Can Apple Protect Our Privacy With the iPhone 6? [The New Yorker]

Excerpt from a timely Apple privacy policy reality check

"It’s true that, among Silicon Valley companies that sell devices, Apple is in an unusual position. Google, whose Android operating system is the main rival to iPhones, makes most of its revenue from selling advertising, and it does scan your e-mail to sell relevant ads. Amazon, which unveiled the Fire Phone smartphone in June, gets its revenue largely through e-commerce. That influences the design of their products. (One of the features Amazon proudly displayed when it launched its Fire Phone was a tool that let people order from Amazon by taking pictures of items.) “From the privacy perspective, advertising-based business models are the ones that cause the greatest concern — digging into user activity to try to find some commercial value to be sold to someone else,” Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research center, told me. “Tim Cook is trying to put a little bit of distance between himself and their main competitor, which is Google.”"

Can Apple Protect Our Privacy With the iPhone 6?