Apple, you leave me wanting more
From next month Apple Intelligence will be deployed on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. On the face of it, flexible writing tools, a more personal Siri, and the ability to clean up my photos by removing anything I don’t want in a flash all sound good, but Apple Intelligence raises almost as many questions as it answers.
Because the beta versions of iOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia have been around for a while now we know a lot more about how Apple Intelligence will work once it’s released, but there are still some questions that remain unanswered. Here are five big questions that Apple’s ‘Glowtime’ event left me wondering about.1. How secure is my data, really?
Apple talked so much about how secure my data would be in their hands, once I gave Apple Intelligence permission to analyze it, that I’m now starting to wonder if it’s really secure at all!
One of the big selling points of Apple Intelligence is that it does most of its processing on your device, which explains why it isn’t backwards compatible with the vast majority of iPhones. You need a device with the required number of neural processing units, to perform the complex processing that AI requires. But despite making a big deal of its on-device processing, for requests that require more processing power, Apple uses something called Private Cloud Compute. “When using Private Cloud Compute, users’ data is never stored or shared with Apple; it is used only to fulfill their request”, Apple says. As if to press home the security message, Apple is keen to stress that independent experts will inspect the code that runs on Apple silicon servers to continuously verify this privacy promise.
But Apple doesn’t stop with its own servers. ChatGPT is accessible on iPhone through Siri 2.0 expected next year. This appears to be the opposite of secure, given OpenAI’s tendency to help itself to public data.
