Unmasking the Privacy Risks of Apple Intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: Unmasking the Privacy Risks of Apple Intelligence

#21

Post by astrange » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 12:11 AM UTC

staplers wrote: post #8

bastard_op wrote: post #3

Apple already slurps everything you do with their "privacy proxy" services, so what more risk do you want? Apple defaults for forwarding all dns and web pages via their proxies, they just can't seem to figure out what to do with it.

If apple can figure out how to carve out a privacy/individual-focused ai model that avoids the classic centralized data-harvest/training they could runaway with a large portion of the market. So many people understand the benefits ai can bring to our lives with automations, search, etc but so many are also aware of the dangers lurking beneath the surface and causes anti-ai sentiment (for good reason). They can be mut…

All anti-AI sentiment I've seen on the internet is based on fears it'll take their jobs and comes in the form of almost-entirely-fake concerns about it supposedly using up all our water. Most people don't care about privacy very much.

Re: Unmasking the Privacy Risks of Apple Intelligence

#22

Post by mingus88 » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 12:23 AM UTC

staplers wrote: post #8

bastard_op wrote: post #3

Apple already slurps everything you do with their "privacy proxy" services, so what more risk do you want? Apple defaults for forwarding all dns and web pages via their proxies, they just can't seem to figure out what to do with it.

If apple can figure out how to carve out a privacy/individual-focused ai model that avoids the classic centralized data-harvest/training they could runaway with a large portion of the market. So many people understand the benefits ai can bring to our lives with automations, search, etc but so many are also aware of the dangers lurking beneath the surface and causes anti-ai sentiment (for good reason). They can be mut…

Do you really think so?

There have been privacy focused alternatives to Gmail since Gmail was invented and it didn’t stop everyone from letting Google index every single thing they sent or received.

Time and time again we have seen privacy nightmare products and services run away with the market. I just don’t think that people vote with their wallets if they even care at all

Re: Unmasking the Privacy Risks of Apple Intelligence

#23

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 11:02 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #21

staplers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If apple can figure out how to carve out a privacy/individual-focused ai model that avoids the classic centralized data-harvest/training they could runaway with a large portion of the market. So many people understand the benefits ai can bring to our lives with automations, search, etc but so many are also aware of the dangers lurking beneath the surface and causes anti-ai sentiment (for good reason). They can be mut…

All anti-AI sentiment I've seen on the internet is based on fears it'll take their jobs and comes in the form of almost-entirely-fake concerns about it supposedly using up all our water. Most people don't care about privacy very much.

At some point it became normalised to post your face, real name and home address online multiple times a day.

Privacy, for most people, is already gone

Re: Unmasking the Privacy Risks of Apple Intelligence

#24

Post by ezfe » Fri, Aug 22, 2025, 2:21 PM UTC

isodev wrote: post #18

ezfe wrote: post #4

The concerns here are valid but the fact the authors label this being about Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute really devalues their credibility in general. Siri doesn’t have any of the new AI features, the prompts they’re using have been around for years, and private cloud compute has always been about Apple Intelligence generative features.

I think people are unaware of the difference between Apple Intelligence and Siri - they even have the same colour glow now. Also, can you always tell if it's Siri or Apple Intelligence handling a request? The only privacy screen on macOS and iOS is during oob or after OS updates, and it does not make a distinction. As the OP post highlights, there is no way to avoid said telemetry from being sent or configure it in S…

Apple Intelligence currently handles no requests. ChatGPT handles some, but asks for confirmation first with the default settings.

Re: Unmasking the Privacy Risks of Apple Intelligence

#25

Post by xp84 » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

MarioMan wrote: post #16

xp84 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they just can't seem to figure out what to do with it. That's the funny thing about Siri. It has since Day 1 insisted on being exclusively online-only, processing on the server - even for commands that the pre-Siri Voice Control could do fully locally on an iPhone 3Gs such as "Call Steve" or "Turn Wi-Fi on" That decision always surprised me, and it's surprising that Siri's never improved given that unlike Apple Int…

Siri has supported an offline subset of commands since iOS 15 came out in 2021. I just tested this with Wi-Fi and cellular data disabled. Calling someone works perfectly and asking to turn Wi-Fi on presents the relevant toggle.

Sorry, so it was only 11 years for them to restore the functionality that Siri in effect "took away" in 2010.

The only way to get it back for those 11 years was to disable Siri entirely, meaning you had to be "cloud dependent" or stick to that unchanging set of offline-only features exclusively for a decade. Not a lot for the Siri team to be proud of there.