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You Are Not Our Product!
Since the very first days of Small Dog Electronics we have had a commitment to protecting our customer’s data. In our earliest web site we gave reasons to buy from Small Dog that included no surcharge for credit card use, free small dogs with every order and our pledge to never sell your personal information. We have had plenty of opportunities to sell our customer list which is well over ½ million customers, but we take our commitment to privacy very seriously and honor what we promise.
Apple does too! Apple and Google were called before the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce to explain how they handle customer data. Apple said very clearly:
“The customer is not our product, and our business model does not depend on collecting vast amounts of personally identifiable information to enrich targeted profiles marketed to advertisers.”
There’s an Internet saying: “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” The point is that, if you’re getting a service for free, the company providing it sees you not as a customer, but as a product to sell, generally to advertisers.
This is how Google, Facebook, and Twitter operate. They provide services for free, collect data about you, and make money by showing you ads. In theory, the more that advertisers know about you, the better they can target ads to you, and the more likely you’ll be to buy. Personalized advertising can seem creepy (or clueless when it fails), but it isn’t inherently evil, and we’re not suggesting that you stop using ad-supported services.
This ad-driven approach stands in stark contrast to how Apple does business. Apple makes most of its money by selling hardware—iPhones, Macs, and iPads, primarily. Another big chunk of Apple’s revenue comes from App Store and iTunes Store sales, iCloud subscriptions, and Apple Pay fees. Knowing more about you, what Web pages you visit, what you buy, and who you’re friends with doesn’t help Apple’s business, and on its Privacy page, Apple says bluntly, “We believe privacy is a fundamental human right.”
Of course, once your data is out there, it can be lost or stolen—in June 2018, a security researcher discovered that the online data broker Exactis was exposing a database containing 340 million records of data on hundreds of millions of American adults. Ouch!
Let’s look at a few of the ways that Apple protects your privacy.
Siri and Dictation
The longer you use Siri and Dictation, the better they work, thanks to your devices transmitting data back to Apple for analysis. However, Apple creates a random identifier for your data rather than associating the information with your Apple ID, and if you reset Siri by turning it off and back on, you’ll get a new random identifier. Whenever possible, Apple keeps Siri functionality on your device, so if you search for a photo by location or get suggestions after a search, those results come from local data only.
Touch ID and Face ID
When you register your fingerprints with Touch ID or train Face ID to recognize your face, it’s reasonable to worry about that information being stored where hackers—or some government agency—could access it and use it for nefarious purposes. Apple was concerned about that too, so these systems don’t store images of your fingerprints or face, but instead mathematical signatures based on them. Those signatures are kept only locally, in the Secure Enclave security coprocessor that’s part of the CPU of the iPhone and iPad—and on Touch ID-equipped laptops—in such a way that the images can’t be reverse engineered from the signatures.
And, of course, a major goal of Touch ID and Face ID is to prevent someone from violating your privacy by accessing your device directly.
Health and Fitness
People with medical conditions can be concerned about health information impacting health insurance bills or a potential employer’s hiring decision. To assuage that worry, Apple lets you choose what information ends up in Health app, and once it’s there, encrypts it whenever your iPhone is locked. Plus, any Health data that’s backed up to iCloud is encrypted both in transit and when it’s stored on Apple’s servers.
App Store Guidelines
A linchpin in Apple’s approach to privacy is its control over the App Store. Since developers must submit apps to Apple for approval, Apple can enforce stringent guidelines that specify how apps can ask for access to your data (location, photos, contacts, etc.). This isn’t a blanket protection—for instance, if you allow a social media app
Facebook to access your contacts and location, the company behind that app will get lots of data on your whereabouts and can even cross-reference that with the locations of everyone in your contact list who also uses the service. In the end, only you can decide how much information you want to share with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and only you can determine if or when their use of your details feels like an invasion of privacy. But by using Apple products and services, you can be certain that the company that could know more about you than any other is actively trying to protect your privacy.
Get more out of your trackpad
For my office set up, I have an external monitor connected to my laptop and then use a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. This past week my original external trackpad finally called it quits. I rummaged through my desk and found my magic mouse. After a day I quickly remember why I loved my trackpad and preferred to keep the magic mouse in my drawer.
I have never been a huge magic mouse fan, for years I used the Kensington expert mouse before switching to the trackpad. I simply find the trackpad more intuitive and versatile, I’m forever swiping in error on the mouse or double tapping when I should single tap. Don would say it’s user error, I disagree! None the less, here are some tips and perhaps new tricks for those thinking about or currently using a trackpad.
Four Fingers on the TrackPad
The four-fingers-down gestures are dramatic and an easy way to appreciate the power of trackpad gestures, so we’ll start with them. Say you have a lot of windows open, and you want to move them all aside quickly so you can open a file on the Desktop. Place your thumb and three fingers together on your trackpad and then spread them outward. Your windows scurry to the edges of the screen. To bring the windows back, reverse the gesture, pinching your fingers in toward your palm. If you haven’t moved windows aside, pinching your thumb and three-fingers together instead opens Launchpad, which shows icons for installed apps. Click an icon to open that app, or use the spreading four-fingered gesture to exit Launchpad.
Three Fingers on the Trackpad
Move three fingers horizontally on your trackpad and either nothing will happen, or you’ll switch to a different “desktop space.” This state of affairs is most easily seen by making an app full-screen, including the menu bar ( to put it back, hover the pointer at the very top of the screen and click the green button again )
You can swipe left and right horizontally to switch in and out of the Safari space. As you make more apps full-screen, they’ll each create their own space. Have you tried to swipe vertically with three fingers? You can swipe up to enter the All Windows view of Mission Control, which shows all open windows as thumbnails, plus desktop spaces in the top bar. Click any thumbnail to switch to it, or jump to any space by clicking it. You can also click the plus button at the upper right or drag any window into the top bar to create a new space. To move a space’s apps back to the current space, hover over a space on the top bar and click the close button that appears. To exit All Windows view, swipe down with three fingers.
Two Fingers on the Trackpad
In Safari, swipe left on a page to go back in that tab’s page history or right to go forward. Also in Safari, tap two fingers on the trackpad to zoom in on the content. Another two-fingered tap zooms back out.
Want to open your Notification Center quickly? Swipe left from off the right-hand edge of your trackpad. Swipe back to the right to close the Notification Center.