand the access your iCloud account and to keep iCloud secure.

So using a two-factor authentication using a strong password or passphrase absolutely critical movie for because all your Apple data is being backed up into that account and there was one last announcement that caught my eye and a bunch of people reached out have to ask if this one actually goes against what they’ve announcer Brown privacy.

This is around of new find my feeder. They merge find my friends and find my device was called find my iPhone, but it’s not all your devices into one app and they simply call it find my guess what Craig has to say about that. So it’s not that amazing that is an end-to-end encrypted in Anonymous.

That’s the only way you could reasonably build this feature. So interesting enough find my eye has always been available for mobile devices, right? So this is constantly paying you back when it’s online to Apple to say hey, this is where the device is located and I can go into my iCloud account and access it trade it in your iPhone or sent it to app for recycling one of the steps.

They always ask you to do is to turn off find my phone and the reason being is because you are have to be authenticated on the device actually disabled that because otherwise it won’t work as a security feature as plan. Right if anybody could turn it off but the downside is is that it’s either off or it’s on there’s no in-between.

Now with the new version you’re going to have your device has even if they’re not connected to Wi-Fi or not connected to the cellular network. They’re going to be picking out using Bluetooth beacons that Bluetooth beacons is a whole nother episode at but the interesting thing here is It’s going to be in the end encrypted Anonymous which basically means they are going to be using Apple devices as a internet basically, right? This is end-to-end encrypted means that you are not going to have any risk from identification as your Mac pings nearby phones are nearby pads to send it back to iCloud.

That’s a really solid design pattern of there is some exposure risk because your system is going to be constantly sending out a pig and a beacon and even though it’s encrypted in arm is that pattern might actually have some operational security concerns but not for 99.99% of the population.

This is a great way to close a loophole especially for MacBooks where they weren’t actually opting-in or they weren’t actually reported back because they had to be connected to Wi-Fi. So this covers it if somebody steals your MacBook if it’s anywhere near an iPhone with pretty much it always will be and it’s going to be able to Ping back and still Report its location at but without betraying at any of your privacy and it’s a really clever design.

Look forward to more details, but on the surface this looks like a really smart move. Its overall. There’s a lot of great announcements around privacy. I’m & on device processing and really that privacy by Design built-in other it like I said, there are some sacrifices apple is a massive company so they can take the hit of Siri not being quite as good as other competing things like Alexa and OK Google.

I am also the fact that they have on their custom Asics their custom A10 and a11 chips all over the place. So they’re in iPod or they’re in the homepod. Sorry there now in the new iPod there any or iPhones are in your iPad to get a ton of processing power locally to be able to pull this off but be banished from a privacy perspectives that your data is always staying on your device and if it’s not in your device and send to your own iCloud account not to a back-end massive service for Mining and your iCloud account is actual.

Restricted to you or your access. I’m in law enforcement upon a legal or judicial request. So I will look to the iCloud security paper that I believe Apple has around. I think it’s a dedicated iCloud one, but it might be part of their biggest Security Services. I’ll put that in the comments down below but that was a highlight of some of the great announcements from Apple.

Yes. I really like their their stuff. But because of this privacy first to take some sacrifice and functionality to gain that privacy. What about you? What do you think? Let me know. Hit me up online. I’m at Mark NCAA in the comments down below and as always by email me at Mark and the.

Ca hope, you’re set up for a fantastic day and we’ll see you on the next episode of the show. Morning, everybody. How you doing today in this episode of the show. We’re going to recap some of Apple’s latest privacy announcements. So this week in California Apple has pulled in thousands of developers worth annual worldwide developer conference over the course of a few days at developers get to talk to Apple software engineers and platform Engineers directly as they give out a series of talks to explain how the software development kids and various features within the operating systems work as part of its conference.

They always have an opening keynote that happened yesterday with a host of Apple leaders on stage talking about the upcoming new versions of Mac OS of iOS of TV OS of watch it and the new iPad OS which is basically an iPad only for core subset of iOS, so we get all these cool features to hear about what’s coming out in the fall and developers get to start playing with these features now so that by the time when we get the new OS on our devices, there are apps ready to go to leverage these features and time and time again Apple hits on a key message of Privacy that’s what I wanted to reach out for you today.

See Apple’s model is very different than Facebook’s or Google’s or even something like Twitter or any of the other social networks are big media Giants. I’m Apple makes money selling devices and they firmly seem to believe in their privacy message, which is fantastic. But let’s be cynical for a minute.

Even if they don’t this is how they make money. They make money by selling us more devices. I’m selling us IMAX telling us everything they can which is great because their model is not around selling our data and they’re reinforcing that at time and time again, in fact years Craig federighi talkin about that very thing as part of the Apple keynote.

So you can see from that short clip that on the slide. They’ve called out a number of features. They’ve built in to the devices and into the software in order to respect privacy. What are the key things is that data is processed locally for machine learning models have anything that is sent to the cloud is sent to your iCloud account and which has limited access and limited has a significant set a restrictions around it.

And which is something is going to be more more critical to understand moving for but Craig goes on further to talk about I’m specifically around location privacy. Let’s see what he has to say about that. This is a great announcement at the switching to allowing apps to use your location just want is critical.

We’ve all had those apps really similarly in Mobile Safari when you’re maybe looking for a store and it’s like what we want to use your current location and it won’t let you type in a postal code or an address and doing a one-time Grant is really really critical. Also ceiling off.

Loophole around pinging Wi-Fi networks and pinion Bluetooth networks and then comparing that to a back-end database that is a really important move towards privacy the great to see these kind of initiatives for Apple, but they wouldn’t even one step further at least in the keynote. I’m sure they went several steps further as we’ll find out over the next few days when they talk more about the changes upcoming to Safari but here’s an interesting new announcement.

Now that’s absolutely huge. We’ve all seen the proliferation of all these sign up account that they sign in with your Google account sign in with your Twitter account sign in with your Facebook account. And theoretically we have some controls in those instances when you’re signing up with Facebook. You can actually go in and say don’t grab these permissions but nine times out of 10 or probably ninety-nine times out of a hundred those apps and then fail and won’t allow you to actually create an account because you didn’t give them all the information they requested now the documentation is available for signing with apple, and there’s a lot of requirements of the developers side to implement some pretty strong Auntie tracking and privacy protections and that’s a really positive thing.

It goes even further though, and this is a really really clever addition to the feature but not for the reason they stayed on stage. So this concept of a random address that forwards unique address. It’s really really interesting because what it does is it reduces the blast radius of you signing up for new accounts because every time you sign up for new account using this method Apple actually generate a brand new unique random private ID to forward to your account.

So for every app that you signed up using this method you’re going to get a unique email address. Now that’s been a long time who knows people of work around this and done it themselves, but that’s been a gap because while you’re supposed to use a different password for every site, you’re always using the same email.

This will help you reduce that even further that the potential risk, but there is a flip side risk on your part because when you get that email in your inbox, you’re going to have to reply a house that email and hide your initial am your real address. Just something to look out for now.

The good news here. Is that most apps send. What information to and from a no reply address to have to take steps to contact them? Anyway, you seem to make sure that use the same Shadow address here but is a fantastic way to protect your privacy is another step forward.

This is a great Phim the keno does that every chance? They have the kind of hit. Hey, we’re doing Step 2. We’re taking steps were making developers take steps to protect your privacy. And that’s a really really positive thing. Now I mentioned before how apple has a tendency to push for on device processing.

This is part of the reason why Siri is not nearly as good as OK Google or Alexa is because all the processing in the model is done other devices. So when they trade new models, they pushed by they have to push updates down to the devices and fire system updates in order to get better Siri understanding and the funny thing is is in my experience series actually really good at understanding me.

It’s the back in searches that really suck. You see this most commonly an apple music if you ask for a specific album by specific artist Siri types it out correctly, but then it won’t actually find the thing that it knows you’re looking. So there’s definitely a some gaps here and there is a lack of quality compared to some competitors, but that’s the trade-off for privacy because on device processing means that everything stays here and at worst is pushed up to my iCloud account, which is actually encrypted with my credentials as well.

And Apple has severe restrictions around how they can access that account. But here’s a new feature. They’ve announced that follows this model and you can see from the illustration in the key know why this is so important. That reinforces that Phim again of on device processing and backing it up into your iCloud account, which is locked down this again great moves for privacy, but it highlights how critical it is to understand the access your iCloud account and to keep iCloud secure.

So using a two-factor authentication using a strong password or passphrase absolutely critical movie for because all your Apple data is being backed up into that account and there was one last announcement that caught my eye and a bunch of people reached out have to ask if this one actually goes against what they’ve announcer Brown privacy.

This is around of new find my feeder. They merge find my friends and find my device was called find my iPhone, but it’s not all your devices into one app and they simply call it find my guess what Craig has to say about that. So it’s not that amazing that is an end-to-end encrypted in Anonymous.

That’s the only way you could reasonably build this feature. So interesting enough find my eye has always been available for mobile devices, right? So this is constantly paying you back when it’s online to Apple to say hey, this is where the device is located and I can go into my iCloud account and access it trade it in your iPhone or sent it to app for recycling one of the steps.

They always ask you to do is to turn off find my phone and the reason being is because you are have to be authenticated on the device actually disabled that because otherwise it won’t work as a security feature as plan. Right if anybody could turn it off but the downside is is that it’s either off or it’s on there’s no in-between.

Now with the new version you’re going to have your device has even if they’re not connected to Wi-Fi or not connected to the cellular network. They’re going to be picking out using Bluetooth beacons that Bluetooth beacons is a whole nother episode at but the interesting thing here is It’s going to be in the end encrypted Anonymous which basically means they are going to be using Apple devices as a internet basically, right? This is end-to-end encrypted means that you are not going to have any risk from identification as your Mac pings nearby phones are nearby pads to send it back to iCloud.

That’s a really solid design pattern of there is some exposure risk because your system is going to be constantly sending out a pig and a beacon and even though it’s encrypted in arm is that pattern might actually have some operational security concerns but not for 99.99% of the population.

This is a great way to close a loophole especially for MacBooks where they weren’t actually opting-in or they weren’t actually reported back because they had to be connected to Wi-Fi. So this covers it if somebody steals your MacBook if it’s anywhere near an iPhone with pretty much it always will be and it’s going to be able to Ping back and still Report its location at but without betraying at any of your privacy and it’s a really clever design.

Look forward to more details, but on the surface this looks like a really smart move. Its overall. There’s a lot of great announcements around privacy. I’m & on device processing and really that privacy by Design built-in other it like I said, there are some sacrifices apple is a massive company so they can take the hit of Siri not being quite as good as other competing things like Alexa and OK Google.

I am also the fact that they have on their custom Asics their custom A10 and a11 chips all over the place. So they’re in iPod or they’re in the homepod. Sorry there now in the new iPod there any or iPhones are in your iPad to get a ton of processing power locally to be able to pull this off but be banished from a privacy perspectives that your data is always staying on your device and if it’s not in your device and send to your own iCloud account not to a back-end massive service for Mining and your iCloud account is actual.

Restricted to you or your access. I’m in law enforcement upon a legal or judicial request. So I will look to the iCloud security paper that I believe Apple has around. I think it’s a dedicated iCloud one, but it might be part of their biggest Security Services. I’ll put that in the comments down below but that was a highlight of some of the great announcements from Apple.

Yes. I really like their their stuff. But because of this privacy first to take some sacrifice and functionality to gain that privacy. What about you? What do you think? Let me know. Hit me up online. I’m at Mark NCAA in the comments down below and as always by email me at Mark and the.

Ca hope, you’re set up for a fantastic day and we’ll see you on the next episode of the show.