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Apple prioritizes user privacy with iOS 18

Translate from : Apple prioriterer brugerens privatliv med iOS 18

Apple is officially part of the AI race now. During WWDC 2024, Apple announced their intentions with AI, which they have called Apple Intelligence. The tech giant claims that Apple Intelligence will be able to understand complex commands such as to show photos of a specific person from a specific day.

But as we have previously seen with AI, concerns about user privacy increase the more advanced the technology becomes. To address these issues, Apple has also addressed the privacy of the Apple Intelligence features. Apple has long been known for focusing on user privacy and for assuring its loyal customers that the new software updates will not intrude deeply into their personal lives.

During the event, Apple introduced a way to ensure that the iPhone will not monitor users with Apple Intelligence, called Private Cloud Compute. According to the tech giant, Apple Intelligence is designed to protect user privacy at every step. It is integrated into the core of iPhone, iPad and Mac through on-device processing.

So it is aware of your personal information without collecting your personal information. And with Private Cloud Compute, Apple Intelligence can draw on larger server-based models running on Apple Silicon to handle more complex queries while protecting your privacy. Furthermore, analyst Max Weinbach explained that anything running locally or on Apple's secure cloud is an Apple model, not OpenAI.

Apple claims that users will have full control over who can access the data they share with the technology or where it is stored. Apple says that when you make a request or command, Apple Intelligence will first analyze whether it can be processed on-device or whether it needs to be taken to the cloud. Those tasks will be handled by what the company calls a "private cloud" meant to protect their personal data.

Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple, explained that to protect users' privacy, the requests to the Apple servers are actually anonymized, so the IP address is masked. Then it connects to a server that has no permanent storage and cannot log. But, most importantly, the private cloud where the image is published runs software that allows security researchers to conduct an audit. The security review of the private cloud computing servers means that an iPhone, for example, will only trust the software that is published.

If it has not been audited and verified, the connection will not be completed. Even the smallest updates to the server software must be audited. The clarity of thought with how Apple Intelligence is structured is evident.

"We think the right approach to this is to have a variety of models and sizes for different applications. And of course we've put a lot of time and effort into the 3 billion parameter model that will run on your iPhone, and it's one of the most capable models today," explains John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy at Apple.