Apple et Tim Cook à l’offensive pour la vie privée

Cupertino sort l’artillerie lourde pour enterrer le scandale des photos de stars dénudées, attrapées pour certaines au moins sur iCloud, en utilisant des méthodes d’ingénierie sociale pour deviner le login et mot de passe des stars en question.

L’offensive de Cupertino se manifeste par la mise en place d’un site dédié, qui donne les contours de la politique d’Apple en matière de collecte des données personnelles, et par une lettre de Tim Cook, qui explique qu’Apple n’est pas une entreprise dont le business est fondé sur le profilage des utilisateurs, à des fins marketing. À la différence de Google,évidemment, ce que Cook n’indique pas de manière explicite mais qui sous-tend toute sa démonstration.

«Il y a quelques années, les utilisateurs de l’internet ont commencé à comprendre que, quand un service en ligne est gratuit, ils n’en sont pas les clients, mais le produit. Chez Apple, nous considérons qu’une bonne expérience client ne doit pas pas se payer par des atteintes à nos vies privées», indique-t-il.

«Notre business mode est très simple : nous vendons d’excellents produits. Nous n’établissons pas de profil basé sur le contenu de vos mails, ou vos habitudes de navigation web, afin de le vendre aux agences de marketing. Nous ne vendons pas vos informations stockées sur vos iPhone, ou sur iCloud».

iAd, le service de pub d’Apple, «n’est qu’une infime partie de notre business» et «adopte la même politique de vie privée que nos autres services en ligne».

«Et pour conclure, je veux être parfaitement limpide : nous n’avons jamais travaillé avec un gouvernement ou ses agences, d’aucun pays, pour créer des portes dérobées dans nos services. Nous n’avons jamais autorisé l’accès à nos serveurs, et nous ne le ferons jamais».

A message from Tim Cook about Apple’s commitment to your privacy.

At Apple, your trust means everything to us. That’s why we respect your privacy and protect it with strong encryption, plus strict policies that govern how all data is handled.

Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services like Apple Pay. And we continue to make improvements. Two-step verification, which we encourage all our customers to use, in addition to protecting your Apple ID account information, now also protects all of the data you store and keep up to date with iCloud.

We believe in telling you up front exactly what’s going to happen to your personal information and asking for your permission before you share it with us. And if you change your mind later, we make it easy to stop sharing with us. Every Apple product is designed around those principles. When we do ask to use your data, it’s to provide you with a better user experience.

We’re publishing this website to explain how we handle your personal information, what we do and don’t collect, and why. We’re going to make sure you get updates here about privacy at Apple at least once a year and whenever there are significant changes to our policies.

A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.
Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.

One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether.

Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will.
Our commitment to protecting your privacy comes from a deep respect for our customers. We know that your trust doesn’t come easy. That’s why we have and always will work as hard as we can to earn and keep it.