Apple To Analyze User Data on Devices To Bolster AI Technology
- Reference: 0177025185
- News link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/04/15/0050203/apple-to-analyze-user-data-on-devices-to-bolster-ai-technology
- Source link:
> Today, Apple typically trains AI models using synthetic data -- information that's meant to mimic real-world inputs without any personal details. But that synthetic information isn't always representative of actual customer data, making it harder for its AI systems to work properly.
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> The new approach will address that problem while ensuring that user data [1]remains on customers' devices and isn't directly used to train AI models . The idea is to help Apple catch up with competitors such as OpenAI and Alphabet, which have fewer privacy restrictions. The technology [2]works like this : It takes the synthetic data that Apple has created and compares it to a recent sample of user emails within the iPhone, iPad and Mac email app. By using actual emails to check the fake inputs, Apple can then determine which items within its synthetic dataset are most in line with real-world messages.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/technology/apple-to-analyze-user-data-on-devices-to-bolster-ai-technology/ar-AA1CUBCr
[2] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/differential-privacy-aggregate-trends
No thanks (Score:2)
Yet more reasons to stick with our 13 and 14 Pros
Re: (Score:2)
12, 11, and older.
This will not safeguard private data (Score:2)
For example, a percentage of email communications that I receive includes confidentiality disclaimers in the footers, including legal requirements to not distribute the email to non-recipients, etc. I'm sure other slashdotters are in the same situation.
An AI training program (which is presumably owned by Apple and licensed for your use on the iPhone) wouldn't be authorized to read these emails and will definitely not be authorized to arbitrarily act up on them.
In particular, comparing the contents of co
Not copying your data to synthetics ... (Score:2)
> In particular, comparing the contents of confidential emails against a synthetically produced external set of contents, so as to favour the more relevant, synthetically produced, samples, is a form of exfiltration of the data.
Not really, there is no exfiltration. They are not copying anything of yours to their synthetics or anywhere else. What they are doing is ranking their synthetics for a match to your data. Anything matching your data was preexisting data in their synthetics. You can't exfiltrate something they already have.
What you can do is confirm a guess when actual data matches preexisting synthetic data, as in your hangman letters example. Calling this exfiltration is a little misleading, its confirmation. So the ri
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> Not really, there is no exfiltration. They are not copying anything of yours to their synthetics or anywhere else. What they are doing is ranking their synthetics for a match to your data. Anything matching your data was preexisting data in their synthetics. You can't exfiltrate something they already have.
The ranking is enough. You use the synthetics as a basis, and look for combinations of synthetics that recreate the unknown data. This falls within the purview of latent semantic analysis, and what is kn
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> For example, a percentage of email communications that I receive includes confidentiality disclaimers in the footers, including legal requirements to not distribute the email to non-recipients, etc. I'm sure other slashdotters are in the same situation.
Those are nonsensical, and roughly as binding as the following paragraphs:
You are not authorized to read the paragraph above this one. If you read it anyway, you owe me $500 and need to turn yourself in to the nearest FBI headquarters to begin serving 6 months jail time in a federal minimum security prison.
In addition, responding to this post will place you in debt to me for $1947 per word in your reply, plus $193 for every paragraph beyond two.
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Sure thing. You should try that with a judge sometime, arguing that you wilfully ignored disclaimers even though you were perfectly capable of comprehending their meaning.
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What I said above is basically legal consensus. Enforcing confidentiality requires a contract, and your putting words at the end of an email does not magically create a contract between you and some random recipient. You will be hard-pressed to find a lawyer that will advise you otherwise.
[1]As the Apex Law Group states rather well [apexlg.com]:
> Email disclaimers depend on contract law to bind the recipient to the disclaimer and impose a duty, often of non-disclosure. This theory, however, does not create a legally binding
[1] https://apexlg.com/email-disclaimers-legally-binding-or-burdensome/
Re: (Score:1)
My secret word is "bullshit".
Now, tell me what the secret is.
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If that's your standard for those emails with confidentiality statements (they are not disclaimers), you already have a problem because your device and maybe email provider already read them to determine if they are spam. Also, unless the email body has been encrypted, they've been sat in SMTP server queues in plain text where nefarious people could read them.
Those "disclaimers" aren't really worth anything.
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> Why would you rather get random ads, rather than ads for shit you're actually interested in?
You are part of the problem. You fail to see any options other than the shit being thrown in your face. How about no ads and none of my information used in any way beyond what I explicitly allow. e.g. it's ok to look at the destination of the email I pressed send on, it's not ok to use the email contents to validate your AI model.
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> it's ok to look at the destination of the email I pressed send on, ...
No it's not ok - if I had bought a $100 android piece of junk then I'd assume that I was the product in that business model and expect all the crap that goes with it (lots of ads, poor privacy, no security, etc.). When I spend north of $1000 on a phone I don't need and rarely use, I at least expect the vendor to stick to (UK / EU) data protection law.
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They need to look at the destination address of an email to know where to send it. Which I have implied consent to by pressing send. Now if they use that for anything other than routing the message, that's not what I consented to.
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> Why would you rather get random ads, rather than ads for shit you're actually interested in?
Because I prefer privacy.
The Grim AI Data Reaper is Coming for Your Work (Score:2)
Soon, everything you use will be out to harvest your effort. Retrocomputers are looking better all the time.
Bold and smarmy. (Score:2)
This is the sort of thing that would get written up as a clever(if probably not at the top of the urgency list) inferential attack if you could do it against remote hosts or VMs under the same hypervisor. Apple has had the temerity to declare the comparatively low bitrate of the leakage to be a privacy feature. Love that Cupertino attitude.
What's great, of course, is that they are doing all this in a black box, whose security vs. people who aren't them they guard fairly jealously; and they are making no
Rotten Apple (Score:2)
Straight "fuck, no!" from me. Time to dump this rotten fruit into a bin.
It may ultimately only be symbolic, but... (Score:2)
... not only have I turned off "Apple Intelligence" on any devices, I have also gone through every last detail to tell it not to learn from any apps on it and not to include it in any recommendations. It ultimately comes down to whether or not Apple and its iOS flavors will actually respect the user settings or not. At least by having turned off those switches it would give me a small amount of legal standing against Apple for violating user preferences/settings... not that I would do that kind of fight o
Opt-in then forced opt-in again later? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, with Apple's [1]tricks [macintouch.com], will this be an optional "opt-in", then a "whoops, you got opt-in automatically without notice" with every subsequent updates?
[1] https://www.macintouch.com/post/46694/apple-intelligence-disabling-trick/
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course. Nobody would opt-in to this bullshit but Apple's feet are on the coals so they, like every business, must squeeze the lifeblood out of every customer.
Need don't tamper or profile regulations (Score:2)
Really, really we need some regulator to get to the point where
"Big tech wants common carrier liability waivers,right? Then, OK, you have to ensure that email, text messages, photos, Pii on the devices, online services is not used to train any AI models in original form, modified form or anonymized form"
"And, note, this includes biometrics too, including typing speed, typing cadence, mouse movement paths,speed, click rates, etc."
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Opt-in, and that preference sticking, is critical. I'm all for Apple taking a different approach from the "if you haven't completely prevented me from getting your data it is mine to use however I want" style generally in use.
I wonder how much of the phone resources/battery life this on device processing will use.
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> I wonder how much of the phone resources/battery life this on device processing will use.
That'd be my main reason to disable it - their entire software stack is already so bloated, buggy and slow, it makes using even a 2-year old device 'un-delightful' already. This would only make it worse.