A new survey suggests that Apple may still have some work to do to gain trust of the hoi polloi. The survey asked 1,025 Americans about security, encryption, and their own personal views and habits.
55.5% believed that their data was safe if it was encrypted in the cloud. Oddly, 65.2% agreed that hackers could access confidential data even if it’s encrypted.
Perhaps, though, you’ll be most moved by the answers to the question: “Which company do you most trust to encrypt your data?”
You might imagine that Apple, with its hearty insistence on privacy and encryption, would be the Miss World of this category.
Instead, it was Google. Followed by Apple? No, it was followed by Amazon, and then Apple… [42.6% for Google, 38.3% for Amazon, and a mere 36.7% for Apple].
MacDailyNews Take: What did we just write earlier this morning? Oh, yeah:
“It’s amazing that privacy champion Apple continually gets lumped in with the likes of privacy-trampling Google and Facebook. It’s also illustrative of Apple’s failure to get their privacy message out to the great unwashed.”
Apple should be running a massive ad campaign that clearly explains how they stand apart from virtually every other major Silicon Valley company when it come to privacy and monetizing users. Every time there is a breach or an abuse at Facebook, Google, etc. Apple should be ready to pound their privacy message into the general public’s exceedingly thick collective skull. — MacDailyNews, April 10, 2018
Apple needs to continue to relentlessly point out how FaceBook and Google make their money: By vacuuming up your personal data and selling it to the highest bidder. – MacDailyNews, June 5, 2017
It’s not at all apparent that the general public values their privacy enough or even knows that Apple’s privacy is paramount, but the average Joe/Jane does seem to regard Siri as not too bright, putting into question whether Apple’s commitment to privacy will every really pay off; i.e. translate to increased product sales.
Apple product users seem to value their privacy. Non-Apple product users, by definition, do not value their privacy (or they’d be Apple product users).
So, what’s the inflection point? Do Google and the others need to have an Equifax event befall it for their product users to wake up? Would they even wake up if Google etc. did have a cataclysmic breach? We have our doubts. — MacDailyNews, October 5, 2017
Until we see everyday people wake up about privacy, we’ll continue to believe that Apple is serving a niche market of those relative few who recognize the need for and desire the type of stringent privacy protections that Apple offers (outside of China). — MacDailyNews, March 21, 2018