Apple continues to battle impending antitrust laws in the USA that would convey main adjustments to the App Retailer. A letter despatched to the Senate Judiciary Committee by Apple and obtained by 9to5Mac particularly contradicts claims that Apple’s anti-sideloading stance is “unfounded, hypocritical, and dishonest.”
This letter from Apple to the Senate Judiciary Committee is dated March 3 and signed by Timothy Powderly, the corporate’s senior director of presidency affairs. The letter was despatched in response to allegations by cryptographer Bruce Schneier, who instructed lawmakers that Apple’s sideloading safety issues had been “baseless.”
In his personal letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, despatched in January, Schneier wrote:
I want to deal with a number of the unfounded safety issues raised about these payments. It’s merely unfaithful that this laws endangers the privateness and safety of customers. The truth is, it’s extra correct to say that this laws endangers the extractive enterprise fashions of those corporations. Their assertions about privateness and safety dangers are each false and deceptive, and pushed by self-interest, not the general public curiosity.
Reuters was the primary to report on Apple’s response to Schneier, and 9to5Mac has now obtained a whole copy of the doc. Apple explains that Schneier’s accusations are “significantly disappointing” and show that “even gifted technical practitioners” can confuse sideloading points:
Given our normal esteem for Mr. Schneier, these accusations are significantly disappointing. In our expertise, the work of delivering industry-leading safety and privateness to a contemporary computing platform on the scale of a billion units is among the many most advanced engineering and technical coverage efforts. and tough ones, and far of this work stays straightforward to misconceive. Schneier’s letter factors out that even gifted technical practitioners, in the event that they have not labored on key points on this area, can confuse points.
All through the letter, Apple factors to a lot of completely different examples of third-party app shops containing malware-infected apps and apps that harvest consumer information. One of many examples cited by Apple revolves across the Android ecosystem.
Within the Android ecosystem, which has 50 occasions extra malware than iOS 5, Nokia discovered that “the truth that Android apps could be downloaded nearly wherever continues to be an enormous downside, as customers are free to obtain apps from third-party app shops”. , the place many purposes, though useful, are protected by Trojans.
The letter continues:
In Nokia’s 2021 Menace Report, Android units accounted for 50.31% of all contaminated units, adopted by Home windows units at 23.1% and macOS units at 9.2%. iOS units made up such a small proportion that they weren’t even singled out, being lumped into “different” as a substitute. We take into account this a triumph in defending our customers, and it may by no means have been completed with out the cutting-edge final line of protection of our gadget safety controls, working in tandem with the safety and privateness protections of frontline that we offer to our customers by means of the App Retailer and app assessment.
As anticipated, Apple additionally highlights a lot of protections provided by the App Retailer, together with the assessment course of, app monitoring transparency, and privateness diet labels. None of this might be attainable with third-party app shops, Apple says.
The total letter is embedded under.
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