Apple's U.S. Privacy Portal May Have Limited Impact on Others' GDPR Approach
Apple has a new privacy portal for users to access their data, but the company's business model means other tech companies may not be following its lead.
October 24, 2018 at 09:00 AM
3 minute read
Apple is handing over the keys to your digital filing cabinets. As of last week, Americans in all 50 states can access an electronic inventory of the data they've accumulated over years of music purchases, contact updates and photos sent to the cloud. They can also start the process of deleting that same information.
But don't necessarily expect the start of a new trend though. Since Apple's business interests are vested primarily in hardware, it can more easily comply with emerging privacy laws that mandate such features as compared to more data and advertising-driven companies like Google or Facebook.
A privacy portal feature was rolled out to Apple users in the European Union in May 2018 in compliance with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which among other things requires service providers to generate “a copy of the personal data, free of charge, in an electronic format” upon a subject's request. It also says that users can “have the data controller erase his/her personal data.”
Voluntarily bringing the same portal stateside could prove to be something of a win-win for a company built on the backs of iPods and MacBook Pros. It gets to polish an already shiny reputation among users as a major proponent of privacy and data protection without risking significant damage to the bottom line.
Apple “has sometimes been called a 'walled garden' in the sense that it is zealously protecting the data on its platform. And it's not sharing with third parties, as where data-driven businesses thrive off of sharing data with third parties and collecting as much data from consumers as they can,” said Jarno Vanto, a shareholder and member of the intellectual property group at Polsinelli.
The company can afford to take a hard line on privacy. In the second quarter of 2018, the majority of Apple's income, approximately 62 percent, was generated by the iPhone. By contrast, the money brought in from Google's advertising business accounted for close to 86 percent of parent company Alphabet Inc.'s revenue.
Companies that rely on data collected from consumers to drive business may not be as willing as to relinquish control over how and when that information can be collected or used.
“The data-driven businesses are arguing for a different sort of regime from the EU GDPR, but Apple, again, is signaling that they want European-style regulation,” Vanto said.
So the question becomes if Apple carries enough stature within the tech sphere to engender imitators through example alone. Hanley Chew, a lawyer focused on privacy and data security litigation with Fenwick & West, thinks that it might.
“Apple is one of the dominant players in the market… I could see that there would definitely be pressure to comply with any standards that Apple's adopted,” Chew said.
He foresees companies adopting similar mechanisms to make consumer data more readily available, not just to comply with the GDPR, but emerging domestic statutes and legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act. Businesses that choose to wait to implement any changes could eventually find themselves playing catch up.
“It's the other companies that haven't complied that are going to have to likely develop policies procedures and infrastructure as such that they're able to have this data readily available to make it accessible to consumers,” Chew said.
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