smarter while balancing privacy

The tech titan touted the term "differential privacy" as a way of smartening up key apps in iOS 10. What it promises is being smart without using the Google approach of moving all of your data to the cloud.

 

Terms like "magical," "incredible," "amazing" and even "chamfered edge" have long sat in the lexicon of Apple keynote events. Here's a new one: "differential privacy."
The words were uttered at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference Monday by Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, while explaining the way its new iOS 10 software will anticipate your needs and wants. And more importantly, it will get smarter without violating your privacy.
"All of this great work in iOS 10 would be meaningless to us if it came at the expense of your privacy," Federighi said during the event, held in San Francisco.
With that, he drew a clear line separating the philosophies of Apple and competitors like Google when it comes to how it handles your personal data.
The bottom line: Apple has chosen not to use its data to create "profiles," which means it doesn't need access to specific information about you in order to figure out what you need. Google, on the other hand, relies on information like photos, email and favorite locations users send to the company in order to help it better understand who they are and, ultimately, to show them more relevant ads as well.
There are many reasons Apple prefers this approach. In the case of a cyber attack, hackers would have a harder time collecting data on Apple users since there's less data about individuals that's available to steal.
This concept also represents the latest step in Apple's fight over privacy. In March, the company refused to help the FBI hack into an iPhone belonging to the gunman in the San Bernardino, California, shootings that left 14 dead. The episode pushed Apple to the forefront of the debate over our privacy, and even inspired the presumptive Republican nominee for US president, Donald Trump, to call for a boycott of the company.
Towards the end of Monday's keynote address, Federighi said Apple was doubling down on its privacy efforts, offering to encrypt communication for any app running on its products, jumbling the data so only the intended recipient can read it.
"We believe you should have great features and great privacy," he said.
 

Apple believes privacy can be different

"Differential privacy" isn't something Apple just dreamed up. It's a technology that's been around since the '60s. At its heart, this type of software adds "noise," or random information, as data is being accessed.
Take the onscreen keyboard and its QuickType feature, which promises to correct spellings and recommend words as you're typing. Using differential privacy, Apple will collect information from your device about what you're typing, but it will inject noise while it's being transmitted to Apple's computer systems so it doesn't know the exact words you used. When the information gets to Apple, it'll be mixed in with millions of other responses, which are then monitored for popular new words, like "gymbership" (a gym membership). Once a new one is identified, Apple can add them to the QuickType dictionary and beam them to your device. So the next time you write "That gymbership costs way too much!" the keyboard will be able to help.
It's perhaps a small distinction to some people, but if done right, experts say this type of data collection can create the same feel as modern technology that's built using all sorts of information about you, your family and anything else you do on the web.
"It is a tool for trying to learn statistical information about a population without learning specific information about any particular individual," said Professor Aaron Roth who co-wrote the book, "The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy" and discussed the technology with Apple.
Apple plans to use this new privacy feature in iOS 10's QuickType keyboard, its new emojis, the Spotlight search function and its "LookUp" function for finding dictionary definitions, iTunes store items and Wikipedia entries. Other apps could potentially benefit later.