Apple's Privacy Crossroads
Last week at Google I/O, search giant Google took the wraps off Google Home, a smart voice-activated home product with Google Assistant (next generation Google Now) capabilities "that allows you and your family to get answers from Google, stream music, and manage everyday tasks." Now news has it that Apple is planning something along similar lines (via The Information, paywall) on a Siri-powered home speaker, at the same time opening its languishing voice assistant to third-party app developers.
Generally speaking, I don't have any qualms with tech giants like Google and Apple playing catch-up. As Vlad Savov of The Verge rightly said days back, that's the way technology improves, innovation happens (through differentiation), and how ecosystems get enriched. And that can only be a good thing. But what interests me is how Apple is going to deal with it.
Given the Cupertino-based company's appreciable hard stance on user privacy, as was evident in its recent fight with FBI over unlocking San Bernardino shooter's iPhone 5c, it remains to be seen as to how it plans to take on its rivals like Google, Facebook and Amazon in a new landscape where smart Internet of Things devices become increasingly intertwined with cloud services and artificial intelligence, two user-facing areas where Apple severely lags today.
In fact a recent report from Reuters goes on to say that Apple's "privacy by design" approach, centered on "keeping customer data on their devices - rather than in the cloud (Apple however does keep the things you mouth to Siri as anonymised voice files on its servers for a total period of two years for testing and product improvement purposes), on Apple servers - and isolating various types of data so they cannot be united to form profiles of customers," have led to it "grappling with internal conflicts over privacy that could pose challenges to its long-term product strategy."
With these restraints in place, will Apple be able to design a smarter assistant that can proactively anticipate your needs by inferring from who you are, when in actuality it has no real picture of "who your are," unlike Google and Facebook? Can it design a sophisticated-enough chatbot and join the zeitgeisty likes of Facebook, Microsoft and Google? Colour me skeptical. But it will be interesting to see how Apple pulls it off.
Generally speaking, I don't have any qualms with tech giants like Google and Apple playing catch-up. As Vlad Savov of The Verge rightly said days back, that's the way technology improves, innovation happens (through differentiation), and how ecosystems get enriched. And that can only be a good thing. But what interests me is how Apple is going to deal with it.
Given the Cupertino-based company's appreciable hard stance on user privacy, as was evident in its recent fight with FBI over unlocking San Bernardino shooter's iPhone 5c, it remains to be seen as to how it plans to take on its rivals like Google, Facebook and Amazon in a new landscape where smart Internet of Things devices become increasingly intertwined with cloud services and artificial intelligence, two user-facing areas where Apple severely lags today.
In fact a recent report from Reuters goes on to say that Apple's "privacy by design" approach, centered on "keeping customer data on their devices - rather than in the cloud (Apple however does keep the things you mouth to Siri as anonymised voice files on its servers for a total period of two years for testing and product improvement purposes), on Apple servers - and isolating various types of data so they cannot be united to form profiles of customers," have led to it "grappling with internal conflicts over privacy that could pose challenges to its long-term product strategy."
With these restraints in place, will Apple be able to design a smarter assistant that can proactively anticipate your needs by inferring from who you are, when in actuality it has no real picture of "who your are," unlike Google and Facebook? Can it design a sophisticated-enough chatbot and join the zeitgeisty likes of Facebook, Microsoft and Google? Colour me skeptical. But it will be interesting to see how Apple pulls it off.
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