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Put simply: I’ve talked to Apple engineers. Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is. Everyone made fun of them for protecting them. This is exac
by tylerchilds 4mo ago
Put simply:
I’ve talked to Apple engineers.
Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is.
Everyone made fun of them for protecting them.
This is exactly the opposite of that, where Mark is throwing you and your children under the bus again because he’s unoriginal and doesn’t know how to make money any other way than by getting all up in your business, statistically.
- al_borland 4mo agoI usually defend Siri, because I’m perfectly fine trading a little functionality for security. I prefer it that way.
- stego-tech 4mo agoSame. The fact they're shoving AI into it and expanding it to providers who don't have privacy as a guiding principle is a key reason I'm sitting on a 14 Pro still, and why I'm exploring local alternatives with Home Assistant. Besides, we just need to set verbal timers and control music. We don't need a full-blown verbal Oracle.
- kypen 4mo agoHome Assistant is indeed quite nice and relatively simple to set up with the Docker images provided by the team. Device setup on iOS was a little inconsistent, but has been rock solid for over a year. Check out Homebridge as well. I run both.
- stego-tech 4mo agoI ought to take a break from my Docker Compose work and get back to migrating off Homekit and into Home Assistant. The Home Assistant Yellow has been a real champ thus far, and once it’s set I can then tie the Unfolded Circle 3 into it for better control.
- FireBeyond 4mo agoWhat value do you get out of Home Assistant you don't from HomeBridge? I use HomeBridge for a few devices, my Windmill AC, some Govee lights, and previously my Ikea smart lights (Tradfri, but now Dirigera supports HomeKit).
- amazingamazing 4mo agoIm curious what the threat model is that you're protecting against
- stego-tech 4mo agoNot everything in life is a threat model, y’know; oftentimes it’s just personal preference. I prefer to read reference material and do research instead of asking chatbots, for instance, because it helps the material stick better and enables me to make broader connections to disparate pieces of knowledge. I also prefer technology to be narrow in scope and function, so I can spend more time enjoying life and less time troubleshooting why some needless complexity has failed again. This extends to voice assistants that consistently fumble on accents and grammar when asking for more complex queries, and often want to send data out of my LAN to some random server I have no control over just to process something that could be done on any of the myriad of GPUs and CPUs in my home instead. Despite the EULA, TOS, and Privacy Polices governing these interactions, I intrinsically don’t trust a relationship that requires revalidation of those policies every time an update is pushed, whose changes fail to be summarized, and which force me into hostile relationships with the vendors. I also generally believe that as live services, there is no sufficient incentive for security or privacy but ample incentive for data mining and prolonged/frequent interactivity. Repeated incidents of supposedly “anonymous” and “private” conversations or data being inappropriately disclosed or compromised do not help lend any sense of security to said services, at least to me. Then you consider the wider economic environment prioritizing immediate gains over sustainable business practices, and my own personal preference for building and nurturing long-term infrastructure to solve my problems on a consistent basis, and it’s less a threat model and more just incompatibility between my personal needs and corporate goals.
- tyre 4mo agoThey’re hosting their own Gemini, so they aren’t sacrificing to Google’s standards even if using their technology.
- linkregister 4mo agoBy disabling Apple "Intelligence" you bypass the risk of your prompts going to OpenAI.
- Tagbert 4mo agoWhat is your concern about prompts to go OpenAI? Apple has a contract with OpenAI that explicitly prevents them from logging, storing, training, or making any use of your prompts other than to satisfy the specific current request. Apple has some good lawyers and I’m sure that the teeth are prominent in that contract.
- JimDabell 4mo agoNot to mention the fact that the default settings are to ask the user before sending anything to ChatGPT, and you can selectively disable just the ChatGPT integration while leaving Apple Intelligence enabled.
- linkregister 4mo agoThe person I was responding to had privacy concerns. The closest thing to a privacy concern about LLM usage on iOS is Apple Intelligence, which sends some prompts to OpenAI to fulfill them. Thank you for the information about Apple's privacy program. I send hundreds of prompts to OpenAI's LLM daily. I do not have a concern about it.
- fragmede 4mo agoNo. "You have to unlock your iphone first" is such a hindrance to using Siri for anything more than setting timers and alarms. If you're doing anything that involves gloves or a mask or getting your hands messy, like in a kitchen or something, it is just so frustrating. How about making a toggle so I can choose to be slightly less locked down for Siri, and I take full responsibility if I get hacked because of it.
- glenngillen 4mo agoSettings > Apple Intelligence & Siri > Allow Siri When Locked
- deaddodo 4mo agoKeeping in mind that this gives quite a bit of access to your data, depending on how someone wants to structure their query
- glenngillen 4mo agoYeah. I've offset that by then long-pressing on any particularly sensitive apps I don't want to risk other people potentially being able to control via Siri and turning on "Require FaceID" just for those apps. Which then blocks Siri from being able to interact with them too.
- fragmede 4mo agoIf only that worked! Explicitly: I have that turned on and I still need to unlock before using.
- Handy-Man 4mo agoThey were kinda forced to in the name of "think of the children". The New Mexico case that's been going on at the moment.
- cyanydeez 4mo agothats a generous view. The dystopian fascist view is he's aligning with the surveillance state's interests and instagram is seen as a breeding ground for anti-american-american activities.
- nothinkjustai 4mo agoApple feels like the only big tech company that remotely cares about its users. Thank god they make the best computer and OS too. I’m sure this will not be a popular take on HN however.
- dwedge 4mo agoAndroid was originally enticing because of iOS locking everything down and controlling the ecosystem
- esafak 4mo agoAndroid was designed to prevent Windows from dominating mobile: I literally helped create Android to prevent Microsoft from controlling the phone the way they did the PC - stifling innovation. So it's always funny for me to hear Gates whine about losing mobile to Android. — Rich Miner (https://x.com/richminer/status/1879004092602982765 https://x.com/richminer/status/1879004092602982765)
- qmr 4mo agoContinue reading with a Verge subscription
- throw1234567891 4mo ago“But I want my freedom, I want to install whatever I want, bad Apple for locking down my devices away from me.” They stay rather secure because of all these measures. But they’ll get dismantled, too. Because idiots push idiots in power to weaken Apple’s stance. Useful idiots is the right term.
- b00ty4breakfast 4mo agoBeing in a prison cell is a great way to avoid traffic accidents, I agree.
- 4mo ago
- dyauspitr 4mo agoPrivacy is the reason I’m still on team Apple.
- bramhaag 4mo agoApple's response to the UK gov asking to see users' iCloud data says enough about where their priorities lie [1]. They do something far worse in China [2]. Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-store-icloud-keys-in-china-raising-human-rights-fears-idUSKCN1G805Z/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
- thephyber 4mo agoYour links say that Apple complies with the laws of major countries. Which companies don’t do that?
- bramhaag 4mo agoSignal is one example. Their values are simply not compatible with what the Chinese government wants (local data storage, key access, etc.). Instead of complying and putting their users' privacy at risk, they accepted the ban. Google, out of all companies, also decided to partially walk away from the Chinese market in 2010 over censorship concerns [1]. Nobody is forcing Apple to do business in China, or the UK. They actively choose to do so, and because of that also put themselves in a position where they have to comply with these laws, presumably because it makes them more money. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html
- mfru 4mo agoGoogle also chooses to be a US company even thought the US is supporting a genocide and is doing an illegal war against a foreign country (again) You could argue Signal is the most "moral" here, but even then they don't really allow self-hosted backends and refuse to open-source their setup
- alex1138 4mo agoDo you know what Zuckerberg said in an interview? I think it was to Lex Fridman but I could be wrong "Apple hasn't come up with anything new in 20 years" Very likely in response to Apple's granularity. Poor Zuck can't steal people's credentials
- thephyber 4mo agoI’m less impressed with Zuck every time I hear something new about him. Apple has made incredible progress in the last 20 years, but almost none of that has been a brand new product. It has all been evolving the existing products and on building the world’s best supply chain and rearing incredible market share from Windows. To be clear, AirPods are a much bigger market than Nike shoes. Those, plus Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro are new in the last 20 years. In the past 20 years, the Facebook website has evolved, but all of the other major investments by the company have been acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. Diem (or whatever that proprietary cryptocurrency was called) and the Metaverse were massive failures. I don’t know what to credit Meta for in the AI era except some of the LLAMA tooling and some open weights LLMs. CZI is doing cool things, but that’s Zuck’s private science company, not part of Meta.
- Barbing 4mo agoAnything groundbreaking in advertising? Meta ad tools are pretty granular. (Looking for anything here!)
- shimman 4mo agoProfiting off of a genocide is a first in the social media world, pretty ground breaking. Especially when you find out that workers and management knew about it as it was on-going but did nothing in response. Truly such innovative people, surely they deserve all the money and non of the responsibility. It is a meritocracy after all.
- thephyber 4mo agoFacebook “allowed” Cambridge-Analytica to Hoover up a massive amount of psychometric data on US voters before the 2016 election (ins care quotes because they “allowed” it in the sense they prevented it by policy but did nothing significant to deter the data collection at scale). I would argue that FB’s bigger wins have been in being the first app / website to get perhaps 50% of the world population using it, and also the Herculean effort it took to moderate that’s volume of content (whether or not you agree that moderation was the right choice or successful).
- zer0zzz 4mo agoPeople are bozos for wanting more from a glorified egg timer. I like Siri myself.
- yalok 4mo agobuilding new features on top of E2EE is genuinely hard, and I've seen many companies struggle to keep innovating while staying strictly E2EE. Having seen multiple leading messaging/VoIP stacks from inside, the amount of engineering spent to work around various limitations of E2EE in real prod scenarios is insane, and even for simple every-day-use features metrics don't compare to the metrics of the same feature running without E2EE.
- garciasn 4mo agoThen a more reasonable response is: “we cannot as effectively monetize all of the data in our advertising platform disguised as another tool entirely unless we disable E2EE and we need to be able to allow not only ourselves but others to invade your privacy even more than we already do because it’s technologically difficult to do so when we encrypt your communications.”
- yalok 4mo agoit doesn't necessarily have to be tied to monetization & privacy directly. It may just be that ROI doesn't make sense: very few user out there truly care about (or even understand) E2EE, for quite some users it creates an inconvenience & support incidents (harder to move from device to device, forgot your passphrase - lost your history, new joiners to a group chat don't see previous history, etc), it requires a significant additional engineering effort to just maintain it, many new features get shipped much slower because of it...
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4mo agoIt doesn't have to be, but that's not really an argument for claiming it isn't. Considering how deeply embedded privacy violation is in Meta's corporate DNA, is there any reason other than hilariously naïve and inexplicably charitable, hypothetical speculation to believe this is not motivated by more privacy violation for profit, just like literally every single thing Meta has done in the entire history of the company? No? Didn't think so.
- wotsdat 4mo ago[dead]
- wolvoleo 4mo agoI don't buy that. They could have done more with it despite the constraints. There's been a big lack of interest from Apple for a long time. Just like every few years they introduce a completely new Mac Pro with all the fanfare and then completely lose interest and let it wither and die for 5 years.
- FireBeyond 4mo ago> Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is. Garbage. That's some good spin, though. Siri is a turd in a punch bowl for many reasons that have nothing to do with privacy. "Siri, do X thing" "Done" "Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean" Siri is connected to my Apple HomeKit. "Siri, turn off my Kitchen Lights" "I don't know what lights you mean." Siri feels like it never evolved past a proof of concept.
- Barbing 4mo ago> "Siri, do [extremely similar to X] thing" "I don't know what you mean" It’s funny. Even a team of interns could’ve mapped more synonyms, right? & Apple Intelligence, when it uses ChatGPT, it wouldn’t be quite as horrible if Apple had paid for better tokens instead of quantizing into oblivion… I think. Two savings for Apple resulting in subpar experiences.
- crazygringo 4mo ago> Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is. That makes zero sense. The problem with Siri is... Siri. The interface itself. Zero of my complaints around Siri have to do with it not being able to access my private data. They're entirely about it not understanding my request in the first place or lacking a basic capability.
- tylerchilds 4mo agoIt’s not about your data. It’s about the sum of all expression being able to be reflected back to you in such a way that Dawkins believes he’s met intelligent life. Facebook and Google just slurped up their data centers, while Apple was encrypted.
- yangm97 4mo agoSiri fell behind because the bean counters at Cupertino didn’t want to spend on it, this is well documented and has nothing to do with privacy.
- sotix 4mo agoInteresting. I've talked with engineers at Apple that worked directly on the Siri team who made no such claim and said it largely a cultural issue.
- _boffin_ 4mo ago> Siri fell behind due to how good Apple’s privacy is. Uhh. What the heck are you talking about? I’m calling straight bs on this unless presented rational. Siri has access to knowledge.db or whatever it is, which is the centralized hub for pretty much all things. Siri phones home every request made via Siri. I think you got sold snake oil