Privacy experts – like the speakers at our 2014 event Nothing to Hide? Illusions of Privacy and Security – have often cautioned us to look beyond the high-profile stories of data use by the NSA and examine the constant, everyday surveillance by corporations. The roles of corporations and the government are not as clear, though, in the current legal battle between the FBI and Apple over data on an iPhone owned by a San Bernandino attacker.
In the New York TImes, Robert Levine asks “In the Government vs. Apple, Who Wears the Black Hat?”. In an ideal world, the government should decide the limits of privacy based on a robust public dialogue. Unfortunately, Levine argues, the NSA and other government agencies have so blatently disregarded the privacy of individual citizens that they cannot be trusted. We are left to rely on the privacy protections offered by corporations, whose decisions will always be entangled with their financial interests.
What is interesting about this case to me is that Apple doesn’t have the data that the government is requesting. In 2014, the corporation made it impossible to access data stored on iPhones without manually entering the passcode. As detailed in a statement posted on their website, Apple cannot access this data without creating an entirely new operating system. Effectively, Apple hid the phone data from itself, giving up some of its own power over information in order to offer a stronger security system to its customers. Apple has said that it would provide data to the government when it was “technically able” to do so, and it has cooperated with court orders to access the huge store of information on its iCloud servers. Apple changed the terms of engagement between the government and the corporation by choosing to be less “technically able” to access consumers’ data.
