Apple says it’s tracking your calls and emails to ‘prevent fraud’
Apple says it’s tracking your calls and emails to
‘prevent fraud’
By Chris Smith September 20, 2018 | 10:29am
Apple has been advocating for unbreakable encryption and
total user privacy for years, even if that put it at odds with governments
around the world.
That’s not just because it gave it an edge on the
competition, forcing rivals to also somewhat embrace encryption and better
privacy features, but also because Apple seems to genuinely believe that user
data and privacy should be defended at all costs.
Apple just created added a new provision to the iTunes
Store & Privacy policy that tells users that their devices will receive
individual scores based on the number of phone calls they make and the emails
they send:
To help identify and prevent fraud, information about how
you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails
you send and receive, will be used to compute a device trust score when you
attempt a purchase. The submissions are designed so Apple cannot learn the real
values on your device. The scores are stored for a fixed time on our servers.
How does knowing how many calls I make or emails I send
help Apple combat fraud? A trust score could help to determine whether the
purchase a user was attempting to make was deemed as an authentic purchase
versus a fraudulent one. The data that gets sent to Apple, according to the company,
is a numeric score that is computed on the device itself. It uses “the
company’s standard privacy abstracting techniques and retained only for a
limited period, without any way to work backward from the score to user
behavior. No calls, emails, or other abstractions of that data are shared with
Apple.” Also, as VentureBeat points out, this new privacy policy applies to
Apple TV too.
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