Apple Hosts Secretive Conferences to Teach Law Enforcement How to Better Use iPhone, CarPlay and Vision Pro for Police Work

Apple in 2023 hosted a "Global Police Summit" to help police agencies around the world better take advantage of Apple products for police work like surveillance, reports Forbes. The meeting was held in October 2023 at Apple Park, and it preceded the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference. As many as 50 police department employees from seven countries attended the events.

At the event, police agencies shared their "successes, innovations, and lessons learned," according to an email about it, while Apple engineers did presentations on products and features that benefit law enforcement such as "CarPlay, Crash Detection, Emergency SOS via Satellite, Vision Pro and more."

LAPD chief information officer John McMahon told Forbes that it was one of the most useful conferences he'd attended. "I've never been part of an engagement that was so collaborative," he said. A New Zealand police department shared an experience creating an app for storing and accessing police data connected to the National Intelligence Database, as one example of what was demonstrated at the conference.

While Apple has refused to unlock iPhones at law enforcement request and has fought public battles to avoid adding backdoors to its products, Apple does respond to some legal requests from governments and law enforcement, and law enforcement agencies are a business like any other that can purchase Apple products for police work.

Electronic Frontier Foundation analyst Matthew Guariglia told Forbes that Apple has kept the product meetings and conferences quiet because the company is aware that they do not align with pro-privacy marketing. "They want to get the reputation that they protect users' data and they will do so at the expense of their relationship with law enforcement, and at the same time recognizing that creating tech for law enforcement is a multi-billion-dollar industry," he said.

Gary Oldham, who oversaw Apple's worldwide strategy for public safety and emergency services until August of this year, spoke with Forbes and said that he had worked to grow Apple's public safety market share in multiple target markets around the world. Oldham specifically worked with police agencies in California to "deepen Apple tech use." Several police departments in California are testing using the Vision Pro for surveillance work. In Western Australia, the police force uses Siri through ‌CarPlay‌ to access police data and send updates about incidents.

Oldham did not provide a reason why he left Apple in August, and Apple did not hold a Global Police Summit in 2024.

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