At WWDC 2019, Apple showed it's truly transforming into a privacy-as-a-service company with its single sign-on service and iOS 13's camera and location updates
Apple shared plenty of news today at its WWDC 2019 annual developer conference, but a few of the announcements early on are potentially …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second straight year Apple has used WWDC to attack surveillance-based business models: the 2018 keynote brought Safari tracking protections explicitly aimed at Facebook, and 2019 extends the fight from the browser into identity and the OS itself. Sign In with Apple is the centerpiece — as The Verge framed it, a sign-in button built for a post-Cambridge Analytica world that treats authentication infrastructure as something needing rebuild.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Google lose their default position as identity providers on iOS: any developer adding a third-party login option now has an Apple-controlled alternative with a private email relay that hides the user's real address.
Second-order effects
- App developers' data-collection habits get squeezed from both ends — iOS 13's camera and location updates add one-time sharing and tracking reminders (detailed in TechCrunch's iOS 13 privacy walkthrough), cutting off the passive background signals that ad-targeting SDKs rely on.
Third-order effects
- The pattern holds through later releases — iOS 14 added mic and camera access notifications, and by WWDC 2022 Apple was Sherlocking apps like Camo and Klarna by absorbing their functions into first-party features — suggesting privacy controls double as a mechanism for pulling third-party functionality into the platform.
The trend: Apple is converting privacy from a compliance posture into a paid-platform service layer spanning identity, OS permissions, and hardware access, with each WWDC tightening what third parties can collect.