Should Apple Credit Card Feature be Trusted
After the photo scandal in which prominent Hollywood stars such as Jennifer Lawrence private pictures were stolen by hackers and uploaded on the internet, Apple is hell bent on doing the marketing that is primarily focus on damage control. Tim Cook Apple’s CEO wrote:
"Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services like Apple Pay. And we continue to make improvements. Two-step verification, which we encourage all our customers to use, in addition to protecting your Apple ID account information, now also protects all of the data you store and keep up to date with iCloud
I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will."
If we look at the statement Tim have highlighted two things. First he is advocating about improvement and security of the new service ‘Apple Pay’. We do need to keep in mind here that Apple’s current breach is still under investigation and until the causes of the breach are determined Tim’s claim cannot be taken seriously.
Second he is telling his loyal customers that Apple never share any information nor have any secret contracts with the government. But in the past Apple has cooperated with government investigations by turning over individual users' data. We know that Edward Snowden'sleaks revealed in June 2013 that many tech companies assist government investigations by turning over suspects' data. Good for Apple’s CEO that he realized this after one year and coming clean on this.
Apple Pay
The Apple Pay includes near-field communication technology or NFC, which allows for the transfer of small amounts of data between two devices held closely to one another. The payment will be done by giving your biometric finger signature, the database of which is obviously stored on remote servers. Apple did not go into any detail describing the security measures of Apple Pay.
Apple Pay is no doubt a big threat for conventional payment systems, but regular users of iphone cannot just blindly put trust on this system. The wise thing therefor for them if they are not tech savvy is not to adopt the technologies such as Apple Pay and others of similar type for some time. Therefore wise thing for regular users who are not tech savvy is to observe how the new entrant is performing.
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