In the midst of immense public outcry against rampant personal data collection by companies, Apple showed off a variety of new security features for its upcoming iOS 13 release at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
The conference comes days after Apple launched a new website trying to highlight its App Store’s accomplishments while countering complaints against the company.
“At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right and we engineer it into everything we do,” said Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software engineering at Apple.
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iPhone users can now opt to have applications use their location only once and to ask for permission every time afterwards. Also, a new “Sign in with Apple” feature gives users the option to have Apple auto-generate a random “relay” email address that hides your real email address.
“That’s good news because we each get a unique random address, and this means you can disable any one of them and anytime when you’re tired of hearing from that app,” Federighi said.
To bring security to the edge, Apple announced HomeKit Secure Video, which analyzes home security footage in the home before encrypting it and sending it to the cloud.
iOS 13 will also introduce many performance enhancements that include 30 percent faster Face ID, downloads that take half as much memory and 60 percent smaller updates, according to the company.
Meanwhile, WatchOS is finally moving away from its reliance on the iPhone for many of its features and the iPad will get its own OS.
In addition, Apple showed off improvements to Maps, Emoji and Siri to help it compete with its rivals Google Assistant and Alexa. Siri will get new neural text-to-speech technology to infuse machine learning into its speech patterns.
