Why Apple is suddenly so obsessed with your privacy

[Commentary] In September 2014, Apple released a long blog post saying essentially the same thing: We are safe custodians of your data. We don’t sell it or try to profit from it. Apple lags behind Google, Facebook, and even Microsoft in the new battle for user attention: Prediction. All of that is changing.

The Apple Watch is essentially Google Now for your wrist. Its purpose is not to replace the phone for interaction, but for notifications and ultra-quick reactions. But Apple, argues Apple, does not pass along your data to third parties or use it to profile you. It only uses it to make your services better. This is a seductive (and also probably reductive) argument, but it strikes at an undenial truth about the internet business in 2015: no company can hope to survive without access to user data. We had better get used to them reading our e-mails and our texts and our Spotify playlists. Some of these firms will use our data to create rich user profiles in order to sell us things. Others focus on creating deep surveillance mechanisms in order to figure out whether we bought the things we’ve been advertised. But a web giant that does not collect user data may as well shut shop and go home. The best we can hope for is that Apple sticks to its principles.