Check To See What Apps Your iPhone Is Training AI On

And here's a step-by-step guide to disabling them. FOREVER WARS does some News You Can Use

Edited by Sam Thielman

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RECENTLY, I INSTALLED APPLE'S iOS 18.1 UPDATE. Shame on me for not realizing sooner that I should be checking app permissions for Siri—which I had thought I disabled as soon as I bought my device—but after installing it, I noticed this update appeared to change Siri's defaults. 

If this happened on an earlier update and you've already adjusted your settings, then shame on me for not having noticed and you can go about your day. But whether you downloaded this update or if it happened unnoticed on an earlier version of iOS you're using, here's a quick step for those interested in stopping Apple from uploading your data to its new cloud-based AI project. 

Go to Settings and then go to Siri. 

Scroll down to the 'Siri App Access' sub-section and open Apps. 

I was alarmed to see that even my secure communications apps, like Proton and Signal, were toggled by default to "Learn from this App” and enable some subsidiary functions. I had to swipe them all off.

I spent an annoying five-to-ten minutes disabling "Learn from this App" from every app. Your mileage, perspective, and level of paranoia may be different from mine. I'm not telling you what to do or how comfortable you should feel sending your data to Apple to amalgamate into a digital gestalt data-entity. But if you're someone concerned with this stuff, I hope you find this useful for your security. 

[If you’re interested in the “technical” whitepapers—which are reasonably accessible to people like ourselves who don’t have engineering backgrounds—the one that addresses Apple’s new “Foundation Language Models” is at a Cornell-affiliated site here and the company blog post that addresses the new “Private Cloud Compute” system is here. From what I can gather Apple tries to keep all data in the new cloud project accessible only to you—meaning not even Apple can get at it—including during active processing; the rationale is that it’s not always going to be practical to carry around the necessary storage capacity in your pocket as the competition for hardware space in your phone increases. If you read these papers and know how to test their assertions, do email me.

In general, I’ve been impressed with Apple’s understanding of user privacy requirements and the extent to which they’ve made it part of their branding. Perhaps this is an innovative collection of generalized training guidelines for machine learning software that builds a personalized version of Siri entirely inside hardware cordoned off from everybody except the user. But even if it is, it’s frankly inexcusable to just turn on a new setting that lets a program on a server located who knows where see into every single one of your apps no matter how sensitive the material inside, doubly so to make it a pain in the ass to turn off. I am fine with the current edition of Siri. I’d be a lot happier if Apple used this money to commission some more Joel Coen movies instead. Spencer and I and our colleague Danny Yadron did a lot of reporting on Apple’s resistance to law enforcement overreach at The Guardian and so the heedlessness of this approach surprises me. But I guess you can only pickle in Sam Altman’s ubiquitous traveling-salesman bullshit about the power of AI for so long before it reaches your brain.—Sam.]

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