I have been meaning to write this post ever since I read about Tim Cook’s speech on how Apple protects its customers’ privacy. Since then there have been posts arguing that Google’s (and others’) approach has merits because it allows for creating a better customer experience and also because it supports free services that are accessible by more people. But neither convenience nor price is the most important tradeoff here. Instead it is the limitations on general purpose computing that Apple imposes on its iOS devices.

With an iPhone you hold an incredibly powerful general purpose computer in your hand, yet Apple meaningfully determines what you can do with it. Unless you make major efforts the only software you can run is one that has previously been approved by Apple. Also Apple decides which capabilities of the device to expose to software that is accessible to you and documented (only Apple itself has access to the lower levels). Limits on general purpose computing are a huge tradeoff for society.

Before I explain why let’s first look at an analogy. Imagine buying a car but having the car maker retain control over which roads you can drive on. Looking to go down that small road to the beach? You car just won’t move. I think very few people would find that an acceptable limitation on how they can use a car, which after all, they have paid for. In the case of software, the limitation is less obvious. After all, you can download apps from the App Store for seemingly everything (“there’s an app for that”). But the second you dig a little bit you realize that Apple had and is exercising all sorts of control, including for example what ecommerce experience you can have, how potentially offensive content is treated and what you can do with crypto currencies.

Now imagine a world where all your options for mobile computing fall into that model. It is easy to see how just a few major corporations could control what we all can do and cannot do with our devices in such a world. Given that we use these devices all day every day to connect to each other that could quickly result in severe limitations on our ability to exercise our rights such as freedom of speech. Or put differently: in the modern world, general purpose computing (which includes networking) is a foundational enabler of freedom.

So Apple’s defense of endusers’ privacy rings hollow to me when the company is taking away what I consider to be a more foundational right — the ability to run whatever software I want to on the general purpose computer I have purchased.

PS In a follow up post I will write about how more generally much of the pro privacy advocacy is at odds with general purpose computing