Apple Makes Strongest Statement Yet on Data Privacy

(Bloomberg) -- Apple is making its strongest statement yet today on privacy and the inclination of companies like Facebook to track users.

Apple’s software engineering head Craig Federighi said the company will make it “dramatically more difficult” for data companies to track individual users. It’ll raise alerts to let customers decide on a case-by-case basis whether they want to let “clever and relentless” data companies track them.

“We believe your private data should remain private ... because there can be a lot of sensitive data on your devices and we think you should be in control of who sees it,” Federighi said at Apple’s annual developers conference.

In sum, Apple fired a rhetorical shot over the bow of Facebook and introduced a few new features that allow users to deny access to third party data collectors. The challenge is that many users find these pop-up alerts to be a nuisance and just blindly click on them.

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To contact the reporters on this story: Brad Stone in San Francisco at bstone12@bloomberg.net;Mark Gurman in San Francisco at mgurman1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anny Kuo at akuo1@bloomberg.net, Tal Barak Harif

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