They literally announced their partnership with OpenAI today, and I've seen no sign of this data being "publicly auditable" - can you share this with me?
All the stuff that works on your private data is Apple models that are either on-device or in Apple's private cloud (and they are making that private cloud auditable).
The OpenAI stuff is firewalled off into a separate "ask ChatGPT to write me this thing" kind of feature.
> I've seen no sign of this data being "publicly auditable" - can you share this with me?
They announced it in the same keynote where they announced the partnership with OpenAI (and stated that sharing your data with OpenAI would be opt-in, not opt-out).
WTF are you talking about, the guy literally said that to connect to Apple Intelligence servers the client side verifies a publically registered audit trail for the server. He then followed up saying no data on chatgpt will keep session information regarding who the data came from.
Apples big thing is privacy, i doubt they'd randomly lie about that
This still runs on external hardware which can be spoofed at the demand of authorities. It may be private as in they themselves won’t monetize it but your data certainly won’t be safe
I can't speak towards Apple's or $your_government's trustworthiness, but MTLS wouldn't protect against an attack where Apple collaborates with a data requester.
There are people and orgs out there who (justifiably or not) are paranoid enough that they factor this into their threat model.
This is a bit academic right now, but it's also worth mentioning that in the coming years, as quantum computing becomes more and more practical, snapshots of data encrypted using quantum-unsafe cryptography, or with symmetric keys protected by quantum-unsafe crypto (like most Diffie-Hellman schemes) will be decryptable much more easily. Whether a motivated bad actor has access to the quantum infrastructure needed to do this at scale is another question, though.
GasBuddy is an optional app, right? Apple is very up front about what apps are going to get access to things like location, with user prompts to allow/deny. Meaning you are opting in to a lack of privacy, which is very expected behavior?
The default Apple apps (maps, messaging, safari) are solid from a privacy perspective, and I don't think you can say the same about the default apps on competitors phones.
I am sorry I used GasBuddy as an example since I agree it is a stretch, but still not one I disagree with.
But let's get back to Apple...if it was functioning at "100% user privacy" would it be able to give access to your data to law enforcement? As an example, I consider MullvadVPN to be 99% user privacy.
Why should apple be in control of what individual apps do with your location data? You explicitly grant the app access to your data, and agreed to the terms.
The difference between that and this is extremely clear is it not?
Gas Buddy, like all 3rd party apps, has their privacy practices detailed on their App Store page. It's true that not all vendors are completely truthful with this information, but Gas Buddy (for one) appears to be pretty up-front: everything in the app is shared with the developers or others except (they say) diagnostic information. Apple set up a privacy-disclosure rule, Gas Buddy seems to be following it, and it's the user's choice whether to install Gas Buddy.
Apple has done its privacy work here; now it's up to the end user to make the final choice.
It's the potential for the model. Everyone else is hoovering the internet to model everything and Apple is sticking with their privacy message and saying 'how can I model your stuff to help you.'
Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a sync of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or Windows or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or any other cloud?
With an Android phone and Windows laptop (for example) you simply install the Syncthing app on both and you're done.
My point is not "Apple is worse", instead I'm just trying to point out that Apple definitely seems eager to have their users push a lot of what they do through their cloud. I don't see why their AI will be any different, even if their marketing now claims that it will be "offline" or whatever.
Apple is interested in providing products that they can guarantee will work, and meet actual user requirements.
"Sync my files without using Apple's cloud" is not a user requirement. Delivering features using their cloud is a very reasonable way for Apple to provide services.
Now, "Sync my files without compromising my privacy" is a user requirement. And Apple iCloud offers a feature called 'advanced data protection" [1] that end to end encrypts your files, while still supporting photo sharing and syncing. So no, you can't opt out of using their cloud as the intermediary, but you can protect your content from being decrypted by anyone, including Apple, ooff your devices.
It has the downside that it limits your account recovery options if you lose the device where your keys are and screw up on keeping a recovery key, so it isn't turned on by default, but it's there for you to use if you prefer. For many users, the protections of Apple's standard data protection are going to be enough though.
I'm a user and I require that feature. Transferring photos over a USB cable to a PC has been a feature in all portable electronics with a camera for the past 25+ years, yet Apple is still getting it wrong.
> Wires? Oh yeah, I remember when things had wires. Good times.
Last I checked the more expensive Macbooks had three USB ports, and the cheap ones have two.
Since Macbooks no longer have ethernet ports, those USB ports are useful for plugging in the dongle when I want to connect the Macbook to an ethernet wire. Good times.
> Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a sync of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or Windows or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or any other cloud?
The first hit on Google makes it look trivial with iPhone too?
iCloud synchronizes all my stuff between all my devices (windows too) now. They've always been privacy-forward. I could completely see a container that spins up and AI's my stuff in their datacenter, that they don't have visibility into. The impact of them getting it wrong is pretty significant.
> Example that should be super trivial: try to setup a sync of photos taken on your Iphone to a laptop (Mac or Windows or Linux) without going through Apple's cloud or any other cloud?
Install jottacloud and enable the photos backup feature.
They really hammered in the fact that every bit is going to be either fully local or publicly auditable to be private.
There's no way Google can follow, they need the data for their ad modeling. Even if they anonymise it, they still want it.