The privacy you shouldn't have to audit

John Gruber has a sharp piece on Apple’s slow slide into the advertising business, and the line that stuck with us is about where trust actually comes from. What gave Tim Cook’s 2014 privacy letter its weight, Gruber points out, wasn’t the prose — it was that you didn’t have to take Apple’s word for it. Apple didn’t show you ads in 2014, so there was nothing to trust about. The absence was the proof.

That’s the whole game, and it’s why we keep coming back to it. A privacy promise from a company that also sells your attention is a promise you have to audit — and almost nobody can. A privacy promise from a company that simply isn’t in that business is one you can verify by looking at what the company does and doesn’t do. The strongest privacy claim is the one you never have to make, because the architecture makes the bad outcome impossible rather than merely against policy.

It’s easy to give that position up one reasonable-sounding ad unit at a time. It’s nearly impossible to win back, because what you’re spending isn’t revenue — it’s the thing that made anyone believe you in the first place. We’d rather never be in a position to have to ask for that trust back.