Learning with Privacy at Scale

[gizmodo59]

Of the big tech companies (GOOG, FB, MSFT, APPL) I really respect Apple for the things they do to protect privacy. From standing their ground against three letter agencies to ensuring user privacy even while collecting information. Albeit they don't earn the major portion of their revenue from ads unlike GOOG and FB its still commendable.

[giacaglia]

The funny thing is that Google was the first to introduce Differential Privacy to a production service into Chrome . Also differential Privacy was first created at Microsoft. Apple just followed Google and publicized it much more

[hashmal]

> Albeit they don't earn the major portion of their revenue from ads […]

That's the most important bit when it comes to trust them on privacy. They don't have a major incentive to exploit user data.

[Fnoord]

The 4 big tech companies are Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon. Facebook is climbing, sure, but not yet in the top 5. In the data I saw from 2015 it was in top100.

[obastani]

Google has also done some foundational research on learning with privacy:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05755

https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45428.html

It's hard to know for sure what they (or any company) are doing in production, but I'd be surprised if they don't use these things internally.

[rubyfan]

Well said. I’ve come to distrust FB and Google so much I am very unlikely to buy their products or leverage their services.

[wincent]

Now if they could just stop introducing passwordless root access bugs.

[freedomben]

I'm really glad Apple takes these positions in privacy. I think their efforts benefit all users, not just Apple users, because the other companies have to respond.

I would love to see them take it further by reducing the amount of "trust" required, such as more open sourcing and support for open source OSes (like Linux). They have definitely improved from "closed end to end" of Steve Jobs, but they could do even better.

[spullara]

Is this sufficient to satisfy the GDPR?

[phoneboy]

They use a term "privatized records" that is not directly recognized by the GDPR. If this is equivalent to data anonymization or pseudonymization is a mathematical proof, that I'm not familiar with. Still kudos to Apple for doing "something", then it remains to be seen how well it stands the test of time.

[nathanlee]

Not sure but from what it reads like, Apple's servers won't be holding data subject PII and data subjects have choice to opt-in or out. Though this process may need to be may need to be easier to toggle.