Study Reveals That Many Consumers Trust Apple Over Samsung In Terms of Privacy Policies

A study by NordVPN reveals that smartphone users trust Apple over Samsung where personal security and privacy are concerned.

I feel like a major reason for this boils down to Apple’s history of being, for lack of a better term, severe with third-party companies and the competition. Despite frequent knuckling from the likes of Meta and Google, the tech giant has rigidly stuck to its policies and demands, safe in the knowledge that the iPhones have established a monopoly of sorts in and of themselves. This behavior can most recently be noted in the iOS 14 Tracking/Transparency features, which caused a massive ruckus with Meta.

The social media conglomerate ran ad campaigns, threatened, and pleaded with Apple to absolutely no effect. It lost much of the Apple audience’s ad revenue, and iPhone users kept chugging along, safe in the knowledge that their data wasn’t being sold to third-party companies without their explicitly provided information. A lot can be stated against Apple and much of its other seedier practices (I don’t trust overseas unsupervised factories all that much), but the company pledges itself to provide cybersecurity safety for its customers.

Samsung, on the other hand, hasn’t established any sort of similar behavior. While the company is branching out into security features, with regards to its clipboard, for example, such small steps are largely overshadowed by the number of cybersecurity holes that users frequently encounter. One of the company’s biggest crutches is the Play Store. While Samsung has a separate app store, its popularity severely pales in the face of Google Play, which is typically regarded as the de facto online store for all Android smartphones. The downside of having Play boils down to its severe lack of platform maintenance, which leads to malware populating Android phones, and Samsung ones by association, by the thousands on a near-daily basis.

44% of the research's sample population believed that iPhones would keep them safer, and 24% felt safer with Samsung. Ultimately, much of this seems to boil down to perspective, as only 50% have ever read the privacy policies of their smartphone brands, and 47% bother to recheck privacy settings after updating their OS. On a more optimistic note, 83% of the populace do claim to know where their privacy settings are and are therefore competent enough to recheck and manage their phones to some extent.

Read next: Apple Dominates the Connected Device Market, Sees Fastest Growth
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World