Apple today published a new page on their website dedicated to explaining Apple’s commitment to preserving the privacy of their customers. The webpage includes a fairly lengthy letter from CEO Tim Cook which aims to reassure customers about their privacy when using Apple products, why Apple is dedicated to preserving privacy and how their business model differs to others (a not so subtle swipe at Google). In the letter Tim Cook promises updates to the page at least every year or whenever there are significant changes to their policies.

Security and privacy are fundamental to the design of all our hardware, software, and services, including iCloud and new services like Apple Pay. And we continue to make improvements. Two-step verification, which we encourage all our customers to use, in addition to protecting your Apple ID account information, now also protects all of the data you store and keep up to date with iCloud.

The page also includes sections on how Apple’s various products have “privacy built in”, how users can manage their privacy settings to alter how much they share with other people and companies, and finally a section relating to government information requests.

Our commitment to protecting your privacy comes from a deep respect for our customers. We know that your trust doesn’t come easy. That’s why we have and always will work as hard as we can to earn and keep it.

There’s no doubt that this website is in part a response to the recent celebrity iCloud privacy breaches, and whilst it is reassuring to see Apple publicly reaffirm their stance of protecting privacy, a more important measure will be how Apple continues to improve the security mechanisms of their products so that what happened a few weeks ago doesn’t happen again. In this respect, it should be noted that Apple did enable two-factor authentication for iCloud yesterday.