When companies fuel people’s suspicions

It’s bad when companies aren’t upfront with their customers. It’s much worse when companies aren’t upfront in ways that fuel conspiracy theories.

Apple agreed on Wednesday to pay $113 million to settle an investigation by more than 30 states into its past practice of secretly slowing down older iPhones to preserve their battery life, my colleague Jack Nicas reported. In 2017, Apple acknowledged that it had reprogrammed its software to slow down phones with older batteries in some circumstances to prevent them from shutting off unexpectedly.

What Apple had been doing was not necessarily wrong, but the way the company communicated with customers was clueless.

Apple knew that people had suspected for years that the company intentionally made people’s existing iPhones slower when new models were coming out so that people would buy new phones. There has never been evidence of this, and Apple has gotten angry about these rumors over the years.

The problem was that when Apple trained its software to slow down iPhones — for perhaps a sensible reason — it didn’t sufficiently explain what it was doing. And that fueled the conspiracy theories that people already had about their iPhones. Apple created unnecessary controversy for itself.

Likewise, Facebook made a similar error when it acknowledged having human reviewers listen to audio clips from people using its services but didn’t properly explain why. There may have been legitimate reasons for Facebook to review people’s audio recordings from its Messenger app and other products, but the company wasn’t transparent about what it was doing — either to customers or its workers.

Again, this activity played into long-held suspicions that Facebook was listening to people’s private conversations. Facebook executives have rebutted these suspicions. It’s harder to trust Facebook saying it’s not secretly listening to people, when its workers do actually listen to people without their true knowledge or consent.

My free advice for rich companies: Don’t do anything that undermines your own attempts to bat down conspiracy theories.
The New York Times
Me: So who gets the “Apple agreed on Wednesday to pay $113 million” would that be the Government by any chance and not the Apple customers?