Brian Fung | Washington Post
Apple widened its privacy feud with tech giants on Thursday as it blocked Google from running its internally built iOS apps, an apparent response to the search company’s violation of Apple’s developer terms.
The decision follows reports that Google had been running a voluntary program, similar to Facebook’s, that offered money to participants who installed an app on their phones allowing Google to monitor their activities.
Google said Thursday that it is “working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be resolved soon.”
Much like Facebook’s research app, Google’s software – called Screenwise Meter – had been designed and distributed to consumers under an enterprise developer certificate that restricts the user base to employees. By making the apps available to the wider public, the tech companies ran afoul of Apple’s terms. Google has disabled Screenwise Meter on iOS devices and apologized in a statement to Techcrunch on Wednesday.
“We designed our Enterprise Developer Program solely for the internal distribution of apps within an organization,” Apple said after Techcrunch reported on Facebook’s Research VPN app.
Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said Thursday the company is “working together with Google to help them reinstate their enterprise certificates very quickly.”
Apple has positioned itself as a major critic of the business models that power companies such as Google and Facebook. Chief executive Tim Cook has called for legislation to rein in what he has described as a “data-industrial complex,” and the company’s products and marketing have increasingly emphasized privacy and security features in recent years.
But Apple itself came under fire this week for its own privacy mishap, after a bug emerged showing that hackers could abuse its FaceTime feature to eavesdrop on those they called.
