Apple, Encryption, and Privacy -- Talking Tech w/ Erik Neuenschwander
Host Brian Wesolowski sits down with Erik Neuenschwander, the Manager of User Privacy at Apple, to discuss a myriad of privacy issues.<br><br>More on Erik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikneuenschwander/<br>More on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT. Tea.
Welcome to CDT's tech talk, where we dish on tech and Internet policy, while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski, and it's time to talk tech. Today is all about encryption, and we have an awesome guest. I'm very excited to welcome Eric Neunschwander, the manager of user privacy at Apple, which is a company that has been a true champion of encryption and security. Welcome, Eric. Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. It is such a pleasure. So let's let's start it off with an easy question. I always wanna do that. Tell me about yourself, your background, and what you do at Apple. You think that's an easy question for a privacy person? Oh, come on. You can do this.
So, I've worked in tech my whole career. I've been at Apple for over eleven years at this point. And, I worked on the first iPhone, worked on the first iPad. Wow. And then in 2011, started a dedicated team focused on privacy Apple's approach to privacy, I think, predates that by a lot. It goes back to our founders and our founding. But just with the evolution of technology, of our products, it made sense to create a discipline and a real dedicated team around doing that work for the company. Great. So we're talking about encryption today. That's that work for the company.
Great. So we're talking about encryption today. That's a big part of what you do. From your perspective, what role does encryption play in our digital society? So we go from specific to lofty.
Well, I think that encryption helps people have trust in the products that they use. If you're transacting online, if you're communicating online, if you're carrying around sensitive data on your phone, you wanna feel that you have the freedom to do that. You wanna feel that you have the freedom to express yourself, and you have the trust that whatever you're doing has integrity in it, has the right person on the other end that isn't being listened into. And I think all of those things just let us kind of get the fuller expression of ourselves in in our digital lives. Digital lives is basically our whole life these days. And so if you're going to be able to freely express yourself, you have to do that digitally. And, you know, right now, we're sitting here in person. Everyone else is listening to us, but I can tell who I'm talking to. We can establish that level of trust very easily in the real world. But when you're dealing with things digitally, you really need encryption to provide that.
Okay. So what's a world with encryption without encryption look like? Is that a terrifying place?
It's it's really hard for me to imagine, actually. When I think back to all the advancements in the past few decades, many of them rely on encryption. All the online banking, online transacting that we do, the ability to exchange digital records, I think that all of that has come about because of encryption. So I don't know. If I was going to try to imagine a world without encryption, I think we would all feel that to be online was to be exposed, that we had to self censor. As much as people wanna share, I think they wanna have control over how they're sharing. And encryption is what gives us the tools or really gives platform providers like Apple the tools to give you the experiences where you can feel safe and protected like that. So in a world without encryption, I think that we would all be, lessened and the world wouldn't be as advanced. And, I don't know. That's not a world that I'd like to live in at least. Okay. Well, good thing you don't have to. Although, I will say when anything let's just say something bad happens, I often hear a refrain
whether it's a terrorist attack, something horrible, that we should break encryption for law enforcement. And another refrain I often hear is that we should do this because innocent people have nothing to hide. How would you respond to that?
There's a lot in that. I think, first, as far as breaking encryption for law enforcement, the breaking it only for the good guys part isn't something that anyone has been able to propose. Any sort of extraordinary access mechanism basically means, you're going to be messing with encryption, and that really comes down to two things. For encryption, there's the algorithm, the math that basically protects the data, and then you have a key that you use to either read the data or to protect it. So if you want extraordinary access and you mess with the algorithm, you're going to weaken it, and then you've weakened it for everybody, the good guys and the bad guys. And everybody seems to think that that, that's not a good trade off. So then they So weakened means
any you know, if there's a flaw,
good and bad could find that flaw potentially. Right. Because the flaw is just present there. And so either you know about it or you don't, and then you can find out. Or you have the capability or you don't, and then you can work to get that capability, and you you can't kind of unring that bell. If you want to turn your attention to the keys, then most people talk about either creating a copy of a key or maybe creating more keys and spreading them out in different places, and that's going to make this system more complex. And complexity is where you get unintended consequences creeping in, and whoever else has those keys will become a centralized point of attack for the bad guys to go try to get those keys, to go read the data. So in both of those dimensions, if we talk about breaking encryption, we don't know how to do that just for the good guys, and the bad guys are out there constantly trying to attack and get at people's personal, financial, medical, whatever data. Right. And so there's a real trade off there. And I don't think anybody has found a way to avoid the trade off. So the debate, when it's a good debate, is really about is that trade off worth it. And so when I think about the side of I have nothing to hide, I think that, you know, if you feel that your thoughts, your behaviors aren't the sort of thing that would be of interest to a government or interest to somebody who wanted to gain power over you, then that's a nice privilege to enjoy. But I think if we look across the world, a lot of people have a much more restricted amount of freedom. And so encryption protects the weakest among us, and I think that if we, again, go back to this idea that people want to have trust and want to be able to freely express themselves in a digital world, encryption is the tool that provides that capability. Yeah. And I I think a good pivot
is that trust aspect of it. So even if you, in theory, have nothing to hide, you certainly have things you want secure. Definitely. So let's talk about Apple a bit. This is great to hear. You know, you've rolled out campaigns about privacy. You are, you know, champions of privacy. Describe your philosophy here when it comes to privacy. Why is it so important to Apple as a company as a whole?
I think for Apple, it's really thought of as as a as a good, a moral good, if you will. It just seems to us to be the right way to design our products and services to be respectful of our customer. Apple, I think, legendarily puts the customer first in all of our design, and for us, privacy is just an aspect of expressing that. In terms of our approach, internally I mean, this could be a whole additional podcast probably, but I'm super fascinated by this, so go for it. But, if you we kind of use a set of principles internally, which, recently last fall, Tim Cook, our CEO, expressed in a speech. And it basically boils down to looking at how we can minimize the amount of data that we collect and restrict its use to the purposes for which we collected it, and then ensure that users that we're very transparent to users about that collection and give them control, including control over the ability to get a copy or correct or delete data that we might have.
That's great. So tell me a bit more. You brought it up a little bit earlier, how you integrate privacy by design. And if people don't know that term, you know, it kinda gets thrown around, define it for us.
The term definitely gets thrown around. I think it could almost mean whatever you want. And so for us, it has two aspects to it. One is that we're involved early on in the design or the conception of products or services that we do. Privacy isn't something that you can very effectively just kind of layer on at the end, just as you can't with security or encryption. It has to be baked into the actual technical architecture to the goals that you have in the product or or the service. And then the second dimension of what privacy by design means for us goes back to those principles that I talked about. That is really how we put into practice an idea or the concept of privacy by design. It means things like restricting the amount of data that we collect and really empowering our users more than empowering ourselves as a company, and encryption is a key part of that because all of this rests on a foundation of security. If you don't have security both in the data itself and in your approach to restrict the availability or the transfer or whatever of that data, then you haven't done any of those other aspects of privacy well.
Interesting. So what so when I think about some of the Apple that or some of the data that Apple has, you know, I have an iPhone. It's not a plug for the iPhone, but I have an iPhone, and I use my face to unlock it. Biometric data or people say you have biometric data. How does, one, biometrics enhance security, but, two, what do you do with that data?
So the biometric systems, systems, we first introduced touch ID, into the phone, and now we have touch ID on the Mac as well, and we have face ID for some of the phones and pads. And all this biometric input or way to unlock your device really helps with the usability of it. So we've had passcodes for a very long time, and maybe you're the type of person who is annoyed by having a passcode. Or maybe you've heard that you shouldn't have a short four digit passcode, but you really don't wanna type 10 letters. You know, your technologists in this office probably have, you know, very, very long passcodes. I've learned a lot from our technologists. Yeah. But for for most people even if they understand and and have that long passcode, they want it to be very easy to use, and so by able, say with face ID, to just unlock your phone with a glance, that's very usable. That's very easy. And so it makes it easy for people to adopt a strong passcode, which getting back again to the privacy and the security, that's the root of protecting your data on your device. Now you said, you know, you have biometrics, and the you there gets to be maybe a little bit ambiguous. Right? Because Apple itself, Apple Inc, the company, doesn't have any biometrics. Oh, interesting. The biometric features that we have, first of all, you don't have to use them. But if you choose to use them, then that data is saved only within your device. And in fact, to get a little bit more technical for a second, the thing that you interact with on your phone is our operating system iOS. It runs all of your apps. Even iOS doesn't have access to that model of your face or of your finger to unlock the phone. It's in a separate part of the phone. We call it the secure enclave, but the important part is that it's not even the iOS operating system. So not only does Apple not have a database of your fingerprints or models of your face, not even most of your phone has access to that. Wow. So the data is always protected on your phone, and it stays there. So backing up to iCloud, my face doesn't come with me. Your face does not come with it. That that actually makes me feel quite good
unlocking with my face. Let's talk about some of your other products because you did very very recently roll out a fair number of them. And it was, as I said before, a central theme of that kind of rollout, privacy, security, encryption. Are there any that really stand out that you're proud of in terms of privacy took center stage and the the development of it? Well, I think I'm proud of all of them. But, that's a good one. Just like your children. Right? Yeah. Absolutely.
You know, not to turn this into a whole recapitulation of the event, I guess, to pick one, we introduced Apple News Plus, and Apple News Plus builds on the foundation of the design in Apple News where Apple doesn't know what you read. We're not tracking the articles that you read, and this is something which really came out because we approached that early on in the design. We said, okay. Well, we want this news reading service. We want it personalized. We want it to surface great articles for you based on your interest, but we don't want to know what you read. And so one aspect that we turn to there, which is a theme throughout our other services, is this thing we call on device intelligence, and that just means using the power of the hardware that we design along with the software that we also design and integrating all that really well together, and exploiting that power to have the device do that personalization for you. So with Apple News and with Apple News plus, your device will download a a whole batch of articles, and then using what it, not Apple, but it, your phone, knows about you, it will select among that batch which ones it should surface up as suggestions. So we're able to do what we like best, which is having a great experience, which is a personalized news reading service along with some really great privacy, which is that we are not collecting your reading history and a profile of you to determine what you should read on your device. And then not selling that to advertisers because you can't. Very much. We don't have the ability to, market your identity because for that service, we're just not collecting it against your identity. That seems like something the news ecosystem could use.
So before I let you go, you wanna play a game of true, false? I feel as though there's a lot of myths around encryption. So so let's and you can answer more than just true, false. You can give the why because that's always helpful. So, number one, true or false, Apple doesn't ever cooperate with law enforcement.
That's false. We have a, global team that works around the clock to be available for law enforcement, and we publish the numbers of requests and the number of responses that team gives in our transparency report at apple.com/wow.
That rolled off. That was great. True or false? Law enforcement should not be given a safe backdoor to encrypted communications. Wow. There are a lot of negatives in that. Yeah. I know. Just wanna mess with you. I'll read it again. Law enforcement should not be given a safe backdoor to encrypted communications.
Tricking you with this one. Yeah. I I think there is no safe backdoor. There we go. Advanced questioning. Not true or false. Yeah.
Alright. Next one. True or or false, law enforcement is going dark because of encryption. We hear that one a lot here at CDT.
We do, and you've probably heard it for a long time. I think that's false, and it's been false ever since the nineties when it first started coming up that law enforcement would not be able to get access to data. And in the decades since, that hasn't proved true. And in fact, I think their surveillance capabilities have have only increased. That said, I do think there's a need for more training and funding for law enforcement because increasingly they're presented with these digital evidence assets that they don't have the tools to be able to process to be able to bring criminals to justice.
Alright. So next one. True or false? Encrypted data is a 100% secure.
Also false. Oh. There's no absolute security or absolute privacy. Encrypted data is better protected data. Absolutely. But, you see time and time again that over time, the attacks get stronger and protections will eventually fall. It's why it's important that every technology company keep investing in security. If we, as an industry, say were to stop moving forward, in practice, you would actually fall behind because the attackers would begin catching up. So you'll always have a job is what this comes down to. Right? That's my hope.
Alright. Last one. True or false? Most new phones, and I'm talking smartphones, cell phones, are encrypted by default.
Well, Apple phones have had encryption by default since 2009. So for us, it's true. But I think that many lesser phones have not yet caught up to that standard. Is there a way that people can check if they're encrypted by default? I guess you can't know every type of phone out there. Right. For every type of phone, I don't know. If you go into settings under the passcode section of settings on iOS, I think at the bottom, you will see a line that says data protection enabled. It's just a line. It's written there. It's true for every phone, so you don't even have to look. But at least on an iPhone, you can see that it's there. So people should at least ask that question if they aren't buying an iPhone, which I already said I have done in life.
Alright, Eric. We've covered just about everything with encryption. Anything that I should have asked you that I didn't that you'd love to share with our listeners? No. Thanks. Those were really great questions. I try. Well, thanks for being a guest. It was such a pleasure having you. Alright. Thanks again. That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. For the very latest on what CDT is doing to shape a vibrant digital future, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or visit cdt.org. I'm Brian Wasilowski. Thanks for listening.
