
Apple's emphasis on 'differential privacy' - rargulati
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/apples-differential-privacy-collecting-data/
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chubot
Google differential privacy technology, used in Chrome, starting in 2014:

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/2841954/googles-
rappor-...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2841954/googles-rappor-aims-
to-preserve-privacy-while-snaring-software-stats.html)

[https://github.com/google/rappor](https://github.com/google/rappor)

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981](https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981)

(I worked on this)

I don't see any mention in the article of what algorithms Apple is using, or a
link to the code. In the area of privacy, the code should really be open
source, for obvious reasons.

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mturmon
Differential privacy is an interesting research area. I know there have been
several survey talks, including at NIPS. I wanted to point out this:

[http://rsrg.cms.caltech.edu/netecon/privacy2015/program.shtm...](http://rsrg.cms.caltech.edu/netecon/privacy2015/program.shtml)

which has some nice slides and discussion on the "reusable holdout"
("thresholdout") which is a technique to allow one to use all of the training
data to fit a lot of models, but also offers guarantees against overfitting.

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jmount
Our intro to use of differential privacy in improving machine learning
(admittedly, a different concern than preserving privacy): [http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2015/10/a-simpler-explanation...](http://www.win-
vector.com/blog/2015/10/a-simpler-explanation-of-differential-privacy/)

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cyann
I would assume this will help Apple to be compliant with the EU General Data
Privacy Regulation. The GDPR defines quasi-identifiers as PII.

~~~
gwbas1c
??? Quasi-identifiers are a Pentium 2?

~~~
tikhonj
Personally Identifiable Information, I assume.

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jalfresi
Article blocks those using an ad-blocker

~~~
waterphone
Block their ad-block blocker with anti-adblock-killer
[https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/](https://reek.github.io/anti-
adblock-killer/)

Built into uBlock Origin with a checkbox to enable it in the settings.

~~~
st3v3r
Because you're entitled to their content.

~~~
waterphone
They're not entitled to execute code on my computer that I don't want
executed. If they want to prevent access to their content, that's fine, but
they aren't doing that, they're making an absurd attempt to keep their content
online while forcing people to disable their adblockers, which protect people
from excessive resource downloading, slow websites, behavior tracking, and
malware. The correct response is to block the script that tries to force that,
not disable the adblocker. Or, better yet, block the entire site.

~~~
st3v3r
No, the correct response is to not go to the site in the first place. All I
saw from your response is that you should be entitled to go read their
content, despite the fact that they don't wish for people with ad blockers to
go to their site. So you are saying you are entitled to read their content,
rather than simply not going to it in the first place.

~~~
icebraining
Yes, obviously people are entitled to read content served to them. That's how
the web works.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Cool. Let's put ad-blockers in the UserAgent string so that both parties are
approaching the transaction honestly, and see how that pans out.

~~~
icebraining
You can't invent some new standard for "honest behavior" and then accuse
others of dishonesty for not following it. There's nothing dishonest about not
informing sites about what addons one is running. We're being just a
straightforward as sites are with their information about exactly what PII is
captured, by whom and exactly who gets a copy of it and for what purposes it
is used. If new standards of reporting are to be expected, then sites - most
of which can't even tell who is serving the ads they have on their site -
would be screwed.

I actually only use adblockers on my tablet, since I have misgivings about the
effect of the end of web advertising on the availability of sites to poor
people (since ads effectively act as a redistribution mechanism), but I don't
blame anyone for not being willing to subject themselves to that crap.

~~~
st3v3r
This isn't a new standard. "Don't take shit you haven't paid for" has been a
standard for quite some time.

Seriously, at the end of the day, why do you feel entitled to their content,
instead of simply not going to their site?

~~~
icebraining
This is a sponsored comment, please watch this ad before reading it:
[http://bit.ly/1UbKM9T](http://bit.ly/1UbKM9T)

The new standard was Doctor_Fegg's idea that people should announce in their
user-agent that they are using an adblocker. In any case, nothing is being
"taken". The entitlement comes from where it has always come from - one makes
a request, they reply with whatever they want to serve. Payment is only a
moral obligation when we have agreed to do so, otherwise we'd have to pay for
every musician playing on the street, regardless of whether we enjoy their
content or not. People trying to push moral obligations to prop up their
flawed business models don't get my sympathy.

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marcuskaz
How would this work for image and facial recognition, especially with regard
to individuals? It seems the features needed to recognize a face are by
definition identifying.

~~~
curt15
Google photos only groups similar faces and requires the user to assign a name
to that group. Apple could presumably perform the grouping in the cloud and
relegate the association of the group with an identity to the user's device.

~~~
droopyEyelids
In the keynote they specifically called out face & image recognition as
something performed entirely on-device, without touching the network.

~~~
marcuskaz
That was my understanding too, but seems like to handle the vast amount of
image recognition required for faces and also objects which they demoed; there
would need to be a large data set to learn from, and results from that
learning saved.

The data set to learn from probably can be gathered from stock photos or other
open source images, but can that learning be saved down to phone and used to
compare against, or would it be too big?

If too big, does that mean characteristics of an image would be computed on
the phone sent to the cloud compared and the results sent back?

~~~
GrantS
Yes, the results of all the learning can be saved in a compact form which is
efficiently run on the device. Apple just yesterday unveiled their neural
network API [1] which they are presumably using for these tasks. The
description states: "BNNS supports implementation and operation of neural
networks for inference, using input data previously derived from training.
BNNS does not do training, however. Its purpose is to provide very high
performance inference on already trained neural networks."

So they're really saying that no data leaves the device for either object or
face recognition at classification time. Now, whether they are using iCloud-
stored photos (which the user has already agreed to share) for training, I
don't know, and any privacy issues would still be important at that point.

[1]
[https://developer.apple.com/reference/accelerate/1912851-bnn...](https://developer.apple.com/reference/accelerate/1912851-bnns)

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cm2187
I find it incredible that along with "we will allow users to save their data
in the cloud" comes now automatically "and we are going to exploit their
data". Even to paying customers, who shouldn't be the product.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Paying customers are not the product. Programs that use machine learning
techniques that require huge amounts of data input into them to be useful are
the product. The _problem_ is providing that data without compromising
privacy, and this is Apple's solution to that.

You can certainly argue that this is "exploiting" the user's data, but any
computer program whose purpose is to summarize or make inferences from a
provided data set is, by definition, exploiting provided data, right? Privacy
questions mostly revolve around consent and tracking. Is it potentially a
privacy concern for Google or Apple to deduce that the email that I have from
American Airlines and Hilton relates to travel plans, add that trip
information to my calendar, add the airline ticket to my phone's wallet, let
me know about transit options to and from the airport (possibly calling an
Uber for me), and so on? Sure. But it's also _really useful._

That Apple is trying to be able to provide ever more Google-esque assistance
_without_ leaving a whole bunch of trackable and user-identifiable information
on their servers, instead keeping as much as possible on my personal devices,
is something I find laudable, not overly concerning. My biggest question is
more whether or not they're actually going to be able to make it work as well
as Google does -- or at least close enouugh to Google's quality level that
it's worth using.

~~~
cm2187
"We are exploiting your data so that we can provide you a better customer
experience", i.e. targeted ads. I know the melody.

~~~
themartorana
iAd is dead at the end of the month. How else does Apple advertise to you?

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ClassyPuff
Apple is really very determined to Privacy and security_!!!

