Apple Reassures Users That macOS Isn’t Spying On Them

Apple is a company that loves touting how they value the privacy of their customers, but recently, it seems that an incident occurred that called into question Apple’s commitment to user privacy. This comes in the form of Apple’s Gatekeeper tool that basically checks against Apple’s own servers to determine if a piece of software is legitimate or not.

However, recently following the launch of macOS Big Sur, Apple experienced some server issues that prevented certain services from working and also some third-party apps from launching. Researchers looked into the issue and found that macOS was sending details back to Apple’s servers about what kind of apps users were using, which led to some concerns that Apple was spying on its users.

Apple has since addressed these concerns in an updated support document which reads, “macOS has been designed to keep users and their data safe while respecting their privacy. Gatekeeper performs online checks to verify if an app contains known malware and whether the developer’s signing certificate is revoked. We have never combined data from these checks with information about Apple users or their devices. We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are launching or running on their devices.”

However, the company is also acknowledging that some users might not necessarily with comfortable with this and that come 2021, Apple will stop logging user IP addresses during the notarization process, and that they will also be giving users the option of opting out of some of these security protections.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: macOS, Privacy