Apple Expands Privacy Features, Enables Digital ID Storage on iPhones

Apple announced a bundle of privacy and convenience features on Monday at its annual developers conference, moves that position the company as increasingly willing to handle sensitive personal data while simultaneously shielding users from surveillance—a tension that defines much of what the company is now attempting.

The centerpiece was digital identification. Apple will let users photograph their state-issued driver's licenses and store encrypted copies in the iPhone's digital wallet, the same place where credit cards and transit passes already live. The company is working with the Transportation Security Administration to make these digital IDs acceptable at airport security checkpoints, starting with participating U.S. states. The rollout amounts to a significant expansion of what Apple considers safe to keep on a phone, and a bet that Americans will trust the company with documents they currently carry in their physical wallets.

The privacy layer underneath these new capabilities got equal billing. Apple rebranded its paid iCloud storage service to iCloud+ and added three new protections without raising the price. Private relay masks a user's identity and web browsing from both Apple itself and from advertisers—a feature that directly contradicts the business model of most internet companies, which profit from knowing who you are and what you do online. A second feature hides your email address when you fill out forms on websites, substituting a random address that forwards to your real inbox. A third blocks email senders from using invisible trackers to detect when you open their messages. The company also said Siri, its voice assistant, will handle some requests locally on the device rather than sending them to Apple's servers.

These announcements came as Apple faces sustained pressure from developers and regulators over how it runs the App Store. The company takes a 15 to 30 percent commission on digital sales through apps, a practice that has drawn antitrust lawsuits—most notably from Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, where a federal judge is currently weighing how to rule. At the conference, Apple introduced in-app events, a feature letting developers host live events within their apps and promote them directly in the App Store, a move that puts Apple in direct competition with Facebook, which announced on the same day that it would launch a competing events business free until 2023, then charging lower commissions than Apple's standard 30 percent.

The developer sentiment is mixed but measurable. A survey by Creative Strategies found that more than 90 percent of app makers have no plans to stop building for Apple devices. But complaints cluster around two points: more than half of developers surveyed said the commission should be capped at 10 percent, and many want clearer explanations for why the App Store rejects their apps and how they can appeal those decisions. The conference, held online for the second year because of the pandemic, typically draws thousands of developers hoping the company will hear their concerns. Whether these new features address those concerns is unclear; they appear instead to be Apple's answer to a different question—how to make the iPhone more indispensable while making it harder for anyone, including Apple, to track what users do with it.

The FaceTime expansion signals where Apple sees competition. The app now supports scheduling calls with multiple attendees and works on Android and Windows devices, moves that directly challenge Zoom Video Communications, which gained enormous prominence during the pandemic. Several of the features Apple announced—like using artificial intelligence to extract text from photographs—have existed on Android for years, a reminder that Apple often lags in raw capability but leads in integration and user trust.