There’s no need to panic — Apple says it definitely didn’t train its artificial intelligence on your data.
Privacy is a massive concern when it comes to AI, but Apple stayed true to its brand by prioritizing customer protection.
Alongside its introduction of Apple Intelligence, the tech giant announced that the system would operate using Private Cloud Compute — an infrastructure designed for handling AI requests privately.
During the Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, Apple showed off impressive AI announcements like custom emojis called “Genmojis,” a more helpful Siri, and a partnership with OpenAI.
While the ChatGPT maker uses the data from users’ interactions with its services to train its models, Apple said that’s not the case for iPhone owners. And while ChatGPT is coming to Apple products by way of a new-and-improved Siri, users have the option to opt out of using the tool from OpenAI.
“We do not use our users’ private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models,” an Apple research note published Monday read.
Instead, it said its models are trained on licensed data and publicly available data collected by its web crawler called Applebot. It’s up to web publishers to opt out of this if they don’t want information on their site used for Apple Intelligence.
Still, the company said that it applies “filters to remove personally identifiable information like social security and credit card numbers that are publicly available,” profanity, and other “low-quality content” from the data it uses for training.
Companies have found themselves in hot water over AI privacy concerns in the past. Zoom users threatened to ditch the video conference company in 2023 after taking a closer look at its terms and conditions. Part of the agreement said that users would consent to Zoom using their data for AI training.
In response to the backlash, the company added a line to its terms of service clarifying that users could choose not to have their data used for such purposes.
Apple is setting a new standard in the field.
“Apple has taken great pains to separate itself from the rest of the tech pack by its passionate advocacy of privacy,” Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, said.
