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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

The number of dumb hot-takes in response to this article is staggering. The system as described so far is opt-in for anything sending your data outside of either the device or a carefully vetted and privacy-first cloud system that was designed by people far smarter than you to make sure that Apple could not get to your data. Apple knows that it is better for them to be unable to see this data and to be able to prove it to anyone holding a warrant.

Will there be a general on/off slider just like there is for Siri? Probably. Will more than 1% of the userbase turn it off? No.

Will I be surprised if, days before Apple Intelligence is released to the general public, it is declared that apps distributed via non-Apple app stores are not eligible for linking to these AI services (payment of the cloud services and OpenAI being funded by App Store revenue, naturally, and TANSTAAFL)? No, I will not.

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> The system as described so far is opt-in for anything sending your data outside of either the device or a carefully vetted and privacy-first cloud system that was designed by people far smarter than you to make sure that Apple could not get to your data.

> Will there be a general on/off slider just like there is for Siri? Probably. Will more than 1% of the userbase turn it off? No.

These two statements are at odds

> These two statements are at odds

No they are not.

As described so far, the system is on device or out to Apple's private computing cloud. If the system thinks it can use OpenAI then it will ask. It will ask _each time_. So far Apple has not said that there will be a complete opt-out but I expect there will be just as there is for Siri.

"Out to Apple's private computing cloud" is exfiltrating data off the device. It very much should not be lumped into the same category as "on device", and should in fact be placed in close to the same bucket as "sent to OpenAI". I don't know the details of how it works, but from your description it sounds like you expect sending your data to Apple would not be opt-in?

Homomorphic encryption is not practical. If you're sending data to a server for processing, that server must be able to see your data. If someone tells you otherwise, they are lying.

> or a carefully vetted and privacy-first cloud system that was designed by people far smarter than you to make sure that Apple could not get to your data.

I've noticed over the years smart people have made great things, but often leave them in the hands of idiots. What does 'carefully vetted' mean.

> What does 'carefully vetted' mean

“We’ll take the extraordinary step of making software images of every production build of PCC publicly available for security research. This promise, too, is an enforceable guarantee: user devices will be willing to send data only to PCC nodes that can cryptographically attest to running publicly listed software” [1].

Based on this thread, Apple over-allocated to engineering over marketing.

[1] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

GDPR also applies to the training data. So far as I know no AI training dataset is made entirely from users who consented to their data being used for that purpose - how could it, when the whole thing is so new?

> Will I be surprised if, days before Apple Intelligence is released to the general public, it is declared that apps distributed via non-Apple app stores are not eligible for linking to these AI services

Yeah, this seems like the move, along with banning competing AI apps from the store.

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