Apple reported its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2021 ended December 26, 2020, with a record revenue figure of $111.44 billion—the first time it has exceeded $100 billion in quarterly revenue—and $28.76 billion in profit, making it Apple’s most profitable quarter ever.
Although the GDPR—designed to augment consumers’ data protection and privacy—is the brainchild of the Council of the European Union and European Parliament, its reach extends far beyond Europe. In the United States, it is no longer a choice but a must for financial firms to adopt stricter consumer-data-protection measures. The costs of not doing so far outweigh the costs of compliance; regulators expect data security, and so do customers.
Apple, the producer of the iconic Mac personal computer and trendy iPhone smartphone, succeeded in reaching a milestone that most corporations only dreamt of: becoming the world’s first company to be valued at $1 trillion. A case study in both perseverance and ingenuity, considering that this was a company flirting with bankruptcy in the late 1990s, few companies can afford not to consider the lessons to be learned in Apple’s meteoritic comeback.
The United States has reached a critical point in determining data privacy standards. With mounting concern among all stakeholders, it is no longer a question of whether more privacy laws will be enacted, but how—and specifically, whether the problem will be resolved at the state or national level.