Jun
11
My data+Your data=Their data
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The announcement yesterday, by Tim Cook,, of the Apple Intelligence initiative may mark a really important point in the development of machine intelligent solutions. Commentary upon it has taken several different directions, which may mean that the pundits and the journalists do not know quite what to concentrate upon.Is this Apple joining the AI battle really for the first time, while trying to sharply differentiate itself from its Big Tech rivals? Is this Apple being forced to do something with AI by virtue of the fact that its asset value has sunk below that of Microsoft? Or is this Apple, aware that it is lagging behind in the AI PR wars, playinig catch up while not deploying its own technology but using Open AI instead?.
It may be one of these things, or it may be all three of them at once. What Big Tech companies say is very much about markets and valuations: what these companies do is very much more about easing customers along the line of upgrade to the next price point. I see nothing much in the Apple announcement that departs from this settled formula. But there is one important difference that does mean a lot. In order to develop its Apple Intelligence program, Apple is going to have to, on a massive scale, acquire, learn from and reuse its own customers data. In the past Apple has set its face against storing and reusing and resellingcustomer data. In fact, it has rather positioned itself as the company of data privacy and the protector of user rights and privileges. Despite protestations that nothing will change this surely has to change if Apple is going to be storing and reusing data about customer preferences, modes of usage, workflow and leisure habits in order to provide more intelligent solutions for the users themselves. The early announcements indicate that there will be “personal“ storage and security. The early announcements do not say that Apple is now abandoning its earlier position as the protector of privacy for its users.
Does this matter? If we all get smart services. which integrate apps and create real speed, time saving and value for us, will we care at all? Possibly many of us will not, and it is indicative that Apple Intelligence is being rolled out in the USA before it moves to Europe. In Europe it will face more difficult challenges, in a way that takes me back to Luxembourg in the mid 1980s when the first debates on European data privacy were getting underway. I think of it as a time when a European dream was confronting an American economic reality. And, as a member of the EU Legal Observatory of DG XIII, I was privileged to watch. My fellow UK delegate, Charles Clark (the U.K.’s leading copyright authority) and I sat through lengthy and impassioned statements of the droit morale principles which covered the inalienable rights of each individual to the ownership of every item of data created by that individual or spun out from his activities as an individual or as a participant in society. It might be said that in the European copyright legislation of those years, the French view, lost the battle, but they got their revenge with the introduction of data privacy law, and it’s dissemination in such a way that it in effect became global despite its European origins.
The part of the world which has seen information and data protection in terms of economic rights, but not in terms of personal privacy, has also been the part of the world mostly concerned with the development of commercial AI. Open AI has in particular gained the reputation of being scraper in chief and re-user in general of everything which can be obtained without payment. Whether that reputation is fair or not, it is certainly true that the torrent of lawsuits is forcing AI developers to look more carefully at the status of the date that they use. And since Apple will be using the personal data of its own users to create services which, while highly beneficial, it will monetise to the fullest extent possible, we may expect to see Apple Intelligence launched on a string of revised terms and conditions, in which users surrender entirely even those minimal rights that they thought they might have had.
Back in Luxembourg all those years ago, the Europeans had a dream. They imagined that if each and every one of us was in control of their own data, then part of the New World might be selling back that data to the developers who were going to use it. Selling it to get lower prices, or premium treatment. A bit like selling the excess power generated by your solar panels back to the electricity company. Selling your data in this way would keep the technology companies honest, it was argued. They would then have to tell you how your data had been reused and who had bought it. They could be audited, and steps could be taken to ensure that the provenance of data was checked, and misinformation in the network was better controlled. Naturally, they were dismissed as fantasists!
My own hope is that Apple today will set it sights higher then improving my holiday travel booking process and getting the erratic predicted text punctuation out of my dictation, and embark on a program of user undertakings that includes prohibiting the sale of my data to anyone who, in any circumstances, will use it against my interests.