Ben Thompson has been saying that they need to collect user data (like google) for a decade.
It seems the botched Apple Intelligence release changed some minds, a little bit.
That still doesn’t give them the right to mine the data that their users entrusted to them though a paid service.
It doesn’t matter how anonymised their harvesting is, they had an agreement with their subscribers not to invade their privacy like this.
We are better off with a LLM that doesn’t work than abusing the data entrusted to them by their users.
It won’t be long until the LLM bubble bursts and we all laugh about how stupid we were to think they had any use whatsoever.
I guess you didn’t see the several points in the article where they make it clear that it is “opt in”?
I do look forward for the bursting of the LLM bubble, but the article isn’t just about LLM.
Is this the same “Opt-In” as keeping Apple Intelligence disabled between software updates?
Apple are haemorrhaging a lot of hard earned goodwill every time they try to move forward with their own AI.
It would be nice if they actually fixed the stability issues in Apple Intelligence before they start adding more layers of slop to it. Writing tools summarization has been broken off and on since it launched.
Apple is the best on privacy though right?
Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.
The entire thing is explaining how they are upholding privacy to do this training.
- It’s opt-in only (if you don’t choose to share analytics, nothing is collected).
- They use differential privacy (adding noise so they get trends, not individual data).
- They developed a new method to train on text patterns without collecting actual messages or emails from devices. (link to research on arXiv)
Right. There’s plenty to criticise Apple for, both in general and for chasing the AI trend, but looking at it purely in terms of user privacy within AI features they’re miles ahead of the competition.
I had scanned through it, and it looked like the exact same stuff that Google and Microsoft say. Paraphrasing: “we value your privacy” “we’re de-identifying your data” “the processing occurs on-device”…
Apple probably is better on privacy than other big tech corpos, but it’s a race to the bottom, and they’re definitely participating in the race.
