Apple kickstarted its annual WWDC yesterday with a powerful keynote. During the same, it announced a collaboration with OpenAI, something that was highly speculated. The tech giant has boarded OpenAI’s GPT 4o powered ChatGPT to not just enhance Siri but to also offer some standalone text and image generation features. While all this is pretty exciting and everyone was waiting for it, the move has also raised many privacy concerns. Some of which were previously associated with OpenAI.
It seems that Apple was well aware that these concerns might arise and hence addressed them in depth during its Keynote. The tech giant informed that when users use Apple Intelligence features, it will be aware of the user’s data but will not share it. Further, it informed that the data will never get stored, will be used only when requested, and it also promises verifiable privacy. So the first step is to trust the iPhone-makers with your data.
Also read: Apple Leverages OpenAI Partnership for Advanced AI Features in iOS 18 at WWDC 2024
The next concern is that even though Apple has properly spoken about privacy protection, it has not spoken about privacy protection when OpenAI’s ChatGPT comes into the picture. As we all know, OpenAI is not very popular when it comes to privacy concerns. With Apple, ChatGPT has been deeply integrated into iOS18. The California-based tech giant has not addressed how it will make sure that user data is protected while using the in-built ChatGPT.
Elon Musk went to the extreme length of saying he would boycott Apple products completely if the company integrates OpenAI at the OS level. He said that this was an unacceptable security violation. He will ban it at his company too. He took to X (formerly Twitter) to say, “And visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage”.
Tech creator Marques Brownlee, famously known as MKBHD, also took to X and shared that he personally asked Tim Cook about the privacy concern to which he replied that Apple will not send any of the user data to OpenAI without the user’s permission.
What are your thoughts on it? Do you agree with Musk too? Let me know.
