4 ways Apple should upgrade its privacy and security game in 2025

Every year, Apple adds additional privacy features that make its products the most secure in the world. Most recently, in iOS 18, Apple added the ability to limit Contacts access to only the select connections you choose. The company also developed its new Apple Intelligence AI system with privacy at its core.

Yet there are still several privacy enhancements Apple could make across its devices to ensure that more of our data remains safe from prying eyes. Here are four top privacy features Apple should add to its devices, software, and services in 2025.

Lock apps on Apple TV

The Apple TV set-top box is one of the best devices Apple makes (the TV app, on the other hand, still needs plenty of work). Unfortunately, the Apple TV, still lacks the privacy protections that Apple’s other devices offer. The most glaring privacy oversight on Apple TV is the inability to lock individual apps—or access to the device itself—behind a passcode.

Anyone who has access to your living room can access all the digital goods on your Apple TV. When you turn on the Apple TV, there is no login screen where you need to enter a passcode to access the operating system and all its apps. This means that anyone can access all your Apple TV data simply by picking up the Siri Remote.

And this doesn’t just include your streaming apps. The Apple TV also has the Photos app, just like the one on your iPhone, so anyone with access to your Apple TV can see all the photos you’ve saved in your iCloud Photos Library. Right now, the only way to stop this is to decline to enable iCloud Photos on your TV—but that means you lose the best screen in your house for viewing your pics.

Apple should do what it did with apps on iOS 18: Let users lock the Apple TV and its individual apps behind a passcode.

End-to-end encrypted email

Back in 2022, Apple turned iCloud into a digital Fort Knox by allowing users to enable Advanced Data Protection on their iCloud account. Advanced Data Protection encrypts most of your iCloud data end-to-end, which means that no one—not even Apple—can access the majority of the data you have stored there unless they know your password.

The problem is that not all iCloud data is encrypted end-to-end, including iCloud emails. And since iCloud emails (those sent from an @iCloud.com email address) are still not end-to-end encrypted, nefarious bad actors could gain access to them and read their contents. If the iCloud emails were end-to-end encrypted, any hackers would only see gibberish even if they did breach iCloud’s servers.

There is, of course, a valid reason that Apple hasn’t implemented end-to-end encryption for iCloud emails: if you sent an end-to-end encrypted iCloud email to the user of another email service (like Gmail), they wouldn’t be able to unencrypt the message because Gmail (and other major email providers like Yahoo and Outlook) doesn’t support end-to-end encrypted emails.

Still, in 2025, Apple should lead the charge when it comes to bringing end-to-end encryption to emails and, with it, spur others in the industry to do the same so end-to-end encrypted emails can be sent and accessed from any email account you use.

Limited Calendar access

One of the best privacy features in years arrived with iOS 18 last fall. That’s when Apple finally added the ability to grant apps access to only the address book contacts you chose rather than your entire address book. This selective access means that companies, including social media giants, can’t see everyone you know—including sensitive contacts like health professionals—when requesting access to your contacts.

Yet apps can still request access to all your calendars, which hold valuable data about you, including when you’ll be somewhere. Your only options are to deny apps access entirely, allow them to add new events only, or give them full access to read all your calendar events. Nowhere is there an option to let an app access only some of your calendars (such as your work calendar but not your personal one).

In iOS 18, Apple gave us incredibly granular privacy controls over our address books, helping to keep our contacts safe from prying eyes and nosey apps. Here’s hoping this level of privacy comes to Calendars in 2025.

Lock individual iMessage chats

For years, Apple’s Messages app has led the industry when it comes to privacy. Apple Messages was one of the first to offer end-to-end encrypted chats, for example. And in iOS 18, the Messages app—like nearly every other app on the iPhone—could be locked behind a passcode or biometric scan before someone could access its contents. However, the Messages app still cannot lock individual chat threads behind a passcode.

Locking specific chats behind a passcode may seem a bit redundant if you can already lock the entire app behind a passcode, but there is a strong use case for adding more fine-tuned options with this privacy feature.

Anyone with young children will know that they will frequently ask to borrow a caregiver’s phone to text someone, like their parent who is at work. Locking specific chats behind a passcode can ensure that your child can’t accidentally text your boss. Locked chats could also ensure that someone couldn’t gain access to any 2FA codes your bank or other services text to you, and that someone with access to your Messages app couldn’t see any texts you receive from sensitive contacts, such as healthcare providers.