Apple’s Advantage

Kyle Baxter, writing about Apple’s Health app and HealthKit, both announced at WWDC:

Second, Apple takes this relationship very seriously. iOS makes it very clear when applications are requesting access to our personal data. Apple has worked quite hard to make sure that the user decides what and how much they want to share.

I don’t think Google or Facebook could announce that they are going to collect their users’ health data and optionally send it to their doctors without some reasonably large amount of criticism and fear of abuse. The reason is obvious: their primary business is utilizing user data to generate revenue, so why couldn’t they do the same with health data?

I agree. Apple highlighted the importance of user privacy several times during the keynote, and I appreciated many of the tech-related choices behind that – such as disabling network access for third-party keyboards by default.