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Wednesday, April 1, marks 50 years since Apple was founded. Over the next week, you\u2019ll no doubt see countless articles examining the company\u2019s influence, with many likely focusing on which single Apple product had the most consequential impact on the tech industry and society as a whole. To be sure, there are myriad options to choose from, most notably, the original Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Yet to me, Apple\u2019s most important contribution over the past fifty years isn\u2019t a physical product. Rather, it\u2019s a policy\u2014one asserting that privacy is a fundamental human right, and, to protect that right, products must be designed with privacy in mind.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a policy that is more important today than ever.<\/p>\n
Whether you realize it or not, you<\/em> are the most important product sold by many of the largest companies in existence. Sure, Google might sell ads, but those ads are only valuable to businesses because of the amount of data that the search giant has on you, which allows those ads to be targeted more effectively. The same goes for Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, and more. These companies offer services in exchange for you giving up your privacy (either knowingly or, often, unknowingly), and then monetizing your data to rake in billions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For roughly the first 20 years of the public internet\u2019s existence, most online companies collected privacy-invasive personal data as a central part of their business model. And as technology became more integrated into our daily lives\u2014 with the advent of smartphones packed with all kinds of new sensors and chips that could gather even more data about us\u2014most tech companies only grew hungrier for our data.<\/p>\n But then something changed. Around 15 years ago, the world\u2019s largest tech company, Apple, began to embrace privacy. One of the first big privacy moves Apple made was to make its iMessage platform end-to-end encrypted, ensuring that no one but you and the recipient could read your messages.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to overstate how seismic a privacy shift this was. While end-to-end encryption had existed earlier in some enterprise messaging solutions, we ordinary everyday users had always been denied equivalent protection\u2014until Apple decided to step in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n