Wednesday, April 1, marks 50 years since Apple was founded. Over the next week, you’ll no doubt see countless articles examining the company’s influence, and many will likely focus on which Apple product had the most significant impact on the tech industry and society as a whole. There are certainly countless options to choose from, notably the original Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone.
However, for me, Apple’s most important contribution in the last fifty years is not a physical product. Rather, it is a policy that affirms that privacy is a fundamental human right and, to protect that right, products must be designed with privacy in mind.
It is a policy that is more important today than ever.
Apple makes a seismic change
Whether you realize it or not, you They are the most important product sold by many of the largest companies out there. Sure, Google can sell ads, but those ads are only valuable to businesses because of the amount of data the search giant has on you, allowing those ads to be targeted more effectively. The same goes for Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, and more. These companies offer services in exchange for you giving up your privacy (either knowingly or often unknowingly) and then monetizing your data to make billions.
For roughly the first 20 years of the public Internet’s existence, most online companies collected privacy-invading personal data as a core part of their business model. And as technology became increasingly integrated into our daily lives (with the advent of smartphones packed with all kinds of new sensors and chips that could collect even more data about us), most tech companies only became hungrier for our data.
But then something changed. About 15 years ago, the world’s largest technology company, Apple, began embracing privacy. One of the first big privacy moves Apple made was to encrypt its iMessage platform end-to-end, ensuring that no one but you and the recipient could read your messages.
It’s hard to overstate how momentous this change in privacy was. While end-to-end encryption had previously existed in some enterprise messaging solutions, we regular users had always been denied equivalent protection, until Apple decided to intervene.
Almost every year since then, Apple has continued to innovate on the privacy front, implementing new measures to keep more of our data out of the hands of others. For example, the company was the first to block first-party and third-party trackers in your web browser, preventing advertisers and publishers from tracking you across the web. It was also the first company to allow users to block the sharing of their precise location data with apps.
Protect user privacy, including yourself
And keep in mind that Apple has not only provided privacy mechanisms to prevent other companies from obtaining your personal data, but it has also prevented itself from doing so.
For example, your iPhone and Apple Watch contain all kinds of health information about you, from how many calories you burn to how well you sleep. All of this data is end-to-end encrypted, so not even Apple can read it.
Or take Apple Pay, the company’s digital payment solution. Apple built its digital payments platform in a way that ensures it never has access to users’ personally identifiable purchase history, despite the billions in revenue this data could generate for Apple.
And as our data moved from our computers’ hard drives to the cloud, Apple was the first major tech giant (and currently remains the only one) to allow users to enable end-to-end encryption of their cloud storage by default, even preventing Apple from knowing what you store on its servers.
The hardware factor
Without a doubt, Apple’s business model was always different from that of most of its technological peers. It sold high-margin physical hardware, not services or ads, so it didn’t need to mine user data to make a profit.
In fact, cynics might say that Apple can embrace privacy the way it does. because rakes in hundreds of billions a year through its hardware, so the company has the luxury or not having to mine user data to make a profit. These critics would also rightly point out that Apple benefits greatly from marketing its strong privacy stance to help it sell even more hardware.
Ardent Apple supporters, on the other hand, would argue that Apple has embraced privacy to the extent that it has for ideological reasons: that its executives truly believe that privacy “is a fundamental human right” and therefore believe that the company should use its power to protect privacy for the good of all.
However, for me, the reason doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is that Apple does embrace privacy and do it out loud. Apple is one of the most successful (and now oldest) technology companies in the world. The industry pays attention to what it does. So do consumers. And Apple’s industry competitors know that if their customers have friends who use Apple products and constantly brag about those products’ privacy protections, their own users will come to expect the same privacy protections, or else they may jump ship.
How Apple can lead the AI era
In fact, several years ago, Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi admitted to me that Apple’s stance likely plays a big role in advancing privacy across the industry.
“I think history has shown that we can move the industry in really meaningful ways,” Federighi told me in 2021. “And certainly, sometimes others come slowly or reluctantly. But ultimately, when customers realize what they should expect, what they can expect, what is possible once they realize that the deal they thought they had to make (which is actually not a deal they have to make), then the entire industry has to react to offer customers what they “Now they know what they want and demand.”
Today, fifty years after Apple was founded, and with potentially invasive technology deeply embedded in every aspect of our lives, it is more important than ever to maintain the expectation that privacy is a fundamental human right. This is especially true in the new era of artificial intelligence we find ourselves in, an era in which AI companies are even hungrier for our data than the ad tech giants of the past, making the risk to our privacy even greater, too.
Apple’s ethos of privacy will continue to set the company apart (and improve society) in the age of AI. If the company’s policy of designing products around privacy can continue to not only affect the development of its own AI products, but also the development of its competitors’ AI products in favor of users, then I have no doubt that Apple’s most significant contribution in the next fifty years will be the same as in its first fifty years. And that is something we will all benefit from.