Apple's differential privacy will continue its advocacy to protect iOS users' data from outsiders. The company has prided itself on being the sole defender of user privacy among its data-hungry rivals.
Wired reported that Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi talked about privacy at the company's Worldwide Developers' Conference in San Francisco on Monday. He explained that, as much as possible, the tech giant tries to keep users' private information on the device instead of on their server.
However, he has admitted that collecting user information is needed for the development of good software. Apple's differential privacy is believed to be the company's answer to this dilemma.
"We believe you should have great features and great privacy," Federighi told the audience. "Differential privacy is a research topic in the areas of statistics and data analytics that uses hashing, subsampling and noise injection to enable...crowdsourced learning while keeping the data of individual users completely private. Apple has been doing some super-important work in this area to enable differential privacy to be deployed at scale."
Apple's differential privacy will allow the company to collect and store iOS users' data about the trends that people follow. It cannot extract specific information on one user, though. In theory, the company is protecting users from itself as well as from hackers or intelligence agencies.
According to Tech Crunch, Apple's differential privacy will be rolled out along with iOS 10. The smartphone giant will begin using the technology to collect and analyze user data from its keyboard, Spotlight and Notes apps. It was also noted that the company will limit the amount of data taken from each user.
Apple's keyboard will use differential privacy to improve its suggestions for QuickType and emoji. It will also point out language trends from all around the world.
Apple's differential privacy is built on the deep linking function introduced in iOS 9. The Notes app is expected to become more interactive and provide smarter suggestions.
