[livre]

>I understand the choices seem to be either pay for it or pay with your privacy and data

Where have you seen those choices? What I've seen is either pay with your privacy and data (Cortana for example) or pay for it and at the same time surrender your privacy and data (Alexa, Google Nest).

[nwienert]

Siri is more of a pay for it and keep the privacy/data.

[socceroos]

No it isn't. See: Apple in China

[nwienert]

If you were going for quality discussion you’d say “it isn’t in China”

[socceroos]

I think you'd rather say that Apple will dress themselves up to look like what their audience wants to see - that they don't really care about privacy, but more the perception that you have it. Their actions in China back this view up. You see, the expectation in the West is that you make sure you look like you're doing the "right thing", but behind the scenes you accommodate state actors doing what they want with your data.

[nwienert]

Or rather that they have a hierarchy of morality in which privacy is significantly higher than any other major tech company, and yet are willing to sacrifice it to fit local laws if the market is large enough.

Unless you have proof they are actively exposing your Siri data behind the scenes in the west, your point is simply fear mongering.

They have invested and spent beyond-significant resources in a wide array of world best privacy technology - all the way down to the chip level; and all the way up to their entire structure of the way they do machine learning, including many novel papers and a lot of work into maturing the field of distributed, differential, private ML. It’s well beyond simple marketing. They also are actively making huge and risky moves that upset large competitors and partners, ongoing, re:privacy. If they were just paying lip service to this, they’d need not to do even a tenth of what they’ve done. To try and claim they aren’t is ridiculous, especially when literally no one else even remotely comes close.

In fact, there exist no platforms you can use today that would come near the level of highly scrutinized, tested and invested in top to bottom security in privacy tech than Apple devices. It’s not even a contest, and that includes all open firmware/stacks.

[grawprog]

Sorry I guess I should have meant theoretical choices...at this point there isn't much of a choice.