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U.S. Customers Get a New Apple Data Tool

Andrew Orr ·

Apple customers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand get a new Apple data tool. This tool is the same that European users got because of GDPR.

Apple devices such as the iPhone or Apple Watch collect detailed data about users, such as whom they email, call or text message and even biometric data such as heart rates and fingerprints. But Apple’s practice has been to keep much of that data on the devices themselves and encrypt it with the user’s pass code, meaning that Apple does not possess the data and cannot unscramble it if asked to do so by law enforcement officials.

It’s good to see Apple do this, and I’m going to use it and see what changes have been made. You can log into the page here.

Apple Updates Privacy Website with macOS Mojave and iOS 12 Details
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Apple Updates Privacy Website with macOS Mojave and iOS 12 Details

Jeff Gamet ·

Apple updated its privacy website on Wednesday. The site now details security improvements in macOS Mojave and iOS 12, end-to-end encryption for Screen Time and Group FaceTime, improvements to no-tracking for websites, and more. It also includes links for managing your privacy with Apple devices and services, and Apple’s transparency in privacy report. It’s great to see the effort Apple is putting into protecting user privacy, especially since so many other companies are playing fast and loose with our data.

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Popular Web Browsers Dropping TLS 1.0 and 1.1 Support in 2020

Jeff Gamet ·

The big names in the web browser community, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, are all dropping support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 and 1.1 in March 2020. The protocol allowed for secure and encrypted connections to web servers for online forms and data transmission, but proved to have several security flaws. It has been superseded by TLS 1.2. Ars Technica noted the pending depreciation saying,

The impact of removing the old protocols shouldn’t be too substantial. All four companies cite usage figures for the old versions; Firefox sees the most TLS 1.0 and 1.1 usage (1.4 percent of all secure connections) while the other three vendors claim a figure below 1.0 percent. The current recommendation is that sites switch to TLS 1.2 (which happens to be the minimum required for HTTP 2.0) and offer only a limited, modern set of encryption algorithms and authentication schemes. TLS 1.3 was recently finalized, but it currently has little widespread adoption.

Odds are most people won’t notice the lack of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 support since the vast majority of sites have already moved on to version 1.2.