How would this work for image and facial recognition, especially with regard to individuals? It seems the features needed to recognize a face are by definition identifying.
There is probably some specifics I'm missing though, and it raises the question about how they identify others faces. I've not used the feature so I can't say. I'm guessing it's a manual tagging when the device can't find a match and then on device processing afterwards once the algorithm has learned.
The data set to learn from probably can be gathered from stock photos or other open source images, but can that learning be saved down to phone and used to compare against, or would it be too big?
If too big, does that mean characteristics of an image would be computed on the phone sent to the cloud compared and the results sent back?
So they're really saying that no data leaves the device for either object or face recognition at classification time. Now, whether they are using iCloud-stored photos (which the user has already agreed to share) for training, I don't know, and any privacy issues would still be important at that point.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/reference/accelerate/1912851-bnn...