Michal Council In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about various forms of spying on users. Of course, giants processing enormous amounts of user data are in the background. They are talking about Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and, of course, Apple. But we all have evidence of Apple's different approach in our devices. And the truth is, we don't like it very much.
It is human nature not to trust anyone, but at the same time not to care at all about what information we give about ourselves to anyone. Forced regulations such as GDPR and others are based on this. But also large companies and their business are built on it. Whether we take Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Yahoo or even Baidu, their business in one way or another revolves around knowledge about ourselves. Sometimes it's advertising, sometimes it's analysis, sometimes it's just reselling anonymized knowledge, sometimes it's about product development. But data and knowledge always are.
Apple vs. the rest of the world
Big companies, whether technology or software, face criticism for collecting and using user data - or perhaps even for "user snooping", as politicians and officials call it. That's why it's important in this somewhat hysterical time to talk about how one approaches it. And here Apple users have a little more room to relax, albeit at a relatively high price so far.
In addition to collecting a bunch of data from registration to the content of all documents on the cloud, which regulatory authorities in particular wave as a red flag in front of users, there is also a lot of talk about how much your device is "spying" on you. While with Windows we know quite clearly that data stored in files only on the local disk of the notebook will not reach Microsoft, Google is already further in the cloud, so we do not have such certainty here, mainly because of the Google applications themselves. And how is Apple doing? Terrible. On the one hand, this is gratifying news for the paranoid, on the other hand, the intelligence train is increasingly derailing.
Is Google listening to you? You don't know, nobody knows. It is possible, although quite unlikely. Sure - there are a number of dark techniques to directly eavesdrop on users using their mobile phone microphone, but so far the use of mobile data does not indicate that this is being done en masse. Still, we give Google many times more data than we give Apple. Mail, calendars, searches, Internet browsing, visits to any server, content of communication - all this is available to Google anyway. Apple does it differently. The Californian giant found that it simply could never get that much data from users, so it's trying to bring intelligence into the device itself.
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Amaya Toman To make it a little more understandable, let's use a model example: In order for Google to understand your voice and your voice speech 100%, it needs to listen often and get the voice data to its servers, where it will be subjected to the right analysis, and then connected to the analyzes of millions other users. But for this, it is necessary for a huge amount of relatively sensitive data to leave your device and be stored primarily in the cloud so that Google can work with it. The company admits this quite openly, when it confirms without any problems that it also processes data from backups of your Android devices.
How does Apple do this? So far, a little similar, where it collects voice data and sends it to the cloud, where it analyzes it (this is why Siri does not work without an Internet connection). However, this is gradually changing with the arrival of the iPhone 10 series. Apple is leaving more and more intelligence and analytics to the devices. Although it comes at a relatively large cost in the form of fast and intelligent processors and higher optimization of iOS capabilities, the benefits clearly outweigh it. With this approach, the data of even the most paranoid will be analyzed, because it will only happen on their end devices. In addition, such an analysis can be much more personalized after a longer period of time.
Direct personalization
And this is exactly what Apple said at its last keynote. That's what the opening line that "Apple is the most personalized" was about. It is not about unified mobile phones, which received three new color variants as part of personalization. It's not even about a much greater emphasis on a personal photo from your iCloud account in various services, and it's not even about customizing Siri shortcuts, which, by the way, you have to do yourself in the settings. It's about direct personalization. Apple is making it clear that your device—yes, "your" device—is getting closer to you and more and more truly yours. It will be served by new processors with dedicated performance for "MLD - Machine learning on device" (which Apple also immediately boasted about with the new iPhones), a redesigned analytical part, on top of which Siri offers its personalized suggestions, which will be seen in iOS 12 and also just new functions of the system itself for independent learning of each device. To be perfectly fair, it will be more "learning per account" than per device, but that's a detail. The result will be exactly what a mobile device is supposed to be about – lots of personalization without unnecessary snooping in the sense of analyzing absolutely everything of yours in the cloud.
We all still - and rightfully so - complain about how stupid Siri is and how far the personalization of work is on competing platforms. Apple took it really seriously and, in my opinion, followed a rather interesting and original path. Rather than trying to catch up with Google or Microsoft in cloud intelligence, it will prefer to rely on increasing the ability of its artificial intelligence not over the entire flock, but over every single sheep. Now that I read that last sentence, to call users sheep - well, nothing... In short, Apple will strive for real "personalization", while others are more likely to follow the path of "userization". Your flashlight probably won't be happy about it, but you'll be able to have more peace of mind. And that's what demanding applists care about, right?
Of course, even this approach is still being learned by Apple, but it seems to work for it, and above all, it is a great marketing strategy, which again distinguishes it from others who will not just abandon their pure cloud intelligence.
I couldn't have explained it better. Thank you for a very interesting and humanly professional reading!