Apple to analyze user info to bolster AI features

In a blog post, Apple (AAPL) shared how it is developing new techniques that enable Apple to discover usage trends and aggregated insights to improve features powered by Apple Intelligence, without revealing individual behavior or unique content to Apple. “One area where we’ve been applying our work on differential privacy with Apple Intelligence is Genmoji,” the company said. “For users who opt in to share Device Analytics with Apple, we use differentially private methods to identify popular prompts and prompt patterns, while providing a mathematical guarantee that unique or rare prompts aren’t discovered and that specific prompts cannot be linked to individual users… For Apple Intelligence features like summarization or writing tools that operate on longer sentences or entire email messages, the methods we use to understand trends in short prompts like Genmoji aren’t effective, so we need a new method to understand trends while upholding our privacy standards, which means not collecting any individual user’s content. To address this challenge, we can expand on recent research to create useful synthetic data that is representative of aggregate trends in real user data, without collecting any actual emails or text from devices… Building on our many years of experience using techniques like differential privacy, as well as new techniques like synthetic data generation, we are able to improve Apple Intelligence features while protecting user privacy for users who opt in to the device analytics program. These techniques allow Apple to understand overall trends, without learning information about any individual, like what prompts they use or the content of their emails. As we continue to advance the state of the art in machine learning and AI to enhance our product experiences, we remain committed to developing and implementing cutting-edge techniques to protect user privacy.”