Two weeks ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly re-iterated his company’s commitment to user privacy and implied that rivals including Facebook and Google were trailing Apple in this area. His claims have become even more credible thanks to a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has commended Apple for its “strong stance” on privacy.
At the EPIC Champions of Freedom event in Washington just before the Worldwide Developers Conference, Cook expressed his company’s disbelief that “customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security”, adding that Apple believes in “a fundamental right to privacy”.
The just-released fifth version of the EFF’s “Who Has Your Back” report, which assesses how well different Internet companies guard their users’ privacy, says that Apple “has adopted every best practice we’ve identified as part of this report.” EFF highly rates the company for adhering to a variety of pro-privacy policies, including willingness to publish its data protection strategy and refusal to create, in collaboration with government, purposefully ineffective security “back doors”.
The EFF has given Apple the overall ranking of five stars out of five for its “user rights, transparency and privacy” policies. Wikimedia, Yahoo and WordPress each receive the same maximum score in the report, but Amazon, Google and Microsoft trail Apple, having each been awarded three stars.
