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.