Apple, Inc.
Headquartered in the United States, Apple manufactures computers, smartphones, and other devices, and produces the iOS operating system, software, and App Store. As of early 2021, the company had a base of 1.65 billion active devices. Apple derives most of its profits from the sale of hardware, but ad sales drive an increasing proportion of the company’s profits.
Throughout 2021, Apple retained its position as the most profitable publicly traded technology company in the world. In 2020, the company released its first-ever comprehensive human rights policy, in which it vowed to protect users’ rights to freedom of expression. But the company has yet to demonstrate a strong track record in conducting human rights due diligence on decisions that affect this right. Indeed, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Apple stopped selling its products in Russia, removed the RT News and Sputnik News apps from its AppStore outside of Russia, and disabled traffic and live incidents features for Apple Maps in Ukraine. How did the removals affect regular people in both countries? It is not clear that Apple fully considered this question. The company offered no evidence of having conducted a human rights impact assessment before taking these measures.
Although designing and selling hardware has always been at the core of Apple’s business model, in 2021 the company saw considerable gains in advertising-driven revenue, stemming from its App Tracking Transparency policy. The policy constituted a win for user privacy, by preventing third-party apps in the iOS mobile ecosystem from tracking users without their consent. But it also gave Apple effective control over the iOS in-app advertising market, tripling its market share just months after the policy took effect. The policy also caused upheaval among third-party companies that sell their apps on the App Store. Meta in particular saw it as an imminent threat to its own ad-based business model.
In its public messaging and campaigns, Apple maintains that it is better at respecting privacy than its competitors. Yet despite the enormous revenues it generates from in-app advertising and ad targeting, Apple published very little information about its ad-content and ad-targeting rules in 2021. The company also failed to publish information about actions it takes to enforce content-related rules for ads and the App Store. How many apps did it remove from the App Store in 2021, and on what grounds? The company has yet to say.
The 2022 Big Tech Scorecard covers policies that were active on November 1, 2021. Policies that came into effect after November 1, 2021, were not evaluated for this ranking.
Scores reflect the average score across the services we evaluated, with each service weighted equally.
We rank companies on their governance, and on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy.
Apple lagged behind most of its U.S. peers on human rights due diligence (G4), and did not commit to respecting human rights in its development and use of algorithms (G1). Apple’s App Store policies failed to give users or developers sufficient information about how to appeal app removals (G6b).
Although Apple made an explicit commitment to protect freedom of expression in 2020, the company still lagged far behind most of its U.S. peers in this category. Although it published data about content and accounts it restricted for violating its rules for the first time, the company omitted key details from the data, such as the total numbers of accounts and pieces of content restricted (F4). And while Apple did publish a policy saying that it uses algorithms within the App Store to rank search results (F1d), the policy revealed nothing about how it uses algorithms to curate, rank, or recommend content in its App Store (F12). The company did not publish similar policies for the other Apple services we evaluated.
Apple earned the second-highest privacy score of all companies in our ranking, primarily due to its policies on security (P13) and encryption (P16). Nevertheless, the company still did not earn a passing grade in this category. This is due in large part to its lack of transparency regarding how it collects, infers (P3), and handles user data coming from third parties (P9).