It explicitly talks about how they've accomplished a lot of this without violating their users' privacy. And that the fact that they deny AI researchers big hoards of data, hurts their reputation in the AI community, because most AI researchers want mountains of data.
My question are: A. who is violating user's privacy, B. How is Apple any different[1] from them, besides proclaiming they aren't violating privacy?
1. Some data is collected from the device and sent to a server for processing. Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is processing on-device), they are just like every other company that opens up user's data to 'ex-filtration' by third parties.
[1]: http://www.recode.net/2016/6/24/11967188/apple-data-collecti...
This is exactly what Apple does, which should answer question B.
That is not true, even the puff-piece article admits as much if you read it carefully. This can be proven trivially: is Siri processed locally?
> Until Apple does something truly radical (like 100% encrypted information that is processing on-device)
You can call it trivial, I will argue otherwise. No one knows outside of Apple how big a percentage cloud-based processing is, but my point remains - Apple's does what everyone else is doing, the only difference is proportion.
They have themselves to blame, at least partially since they painted themselves into a corner. A while back they went on a media offensive proclaiming how "data-mining" the user's information is bad, and they won't stand for it in the interest of privacy... As it turns out, reality is a little more nuanced, and a bit of applied AI is in fact good for the user experience. e.g. your phone can't tell you were you parked your car unless it knows your location, and when you stopped driving.
I see this article as Apple PR rolling back on the previous position which inadvertently made Apple look like a company being overtaken by recent technological developments.