Apple today shared a humorous new privacy-focused iPhone ad in which people awkwardly overshare their personal information with strangers, such as their credit card number, login details, and web browsing history.
A man yells in a bus full of people that he browsed eight sites for divorce lawyers. A woman blithely tells her log in information to strangers in a movie house. A pair of coworkers has an unflattering conversation out loud about a nearby colleague and a woman uses a megaphone to broadcast her credit card information to anyone within earshot.
Some of them are embarrassing, some are potential privacy violations, but they’re among the examples in Apple’s new Over Sharing ad, which re-emphasizes the company’s focus or at least its image of being a protector of online privacy. The ad’s tagline, shown at the end, reads “Some things shouldn’t be shared. iPhone helps keep it that way.”
Apple has repeatedly said that it believes privacy is a “fundamental human right,” and one of the company’s “core values.” At the CES electronics show in Las Vegas last year, Apple promoted its commitment to privacy with a billboard near the convention center that read “what happens on your ?iPhone?, stays on your ?iPhone?.”
Apple has not been without its own share of security problems in addition to the FaceTime bug, Apple was forced to apologize last August for secretly having human contractors listen to recordings of the iPhone’s digital assistant Siri.
Still, the Over Sharing ad reminds us just how much of our digital lives and information can be made public, or at least readily available for nefarious actors if we and the technology we rely on aren’t careful about what we share and how.
