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The iPhone vs. Android battle is about to get even more intense than perhaps ever before. And if you’re a premium Samsung user, Apple’s sudden new statement should be reason enough to consider making the switch.
Apple vs Samsung—The battle lines for AI are being drawn
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In a country far, far away, Apple made a major statement this week that has serious implications for the escalating battle between iPhone and Android alternatives. Android alternatives mainly mean Samsung at the higher end of the market.
“Some companies routinely scan personal information in the cloud in order to monetize users’ information,” Apple said. Apple isn’t like that. We have chosen a completely different path, prioritizing the security and privacy of our users. ”
The statement was made in Australia, another market that is considering imposing a monitoring burden on technology providers to alert them to fraudulent activity across their user base.
The country’s eSafety proposals to combat terrorism, radicalization, and child sexual abuse include measures found elsewhere to monitor user content (in some way) while maintaining user security and privacy. There is the same obvious contradiction.
“Scanning all users’ personally stored iCloud data may pose serious security and privacy issues,” Apple warned in a statement released on October 1, 2016. guardian. “Scanning for specific content opens the door to bulk monitoring of communication and storage systems.”
This statement is notable for two reasons. The risk highlighted by Apple is that by technically breaking the sanctity of end-to-end encryption, technology providers lose a key defense against scope creep. Simply put, what begins with CSAM or radicalization moves into political dissent and sexual freedom.
Apple warned that “mass surveillance tools have far-reaching negative consequences for freedom of opinion and expression, and for democracy as a whole.” For example, the perception that governments can force providers to monitor people’s behavior raises significant risks of chilling legitimate associative, expressive, political freedoms, and economic activity. ”
This is notable because it is exactly the same argument I and others made when Apple proposed device-side scanning for CSAM in 2021: That device. Apple has rejected such requests in the past. Technically impossible. Well, that suddenly changed. ”
The backlash against Apple’s plans for being too un-Apple-like was relentless, and the iPhone maker eventually changed its mind and scrapped its device-side scanning plans. Instead, we opted for communications safety features that alert you when content is dangerous and provide a way for minors to seek help. A year or so later, Apple began end-to-end encryption for most iCloud storage, a major shift in the opposite direction and the biggest security enhancement in years.
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Putting the irony of this welcome clarity aside, here’s another reason why this privacy confirmation from Apple is noteworthy. private On-device processing and Open Cloud processing is about to become the biggest differentiator between Apple and Google in terms of ecosystem. That means Apple vs. Samsung in terms of devices.
Google scans photos and other content stored in the cloud for CSAM and other materials. We also use the cloud for other types of classification, relying on heavier processing to classify content and support apps and services. This is also making headlines now that Gemini (née Bird) is being rolled out across Google’s ecosystem, with the possibility that user content created while working with this AI will be stored in the cloud. There have also been a number of warnings about the high levels of pollution and the potential for human-induced impacts. review.
Apple doesn’t want to do this. The approach is to run the AI on the device within an end-to-end encrypted bubble where the AI is applied, and prevent the AI itself from accessing content stored on the cloud side. This is much more difficult than the economies of scale that come with cloud processes, but the theory is that if anyone can do it, Apple can do it too.
As I reported last month, Apple appears to be evaluating the performance of device-side generative AI against leading cloud-side alternatives. And while iOS drives a consequential generative AI built around device privacy and security, Google drives an alternative AI built around privacy warnings and guidance notices about data used and stored online. A parallel world is approaching.
This is the next privacy nightmare in store and will likely polarize the Android vs. iOS debate, much like we’ve seen with privacy labels and encryption.
In my opinion, from a device perspective, the iPhone and its Samsung replacement are closer than ever in terms of performance, features, and functionality. But the wave of AI will create new levels of differentiation never seen before. And if you’re going to buy a smartphone for between $1,000 and $2,000, you want privacy to be fully built-in.
I don’t want an ecosystem that could accidentally flag content or introduce the risk of data breaches on the cloud side outside of the crypto bubble. I want to be clear about my deep-rooted philosophy regarding content protection and sovereignty. We also need technical guarantees that cannot be compromised.
Additionally, similar confusion can be added when it comes to Android security updates and Apple’s equivalent security updates, as well as highly dangerous malware attacks, some of which specifically target Samsung devices.
And in 2024, when generative AI is poised to change our smartphones forever, the iPhone’s case at the premium end of the market will be stronger than ever, even though Google’s AI took the lead in releasing AI features. ing. Perhaps that’s why the top seven best-selling premium devices last year were all iPhones.
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