Apple’s obsession with secrecy has struck again but this time in an unusual way. Yes, the company that is only able to sell devices by tricking people with that icky “marketing” that no other company does actually forgot to market a feature!
What is this feature? Well, according to developer Guilherme Rambo the M4 iPad Pro is:
…the first device to support and use Apple’s new Secure Indicator Light (SIL) mechanism. When using the microphone or camera, the corresponding indicator dot is effectively rendered in hardware (using the display), making it a lot less likely that any malware or user space app would be able to access those sensors without the user’s knowledge.
Guilherme Rambo
Apple implemented this without fanfare. Or any kind of fare at all. In fact, it implemented it without even mentioning it when the product was rolled out.
This is very odd behavior for a company that (according to many) only uses privacy as a marketing tool. You made the privacy, and you forgot to market it? What’s that about?
Now, you may be saying to yourself, please, Mr. Macalope, sir. (Why so formal?) Your strawmen do burn oh so very prettily, but spare us your concocted arguments from fabricated Apple foes!
But this is not a strawman argument at all! As it turns out, you are the only strawman here, fictional reader who purports not to think anyone says this about Apple.
Ironic, right?
One entity that suggests privacy is a marketing smokescreen for Apple is a little outfit known as… let’s see here, lemme just pretend to be looking this up… oh, yes! The U.S. Department of Justice. Apple’s emphasis on privacy was brought up multiple times in the DOJ’s suit against the company.
The DOJ suggested that by not allowing third-party app stores, the company was reducing privacy options by not allowing a more privacy-focused store to set up shop on iOS. Yeaaah. Because that’s gonna happen. The horny one is sure there’s a long line of privacy-focused would-be app store overlords out there. It’s definitely not outfits like Meta that have tried for years to slip various privacy-hoovering apps into the App Store. Nope. Nuh-uh.
The DOJ argued:
By contrast, Apple allows certain enterprise and public sector customers to offer versions of app stores with more curated apps to better protect privacy and security.
U.S. Department of Justice
Like much of the DOJ’s filing, this is a poor explanation of the situation. These enterprise app stores are for employees and are designed to protect the privacy and security of the entity running the store, not the end user. In fact, many of them, because they’re run by companies that want to spy on their employees (or, to be fair, have to if they’re regulated industries) are absolutely terrible for privacy.
The only privacy argument the DOJ makes that actually makes sense is that Apple degrades privacy by making Google the default search engine. And Apple does do it because Google pays them a ridiculous amount of money to do it, but most people were probably going to use Google anyway. (Still, they should stop.)
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There are many good reasons to force Apple to loosen restrictions on the App Store. So many, really. Privacy isn’t in the top 20. Privacy doesn’t even know the items in the top 20. It never gets invited to their parties.
Does Apple use privacy to market its products? Of course it does. It does so because privacy is an advantage of its products. These are not mutually exclusive things. But you can also make a pretty good case based on the above that privacy is so engrained at Apple that it defaults to that (unless someone wants to give them billions of dollars a year to kind of forget it for a bit). Is it perfect? No. But it’s still better than pretty much anyone else.
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