Apple has been increasingly vocal about its focus on privacy in recent months, and its latest video ad emphasizes that theme yet again — this time in reference to iMessage encryption.
The roughly minute-long ad shows a woman laughing while reading messages on her iPhone. Near the end of the video, the camera pans out and the viewer realizes she's in a salon. Then text appears on screen that says, "iMessage encrypts your conversations. Because not everyone needs to be in on the joke." The YouTube description for the video includes a link to Apple's privacy page.
It's the latest in a string of Apple advertisements putting digital privacy and security in the forefront. In March, for example, it released an ad that included the tagline: "If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on." Earlier this year, the company put up a billboard advertising the iPhone's privacy features in Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest technology conferences of the year.
Watch the video below:
Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken publicly about the importance of privacy on several occasions, most recently saying that digital privacy has "become a crisis" when speaking with ABC News. The company's fixation on privacy comes as companies like Facebook and Google have come under increased scrutiny regarding the way they handle consumer data in recent years.
Last December, US lawmakers grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai about the company's policies when it comes to tracking the location of it users, among other topics. And Facebook has been embroiled in controversy regarding how it handles the personal information of its 1.56 billion daily active users over the past several years — the most notable of the company's privacy blunders was last year's Cambridge Analytica scandal, during which it was discovered that the political data analytics firm had harvested data from 50 million Facebook profiles without user consent.
Executives from both Facebook and Google have reiterated the steps their respective companies are making to improve user privacy and transparency moving forward. Facebook announced during its F8 conference that it will encrypt user messages by default, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated the phrase "the future is private" when speaking on stage.
Apple's stance has been that since its business model is not centered on advertising like Google and Facebook, it does not benefit from collecting personal data. But Pichai, when writing for The New York Times, took what could be interpreted as a subtle jab at Apple, saying that "privacy cannot be a luxury good offered only to people who can afford to buy premium products and services."
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