So sad.
Screenshot by ZDNet
You’re so silly, you.
You spend all day on your phones and laptops and you have no idea just how much of what you say and do via these things simply isn’t private.
You just don’t care, do you?
It’s like walking up to strangers and shouting your credit card number. Or telling them your heart rate. Or revealing that you’re trying to divorce your ever-loving spouse.
You have to laugh, don’t you?
Well, Apple does. Its latest ad is a vertiable litany of humanity’s sins, as it blithely tosses privacy to the winds. In favor of immediacy, convenience and sheer laziness.
Here we see people going through their everyday lives, exposing themselves on the subway, in a restaurant, on the street and even in a restroom.
Exposing their private information, that is.
Buy an iPhone and your life will be private, says the ad. Wait, or does it?
Well, what’s interesting here is that there are no phones in the main part of the ad, so we have no idea whether at least some of these people might actually be iPhone users.
Moreover, Apple’s promise at the end is carefully worded: “Some things shouldn’t be shared. iPhone helps keep it that way.”
Helps is correct. Apple does try harder to preserve what’s left of human dignity.
Yet, as a blisteringly depressing Washington Post article last year revealed, in one week with an iPhone thousands of trackers — mostly in apps — merrily sent on the user’s identifiable information to others.
There’s little hope of actual privacy when the whole tech ecosystem is built on stalking.
That’s what recently led a top LG executive to dump Chrome for Brave.
The vast majority of people, however, can’t be bothered. If they think about tracking at all, they think it’s inevitable. If they think about privacy at all, they vaguely remember it used to exist.
For Apple, of course, marketing privacy is a way of suggesting its brand is more purely attuned to humanity’s needs and feelings.
The snag is, of course, that humans are very good at ruining themselves without any help at all.
