Grateful for nag screens

I used to be really blase about digital privacy.

Even when Tim Cook asserted that privacy is a fundamental human right, I was still indifferent to it.

I was laboring under the misimpression that online privacy was mostly about personalized advertising. It’s just used to target ads, I thought: Who cares?

But if course, it’s far more than that. Our data is used constantly for all kinds of purposes, some benign but many nefarious — from denying health insurance coverage to identity theft.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Report, for example, details more than one million cybercrime complaints in 2025 and losses of nearly $21 billion from defrauded Americans, many aided by data freely available online.

An elderly relative of mine suffering from dementia was cheated out of several thousand dollars last year — and I’m convinced it was directly tied to leaks of her personal info.

I’ve become a lot more serious about protecting my personal data, and I’m very grateful that Apple is one of the few Silicon Valley companies that can be trusted to guard it.

I do have to admit though, tha many of Apple’s privacy prompts are annoying. It gets tiresome very quickly to be asked every time whether you want to share some data or not — I’m trying to do something, of course I do!

But nag screens like this new AI-related one aren’t an annoyance. They’re a reminder that you should always be careful what you share.

Also in today’s newsletter:

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

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