Apple’s privacy director hails commitment to privacy at Brussels summit

Apple’s privacy director hails commitment to privacy at Brussels summit

Neuenschwander joined CPO Jane Horvath at CPDP 22.

What you need to know

Apple hosted a session on privacy at CPDP on Tuesday.
Erik Neuenschwander said Apple designs ‘great privacy’ on its platforms in multiple different ways.
Jane Horvath hosted a summit on the ‘global governance of privacy’.

Apple’s director of user privacy Erik Neuenschwander has hailed the company’s commitment to privacy and designing great privacy features at a panel hosted by the company at CPDP 2022.

Neuenschwander took to the stage at a session in Brussels Tuesday on the second day of the Computers, Privacy & Data Protection summit as part of a panel on ‘Global Governance of Privacy: Beyond Regulation.’

The panel was hosted by Apple’s Chief Privacy Officer Jane Horvath, from the schedule:

The panel will seek to explore how privacy and privacy enhancing technologies are being realized through multistakeholderism and the pros and cons of this approach. Can technical solutions to privacy pave the way for high levels of privacy protection beyond jurisdictional borders? Should laws provide space or even incentives for privacy preserving innovation and, if so, how? Panellists will be asked to put forward their views on global governance of privacy and whether privacy can and should be achieved through multistakeholderism and the limits therein.

On stage, Neuenschwander talked about the “multiple ways” that Apple designs devices like its best iPhones for ‘great privacy’ using features like its App Tracking Transparency measure. Apple recently unveiled a new iPhone privacy campaign that shows a woman stumbling upon an auction for all of her data with its usual tagline ‘Privacy. That’s iPhone.’

Erik Neuenschwander, Apple.

Multiple ways Apple designs for ‘great privacy’. Session processing. On device processing. App tracking transparency.

<Me. Thinking ‘what about those system services location defaults’ 😉 #CPDP2022 https://t.co/o7WHky02Kp pic.twitter.com/KjiyO5d2uo

— Privacy Matters 🇬🇧🇮🇪🇪🇺🌻 (@PrivacyMatters) May 24, 2022

Also in attendance was Hanff & Co’s Alexander Hanff, Dr. Konstantin Böttinger of the Fraunhofer AISEC, The EU Data Protection Supervisor’s Anna Buchta and TILT’s Dr. Lorenzo Dalla Corte.

In an interview last week Horvath spoke about how Apple was her dream job, reflecting on her first meeting at Apple she said:

“…when we were debating what data the engineers can collect off a device, a colleague said to me, “We might be able to string this data together to all of the other data we’re collecting and somehow identify someone, and we don’t want to do that.” I thought, Wow, I have arrived at a place that really, really protects privacy.”