These are going to be very popular for intercepting images on their way to a display. Think of the advertising possibilities. Ad attribution can be 'vastly improved' when both the ad and every step in the funnel are all spymarked and all of them are reliably reported on by virtue of their pixels hitting your screen.
First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.
[1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)
Apple is just Stockholm Syndrome at scale. I wouldn't trust anything they say about privacy, especially given how closed their ecosystem and hardware is.
TBH, Nvidia kinda deserves this. Between the incredibly buggy forcedeth ethernet chipset, the 2010 era laptop GPUs with insane failure rates that caused a recall across the entire industry, and various other issues, Apple (and others) have legitimate reasons to avoid working with them.
Literally nothing that happened 15 years ago could possibly be cited as a good reason for a business to make a decision today.
Like, a significant portion of the people who were involved in any screwups made in the 2000s -- especially the more senior people who should get most of the blame -- are now retired.
Make decisions based on today and on reality. Apple holding a grudge against Nvidia today, if true (as we have no proof that it factors in, of course), is downright childish.
Both of those issues are over 2 decades old. It's the equivalent of boycotting Apple for supporting IBM, you will not achieve anything since the "problem" is already fixed. I don't know how you can call that legitimate in good faith.
Apple had the opportunity to take Apple Silicon to the datacenter and become the #1 professional ARM microarchitecture in the world. It was Apple's stupid grudge that gave Nvidia everything they needed to sell thousands of their lazily-made Grace CPU.
I don't think you can count apple out like that. They will likely implement it themselves though. This would be in addition to their always listening AI watch and intelligence features.
Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later but.. they tell you about it proudly. They also tell you how they’ve managed to do it while keeping privacy focused.
It’s your choice if you believe them or not, I like Apple and I wouldn’t use that feature.
The pretending that this is the same thing, that Apple is sneaking something past you when they’re showing you that they’re trying to do it right is a bad faith argument.
It’s absolutely not a bad faith argument. They proudly tell you about iMessage being end-to-end encrypted. The part where it’s practically only encryption at rest, because everyone enables iCloud backups without ADP is hidden somewhere in a footnote.
Wonder if they proudly tell Chinese users (or visitors to China) that suddenly their data is going to a different place than usual, servers outside of Apple's control?
> Apple’s always on watch has a declared 15 second buffer for live audio, and a worse scenario of summarizing your conversations for later
Even if you trust them, maybe as an user you can be ok with that. As a non-user who will talk with people wearing Apple Watches, I disagree being recorded and my conversations with the watch owner summarized.
Will they surrender logs for a legal discovery request?
e.g. Johnny's accused of something white collar, did he ever make any prompts that suggest how early on he was aware of {X} and further indicate how he moved to frame it?
They’re asserting that all the audio is done on device, and the results of encrypted so they can’t access them even from the backups.
Unlike… EVERY… other tech company, it is in Apple’s interest to be privacy-focused.
Even if you just have to believe them, which you do pretty much, they’re the biggest name pushing for privacy in the world right now. They make more on selling devices than they make on ads and behaviors. It’s in their interest to not lie.
Read the actual privacy brief. Even though the audio transcription is done on device. For Siri recap, a condensed transcription (which mostly removes superfluous words, etc.) goes to their PCC servers. So even though their servers do not get raw audio, their servers do get transcriptions, which is nearly the same privacy-wise.
Of course, at that point it depends on how much you trust their PCC.
I'm not pretending anything, nor did I imply they were sneaking anything in. It's a bad faith argument to pretend I was doing that, which is ironic but not unexpected from an apple fan...
I’m a bit unfamiliar with current laws, but are there any rules that would prohibit companies from doing this in interest of user privacy? I know at this point privacy is long dead but there are certain things that do get called out and shut down.
Apples largest area of growth is literally services and advertising. They even make a huge deal of it in their investor calls. Have for at least the past 3 years.
As synthetic image fidelity gets closer and closer to indistinguishable from genuine pictures, what, exactly can one do to tell the difference absent something like SynthID?
Who, exactly, is the "bt@brand.io" whose only attributable contribution is FUD regarding SynthID (and what are their motives)?
First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.
[1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)