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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

I have only one question: can I turn it off?

You can turn Siri off, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the same: a toggle on by default that they present you when upgrading the OS. Perhaps even just the same toggle for Siri controls all of this as a whole.

Turn off what part and why? They announced several new systems, much of which runs on-device, one of which is simply an improved Siri. I was surprised by how considerate they seemed about AI data privacy, even for Apple.

> Turn off what part and why?

Assume any part, and assume none of your business.

It's not reasonable to expect to be able to turn off "any part" of a piece of software, unless it's open source and you're digging through the code yourself to remove sections of it, refactor and re-compile everything.

That said, Apple generally gives people very fine-grained controls over what software features they want enabled, at least compared to other closed-source software vendors.

My question "what part and why" was intended to open up a discussion about privacy in regards to Apple's AI. But if your answer is simply "none of your business", then my answer to the question "can I turn it off" is simply "nobody has any way of knowing yet." Neither of those answers are great discussion openers.

Your username seems to check out.

I don't want any part of my personal data (what I write, what I photograph, what I record, what I jot down) to be viewed by anything by my own eyes or the encryption algorithm converting it to ciphertext to send across a secure channel WITHOUT MY CONSENT.

Period.

Reason: again, nobody's business.

If you don't get this then, a) you're not in a high-risk group for discrimination, or b) you've never been subjected systemic polices designed to keep you "in line".

I do get this. I don't know why you'd assume I don't.

And the sentiment behind your comment seems very reasonable, reading past its non-sequitur tone.

I do wonder if my privacy awareness has a connection with the fact that I lived the first 13 years of my life under an eastern block dictatorship ...

However in this case I'm also concerned about needless power consumption. Especially on battery.

In most cases the one using most power in a modern smartphone is the display.

And knowing Apple, the RAG-stuff will be done overnight when the phone is charging, not during use.

It's one thing to have private information at rest, another to have it indexed, and interpreted by a LLM. What if some virus orders the LLM to search for blackmail material and email it to them? The very act of putting a LLM near your data is a security concern. If someone else orders your Siri to reveal something, it can get to the prize in seconds, with AI help.

A virus can use its own LLM, so I guess you don't want indexing at all. Makes it hard to find stuff.

It did sound like it would be opt-in. I think the current iteration of Siri already is, so it would make sense if they kept it that way.

Microsoft's recall is going to have that feature, according to the latest updates on the matter. I hope apple won't lag behind on implementing this one.

Which part? The online or offline capabilities?

Nope. I afraid AI future is mandatory ;)

You're an apple user, you decided a long time ago that they know what's best for you

I almost shed a tear, then I remembered the alternative is Google...

Apple has decided to allow users to disable various features, so the question is, do they let you disable this.

Why? Things are secure (outside of the explicit OpenAI calls via Siri) and mostly seem subtly integrated. You don't have to use each feature, but why blindly disable all AI having not even tried it?

I've tried a number of these things and I honestly don't see the value in them. I have to double check everything they do and it takes longer to describe what I want and double check everything then just to do it myself.

I'll be disabling everything I can. I don't use Siri or anything of that sort as well.

"It will automatically find a picture of your drivers license, read the number and add it to your text"

This is scary stuff that should not be happening on anything that is closed-source and unaudited publicly. The pervasiveness of surveillance it enables is astounding.

How is it any more dangerous than having a picture of your ID on your phone? It uses a local model for finding and extracting data, and confirms before autofill.

Should we start auditing wallets next? People's driver licenses are sitting insecure and unencrypted in their pockets! Anyone could grab it!

Security is important, but being alarmist toward thoughtful progress hurts everyone.

What's different about this from the current implementation of searching photos for 'driver's license' and it pulling up pictures of your license? iOS has already been using "AI" image recognition for years on your photos.

Yes, this is an extension of that feature and a further integration with other enhancements. Apple has been doing “machine learning” for years for features like this. Now they are starting to bring those features together using other models like LLMs.

Why take up processor time or memory for a feature I don't want? Or the increase in threat space?

This could be said for literally every single feature of a smartphone, down to the out of order execution of the CPU

Yes. I would like to be able to disable other smartphone features I don't use. But that's already the case. Like the GPS, for instance, is disabled unless I'm using the map. And even that can be set to "never" if I want.

I also have animations toned down from the accessibility settings, yes :)

That's exactly why I wait extra long to install updates.

Not wanting to send that much data to Apple's server no matter the pinky promise they make about caring for our data? That's a legit ask.

Apple's? You mean OpenAI's...

Stuff that I don't use can get in the way.

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