| Hey y'all, it's Austin. On Tuesday in Las Vegas, Apple Inc. will make its first official speaking appearance at the CES technology conference in 28 years. Yet rather than hawking some new phablet or smart speaker, as is common at the gadget extravaganza, Apple will be pitching the public on its commitment to consumer privacy—a corporate value Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has repeatedly called "a fundamental human right." Apple is sending Jane Horvath, its senior director of global privacy, to promote Cupertino's platform security. She'll speak on a panel alongside Facebook Inc.'s chief privacy officer, who's likely to make the case for renewing trust in the social network. The appearances will be a departure from the typical CES fare about embedding technology ever-more deeply into our personal lives. But it's still not clear whether the privacy fanfare is just more hype, or whether 2020 will mark a turning point for the tech industry making good on its promises of protection. It's worth noting that privacy has been a theme of CES for years. Long before the Cambridge Analytica scandal was exposed, company executives have used the trend-setting tech conference to profess their commitment to protecting personal information, even as they unveiled hardware and software that collected reams more of it. "We believe customers own their data and we are simply stewards of that data," said Mark Fields, then-CEO of Ford Motor Co., at CES in 2015, as he revealed new in-vehicle sensors and analytics capabilities. "We commit to being trusted stewards of that data." Of course, as it turned out, corporations have often proved poor stewards of consumer data in the half-decade since. (Even some Ford files were exposed last year.) Critics have argued that CES has not devoted enough attention to this existential industry threat. Instead, the conference has at times served a testing ground for merely marketing privacy. At last year's CES, for example, Apple erected a giant billboard in Vegas advertising that, "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone"—an obvious dig at its Silicon Valley rivals. At subsequent tech conferences in 2019, both Google and Facebook adopted similar approaches to selling privacy to the public. But there's a sense that companies can no longer get away with only paying lip service to privacy policies. Imagine if Ford or another automaker heavily advertised five-star vehicle safety, even as they continuously failed J.D. Power reliability tests. How many crashes could they afford before consumers woke up to the idea that their safety promotions were bogus? The same ought to be true for platform safety in the tech world. While it's unclear whether we've reached a tipping point where consumers are, say, buying an Apple HomePod over an Amazon Echo because of privacy differentiation, there are signs that users may be increasingly swayed by innovative safety features and more transparent data-collection practices. A recent Pew Research Center study found that a stunning 81% of surveyed U.S. adults believe the potential risks of data-mining products and services outweigh the convenience they provide. Apple, which has continued to make data security a centerpiece of its recent ad campaigns, is hoping its privacy stance will prove a competitive advantage. But so far, their ads have served as reminders of the ways Apple has apparently failed to live up to its own standards. What happens on your iPhone, as it were, hasn't always stayed on your iPhone, from Siri voice-requests to location data to app inputs. Perhaps that's why Apple is sending Horvath to CES this week: When it comes to introducing true product privacy, a billboard is no longer enough.—Austin Carr | 
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