Apps, Check Them, If Privacy Matters in Your Life
In an effort to provide better privacy, recently I received a notice upon sign in from one of the scheduling apps I use that you would no longer be able to sign in using Facebook or Twitter. Hummm… I wondered why, but complied by setting up an individual sign in and password.
The reason became clear this morning as I read the local newspaper and made note of Apple’s new tagline. “If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on.” Apple has a mobile update planned for fall 2019 that would offer users the option to remain anonymous when signing into certain apps in the App Store. What difference will this make you ask? Well, it will better protect users’ privacy and threatens to choke off data to companies including Facebook and Google that use the information to track users and sell ads based on their habits.
Relationships between app developers and third parties have thrived for years on the convenience of letting users sign in through their respective social-media accounts. Yep, I’m guilty of this, all though, less recently than ever before. App developers receive either names and email address from direct sign-ups or related info such as gender from Google, Facebook, 
Linkedin, or other accounts.Now you know how all those unsolicited emails wind up in your inbox. As we all know, certain tech companies have had highly publicized scandals with millions of user’s personal data exposed. Not good.
Just this week, Apple, who has pioneered authentication factors like FaceID and touted file encryption and other safety devices on its iOS devices, added yet another safeguard. As Apple users we can already opt out of continuous location tracking. But now we can use the new feature to share our location with an app only once to perform a specific task, in addition makes it easy to see which apps are still tracking your location when the apps are not in use. Cyber stalking. Creepy.
The bottom line these companies are going to need to find and collect data more directly from us consumers rather than using third-party services like Google and Facebook to do the work for them. As always when signing up new apps, think about just how much info you want these apps to have.
Next week, we’ll dive into whether ultra-powerful and still experimental technology entitled quantum computers will be friend of foe?
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Posted in My Say What Blog and tagged Apple, Apps, Email, Facebook, google, iOS by Tena Stetler with comments disabled.
