Of all the Justice Department’s charges against Apple, the most controversial may be its blistering attacks on security and privacy. Apple has warned that if the Justice Department succeeds, its products — especially iPhones — will be less safe for users. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice claims Apple’s much-touted privacy features are just excuses.
The complaint in the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple alleges that the company “wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security and consumer preference to justify its anticompetitive conduct.” In a news release announcing the lawsuit At the meeting, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said Apple’s choice actually made its systems “less private and less secure.”
“Apple has selectively compromised privacy and security interests when it was in Apple’s own financial interest to do so, such as by making text messages less secure and by providing governments and certain companies with access to more private and secure versions of the App Store,” the complaint reads. opportunity.” , or accepting billions of dollars a year to choose Google as the default search engine when more private options are available. “
It’s a particularly aggressive attack for a company whose brand strategy places a heavy emphasis on privacy by design.exist Epic v. Applea judge found that user privacy and device security were acceptable reasons behind some of the company’s extremely strict (and lucrative) App Store policies.
At a press conference, an Apple spokesperson expressed dissatisfaction with the Justice Department’s assertion that the company’s privacy and security features are pretextual, and claimed that the antitrust lawsuit will ultimately harm the interests of users.
The Justice Department’s attack on one of the core tenets of Apple’s brand image relies on the breadth of the general concept of user privacy, going well beyond the issue of App Store review to make its point.
The complaint highlights that, unlike iMessage, iPhone users’ SMS communications (i.e., green bubble text) with Android users lack encryption.
“Apple forces other platforms to use SMS. It doesn’t allow them to integrate with iMessage or other built-in encrypted messaging platforms,” Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at the National Cyber Security Alliance, told us. edge In a phone interview. Because SMS messages are not encrypted, they are less secure by default.
Apple has previously said that its devices will start supporting RCS, a more secure messaging protocol that encrypts communications with Android devices, later this year.
But once attention shifts from the green bubble text back to the App Store, the Justice Department’s position becomes more shaky. At a Justice Department news conference, a reporter noted that a member of Congress said stripping away Apple’s ability to review products uploaded to the App Store could “open the door to apps made by China and Russia and other adversaries, if you will.” if” “.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the goal of the lawsuit is to limit “exclusionary practices” in the App Store, not to weaken Apple’s ability to review apps. The lawsuit specifically asks the court to prevent Apple from “using its control over app distribution to undermine cross-platform technologies like super apps and cloud streaming apps.”
But super apps like WeChat can actually serve as their own app stores. For the Justice Department, this is not so much about privacy as it is about competition. This didn’t just happen out of thin air – the lawsuit points out that Apple described super apps like WeChat as a “major impediment” to driving overseas iPhone sales in a board speech.
However, some security experts point out that Apple’s App Store is indeed more secure than the App Store on Android phones.
Danny Rogers, CEO of cybersecurity firm iVerify, said: “Our scan data from millions of iOS and Android devices around the world shows that open app stores lead to more attacks than closed ecosystems. A lot of malicious activity.” Computer. “So while opening app stores to third parties may be good for competition, it may also increase malicious activity.”
Rogers told us that malicious activity ranges from operating system-level compromises to the presence of spyware like Pegasus edge. “We see security issues occurring almost 100 times more frequently on Android compared to iOS,” Rogers said, even though the app does more iOS scans than Android scans.
Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said the higher incidence of malware on Android devices may be related to the phone’s “much longer shelf life” than the iPhone. “You’re going to find more vulnerabilities on these old, outdated Android devices simply because these old, outdated Android devices are out there and being sold,” Gilmore said. “Apple has done a great job of keeping the update process normalized, and they’ve also done a great job of retiring older iPhones. They’ll tell you, ‘This thing isn’t good anymore, you have to buy a new one. We can’t support that.’ it.'”
Gilmore agreed that “more loosely controlled” app stores could lead to “more invasive, infectious junk being pushed onto people’s phones,” he said. “But the risk is worth it because it means we also allow software that Apple may not approve of, regardless of their political reasons.”
Gilmore points out that Apple banned the game phone storyIn 2011, an app that satirized the company’s manufacturing processes was released from the App Store. An app that tracked U.S. drone strikes was rejected by the App Store more than a dozen times before Apple allowed it.
“There is no doubt that Apple exerts tight control over its ecosystem beyond what is necessary to have a healthy software ecosystem on its phones,” Gilmore said. “Even an Apple computer lets you install any software you want.”
At this point, it’s too early to tell how iPhone users’ privacy will be affected—we don’t even know what remedies the Justice Department wants if it wins, let alone what it will actually get. (Of course, all of that depends on it winning first.) “There’s a lot of different parts to this,” Steinhauer said. “I don’t understand how they can all win or all lose.”