When Privacy Becomes a Product Constraint

As we say farewell to Tim Cook, one of the most successful CEOs in tech history, it only seems appropriate for a blog that vaguely promised irreverence to offer a critique rather than praise. You can find the praise elsewhere, and it is of course very well deserved.

My issue is I am not as convinced as Tim that building Apple’s brand around privacy is quite the no-brainer he thinks it is. 

I used to be a business school professor teaching both undergrads and MBA students. Each year I would ask my classes how concerned they were about their personal information being used to target ads at them. I did this for about 12 years starting in 2010.

In the first year, almost all the MBA students (average age late 20s) put their hands up to express that they were concerned. Slightly more than half the undergrads did so. By the time I retired in 2022 there were no undergrad hands going up at all, and maybe 1 or 2 MBA hands. Put simply, they didn't care. Moreover, I would have students come up and tell me they liked Instagram precisely because the ad targeting was so good it was a source of product discovery. 

My take is they care about security, they don't want their nudes leaked, but their data being used for ads and services is of little concern to them if they find those ads and services useful.

And this is not just a branding issue, it directly affects the product offering as Apple tries to do everything locally rather than in the cloud. I spend much of my time out in nature taking bird photos. I recently had a straightforward editing issue, a branch against a clear blue sky that  I wanted to quickly remove. Apple Photos, processing locally (I think) on my iPad, left a blurry smear behind, Google Photos, working in the cloud, did it perfectly. It’s just one example, but the potential for Apple to offer inferior AI services as they think the privacy brand is so important seems clear.  Yes they have private cloud compute, for when they absolutely have no choice but to use the cloud, but that has already left the new Siri with no permanent memory, which seems another clear example of privacy trumping efficacy. 

Tim is a gentleman of a certain age, and I’m sure his generation would be putting their hands up in my class. But my students are growing up and I doubt they will suddenly start caring about their data being used to make AI services better. 

Disclosure: I have no position in Apple.