Apple is long known to focus on its user privacy. With the advancement, Apple Intelligence brings in a new feature to put privacy first, called Private Cloud Compute.
New Delhi,UPDATED: Jun 11, 2024 11:27 IST
Apple is officially a part of the AI race now. During WWDC 2024, Apple announced its intentions with AI and termed it Apple Intelligence. The tech giant claims that Apple Intelligence will be able to understand complex commands like asking it to show images of a particular person from a specific day. But as seen previously with AI, the advanced the tech, privacy concerns will be greater. To combat these issues, Apple also addressed privacy for Apple Intelligence features.
Apple is long known to focus on user privacy and to assure its loyal customers that the new software updates will not peer deep into their personal lives. During the event, Apple introduced one way that ensures that the iPhone will not spy on the users with Apple Intelligence, is the Private Cloud Compute.
Private Cloud Compute service
According to the tech giant, Apple Intelligence is designed to protect the user's privacy at every step. It’s integrated into the core of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac through on-device processing. So it’s aware of your personal information without collecting your personal information. And with the Private Cloud Compute, Apple Intelligence can draw on larger server-based models, running on Apple Silicon, to handle more complex requests for you while protecting your privacy.
Additionally, an anyalyst Max Weinbach explained that anything running locally or Apple's Secure Cloud is an Apple model, not OpenAI.
Apple claims that users will be in complete control of who can access the data they share with the technology or where it is stored. Apple says that when you make a request or a command, Apple Intelligence will first analyse if it can be processed on-device or it needs to be taken to the cloud. These tasks will be handled by what the company is calling a “private cloud” that is supposed to shield their personal data.
Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President for Software Engineering at Apple, explained that to protect the privacy of the users, the requests to the Apple servers are actually anonymised, so that the IP address is masked. Then it talks to a server that has no permanent storage and cannot log. But most importantly, the private cloud is running software where the image is publicised for security researchers to audit.
The security audit for the Private Cloud Compute servers means that an iPhone, for example, will only trust the software that’s been publicly put out there. If it hasn’t been audited and verified, the connection will not complete. Even the smallest of updates to the server software or configurations must be audited.
The clarity of thought with how Apple Intelligence has been structured, is clear. “We think that the right approach to this is to have a series of different models and different sizes, for different cases of use. And of course, we put a lot of time and effort on the 3 billion parameter model that will run on your iPhone, and it is one of the most capable models today,” explains John Giannandrea, who is Senior Vice President for Machine Learning and AI strategy at Apple.
Published By:
Unnati Gusain
Published On:
Jun 11, 2024
English (US) ·