Apple to participate in CES 2020
Apple will participate in CES 2020.
The company’s senior director of global privacy — Jane Horvath — is set to participate in a Jan. 7 roundtable on privacy at the trade show.
According to the schedule on the CES website, the panel will address how companies build privacy at scale, what’s to come in terms of regulation and what consumers want.
During CES 2019, Apple highlighted privacy regulations with a large billboard across the street from Google’s outdoor pavilion at the Las Vegas Convention Center that read, “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone,” referencing controversies tied to data protection at Google, Facebook and other industry peers.
Data is the oil that greases artificial intelligence, the technology behind many of the products at the show. Speakers at a panel on autonomous vehicles during CES 2019 highlighted privacy concerns as one of the issues the auto sector has to address as it transitions to smart cars.
Facebook and Google use consumer data to target advertisements, which account for a significant part of their revenue. That usage has come under greater scrutiny after reports of misuse last year.
Google executives said at a September 2018 Senate hearing that the company had “made mistakes” with privacy.
Facebook confirmed Cambridge Analytica used its platform to collect data on as many as 87 million users, promoting more calls for regulation of social media sites.
When asked about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Apple CEO Tim Cook said his company would never have gotten itself into such a problem.
“The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer — if our customer was our product. We’ve elected not to do that,” Cook told MSNBC in March 2018.
Apple will not have an exhibitor booth at CES 2020, which will run Jan. 7-10. More than 170,000 attendees are expected to attend Las Vegas’ largest annual convention.
An Apple spokesman declined the Review-Journal’s request for comment Tuesday on why the company chose to participte in the 2020 show.
Contact Bailey Schulz at bschulz@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0233. Follow @bailey_schulz on Twitter. Former Review-Journal staff writer Todd Prince contributed to this report.
