I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
The article doesn't say that every HomePod limitation is an intentional privacy-based decision.
However, Apple is also not racing to rapidly throw out ideas in the voice category because:
d) from your point of view but I've not seen anything to validate it
Are you completely unaware of “antenna-gate” and signal attenuation on iPhone 4? Signal attenuation was nothing new at the time but it exploded when exhibited on the iPhone 4. Heck, I even had a manual to a previous phone that had a drawing of a hand holding that model of phone and basically saying if held in that way the signal may be affected. Nobody cared. But when Apple released a phone that exhibited the same behavior as other cell phones it was suddenly front page, screaming headlines news.
That’s just one example.
Apple has around 30-40% market share in the US. I'd be surprised if it wasn't headline news. We have an inbuilt negative bias that the media exploits. Every big company makes headlines when something happens - Samsung's exploding batteries, Facebook's CA problems, Google's issues around diversity, tax avoidance, censorship, car crashes, demonitising some youtube channels, screw ups on messaging, email scanning, book scanning. And we are currently commenting on one of many articles about Amazon's Echo spying.
Apple's moral stance isn't a virtue of bieng inherently "good" but a feature of corporate branding, if Apple really cared about the environment or privacy they wouldn't advertise to us so much about their efforts, but they do because as you can see by this thread it sell more iPhones,
I’ve always figured the reason they talk about their efforts regarding the environment was to head off being called out by, for example, Greenpeace. And even if that’s not the reason, there’s nothing wrong with eliminating/reducing toxic chemicals or conflict minerals in their devices. If they didn’t mention it from time to time how would anyone know? I doubt there are that many people making their buying decisions based on Apple’s environmental stance. If it helps other companies to do the same then that’s great.
By the way, when does Apple advertise “so much” about their environmental efforts? I’ve seen it mentioned during keynotes and I see things on AI but I have yet to see a print ad or television spot by Apple touting their environmental efforts.
I care about my privacy, don't have a FB account, don't use my real name "anywhere", use a VPN daily, and Siri.... I wouldn't use it even if it was actually useful.
If you own an iPhone, you've already acknowledged your trust in Apple's privacy integrity, because you know... Siri could be listening to you without you knowing it. Sure you can turn it off but is it really off? Of course if you were a really paranoid IT security expert you could look through the packets with NetShark to verify, but fortunately with Apple you probably don't need to.
I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
The article doesn't say that every HomePod limitation is an intentional privacy-based decision.
However, Apple is also not racing to rapidly throw out ideas in the voice category because:
d) from your point of view but I've not seen anything to validate it
Are you completely unaware of “antenna-gate” and signal attenuation on iPhone 4? Signal attenuation was nothing new at the time but it exploded when exhibited on the iPhone 4. Heck, I even had a manual to a previous phone that had a drawing of a hand holding that model of phone and basically saying if held in that way the signal may be affected. Nobody cared. But when Apple released a phone that exhibited the same behavior as other cell phones it was suddenly front page, screaming headlines news.
That’s just one example.
Apple has around 30-40% market share in the US. I'd be surprised if it wasn't headline news. We have an inbuilt negative bias that the media exploits. Every big company makes headlines when something happens - Samsung's exploding batteries, Facebook's CA problems, Google's issues around diversity, tax avoidance, censorship, car crashes, demonitising some youtube channels, screw ups on messaging, email scanning, book scanning. And we are currently commenting on one of many articles about Amazon's Echo spying.
Agreed, it's Apple loons who think that there actually are people who seriously dedicte their time and energy to hating and conspiring against a near trillion $ company. It seems DED can no longer write an Apple article without bringing up the same companies that aren't really even in any significant way directly competing with Apple. Google is a search engine ad company, Amazon is an everything online store, Samsung is the everything electronics and appliances store, Apple is the iPhone/computer company, in what universe can you reasonably equate any of these business models ? constantly implying that since Apple is the only one succeeding at the computer business (which is their model) means the rest are implicitly evil and out to exploit and harm people is ridiculous. Apple's moral stance isn't a virtue of bieng inherently "good" but a feature of corporate branding, if Apple really cared about the environment or privacy they wouldn't advertise to us so much about their efforts, but they do because as you can see by this thread it sell more iPhones, if it didn't it be out the window i.e China.
Says what authority? If you think the level of effort apple has put into environment or privacy values is equal to other corps you’re delusional.
I didn't say it was equal, just that it's not pure nobility it's marketing intended to generate sales like all marketing. Apple isn't good or evil, there are no good or evil companies, they are all out to make money, Apple like all other brand companies is selling a brand, like Chanel or BMW, the brand transmits a massage about the company that the company hopes will resonate with their targeted customers to the point of generating a sale, the company associates the brand with social causes and ideas that will best achieve this, Biz school 101 really. Strange can you honestly say that Apple's environmental and privacy efforts aren't one of the reasons we are so loyal and infatuated with Apple and why its brand holds such esteem and people are proud to own Apple products to the irrational point that we absolutely loathe Google or Samsung ? does Apple not do these things in part to paint it self in a light that it knows will romance the pants/cash off it's customers ? BTW I don't see this as bad, evil or deceitful, its great, after all it's just business
We appear to be mixing things up here! To start with any information about you either posted or dictated by us needs to be secured! Security is important!
BUT! Siri's major failings as well as Home Pods is not security! Its inaction & lack of vision!
Asking a simple question about something and not getting an answer that correct or just points me to a web URL which is not what I want. It's the lack of conversational flow, so if Siri pointed me to a URL I should be able just to tell Siri to read it or at least give me a synopsis. This has nothing to do with security!
How about when I'm cooking breakfast and I ask Siri for a timer for my eggs and then ask for a second timer for my oatmeal can't do it!
The only security issue presently is Home Pod being locked to my iPhone so anyone can ask the HomePod to send a message as me. Now thats a security weakness which still hasn't been dealt with.
So stop finding reasons that Apple can't won't do this or that. Lets focus on what it should do that has nothing to do with security and when they fail to deal with something that does have to do with security lets get it fixed ASAP or at least limit the action until something can be done.
Basically, iPad's & Home Pods need to support multiple people and be able to discriminate in some fashion whom is the person is thats interacting with them! In the case of having multiple Home Pods, each one needs to discriminate the person nearest to them and if the person joins the other somehow the Home Pod needs to know what not to do!
1. Ask Siri to give you a verbal synopsis of a web page? Will Alexa or Google do that? That would a pretty significant artificial intelligence trick to be able to do that. Not only are you expecting AI to be capable of high-level reading comprehension, but you’re also expecting it to be able to reliably determine what’s important to summarize and what can be left out. I know a lot of humans who aren’t all that good at doing that on the fly. You think AI is going to be able to do that with content that will vary from pop culture to porn to political news, to highly specialized interests in subjects ranging from science to music to coin collecting? I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
2. Multiple timers keeps turning up as a criticism, and while it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to implement, I find it difficult to believe that it’s that important a thing to anyone. Seems more like a critic’s talking point.
3. You can turn off messages for your HomePod. They’re disabled on mine. I’m not sure how “thats a security weakness which still hasn't been dealt with.” It’s been dealt with on my HomePod.
4. You want HomePods to “discriminate (determine?) the person nearest to them (it?).” Just in your description here you highlight the engineering challenges and subjective choices required for making a device like that serve multiple masters. How is it going to know who is nearest to it? Does everyone have to be wearing an Apple Watch or have an implanted RFID chip? Would it listen for your heartbeat? Would it require an always-on camera watching the whole room? Why would personal distance be the determining factor for who it serves? If it’s playing music from my preferences and someone else sits in a seat slightly closer to it, should it automatically switch to her preferences? If she’s sitting next to it listening to music, and I call out from the next room to turn on some lights, should it ignore me because I’m not the one closest to it?
The point here is, you can list all sorts of things it would be cool if HomePods could do, and they might one day do some of those things. You’re describing both difficult engineering feats, however, as well as choices that might meet one person’s preferences and make another really unhappy. The point of the editorial at the top of this thread is that Apple takes a slower pace at working things like this out, both to make certain that the engineering is well implemented, and also that questions of functional preferences are handled well, rather than just pushed out there to say they “did it.” A multi-user HomePod that is less than spectacularly effective at understanding and differentiating those multiple users would draw far more and far harsher criticism than a HomePod that simply doesn’t do that yet.
So far, Apple is deeply invested in pursuing such thoughtful contemplative efforts, while its rivals do not even seem to recognize this as an issue. That's not going to work out well for them.
That seems like a logical conclusion but based on the minimal fallout that Facebook has had since the whole CA thing, I’m not sure how accurate it is.
It’s interesting that CA had to close down because their business tanked, but Facebook, the originator of the data collection that CA used, seems to have only been slightly bruised.
Considering that, I’m not sure many people care about ethics or privacy.
The fan masturbation editorials on here are out of control. In one voice we should be screaming at Apple to fix this garbage software not maligning Amazon for building a 30$ superior product.
This privacy nonsense should die. Nothing and no one on the internet is private. Period. It’s a marketing scheme and it will also fail.
Tneyve been recording our 411 calls without our Permission for over a decade.
I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
I’d be interested in knowing how well voice match has been implemented on HomePod competitors’ devices. It’s not unusual for blood relatives in a household to have very similar voices. A static appliance in the house using voice match to access individual accounts, playlists, etc. would need to have a very low fail rate at matching voices. Is the question that Apple can’t implement this as well as others, or is it that they have a higher expectation for quality before they’re willing to roll it out?
Other vendors did face recognition before Apple’s faceID, but their implementation was decidedly inferior. Could be the same issue with voice match on the HomePod.
Could be, I'm not sure. I guess the assumption is that most people trust those living with them and if they don't, they'll limit access to such a device. There's definitely room in the market for both approaches - lock it down by default and keep it open by default.
AppleZulu said: Multiple timers keeps turning up as a criticism, and while it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to implement, I find it difficult to believe that it’s that important a thing to anyone. Seems more like a critic’s talking point.
I was thinking that if you can't set multiple timers then perhaps you could use multiple alarms instead, but in the case for the example of cooking eggs you would need precision down to the second. It didn't exactly work out as I had hoped.
Try this on your iPhone with Siri:
Me: "Please set an alarm for 11:59 and 10 seconds."
Like prescription drugs all technology advances have side effects, some good, some bad. If Apple is really thinking about this stuff before deploying then I’m happy as can be. Can you even imagine what would have happened if the Amazon Alexa privacy failure had happened on a HomePod? Instead, last night on the NBC Nightly News, there was a 20 second blurb about it in the form of a “Privacy Alert.” If it had been an Apple device the Internet would have caught on fire, AAPL would dropped like a rock, class action lawsuits would come out of the woodwork, forums like AI would be choked to a standstill because of the traffic. But since it was Amazon Echo/Alexa there was barely a mention anywhere. And that’s why Apple must take extra special caution before it deploys features. I take their word that they are indeed committed to user privacy.
Irrelevant New’s perhaps or simply not worth a news for tech and media.... im glad I don’t have alexa at home, I made lots of noise in the bedroom and I don’t want my friends to know....ouch:-((
I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
The article doesn't say that every HomePod limitation is an intentional privacy-based decision.
However, Apple is also not racing to rapidly throw out ideas in the voice category because:
d) from your point of view but I've not seen anything to validate it
Are you completely unaware of “antenna-gate” and signal attenuation on iPhone 4? Signal attenuation was nothing new at the time but it exploded when exhibited on the iPhone 4. Heck, I even had a manual to a previous phone that had a drawing of a hand holding that model of phone and basically saying if held in that way the signal may be affected. Nobody cared. But when Apple released a phone that exhibited the same behavior as other cell phones it was suddenly front page, screaming headlines news.
That’s just one example.
Apple has around 30-40% market share in the US. I'd be surprised if it wasn't headline news. We have an inbuilt negative bias that the media exploits. Every big company makes headlines when something happens - Samsung's exploding batteries, Facebook's CA problems, Google's issues around diversity, tax avoidance, censorship, car crashes, demonitising some youtube channels, screw ups on messaging, email scanning, book scanning. And we are currently commenting on one of many articles about Amazon's Echo spying.
Agreed, it's Apple loons who think that there actually are people who seriously dedicte their time and energy to hating and conspiring against a near trillion $ company. It seems DED can no longer write an Apple article without bringing up the same companies that aren't really even in any significant way directly competing with Apple. Google is a search engine ad company, Amazon is an everything online store, Samsung is the everything electronics and appliances store, Apple is the iPhone/computer company, in what universe can you reasonably equate any of these business models ? constantly implying that since Apple is the only one succeeding at the computer business (which is their model) means the rest are implicitly evil and out to exploit and harm people is ridiculous. Apple's moral stance isn't a virtue of bieng inherently "good" but a feature of corporate branding, if Apple really cared about the environment or privacy they wouldn't advertise to us so much about their efforts, but they do because as you can see by this thread it sell more iPhones, if it didn't it be out the window i.e China.
I think the companies you claim here “aren’t really even in any significant way directly competing with Apple” would all be surprised to learn that they aren’t. Today, particularly the folks at Samsung, who just were told by a jury to fork over half a billion dollars to Apple for reasons that really do seem to relate to direct competition. Doesn’t Google produce Android OS? I could swear Samsung, Google and Amazon have all manufactured phones, speakers and other devices that compete directly with Apple.
Yeah, I am almost certain these companies (and others) are all direct competitors with Apple. I also think, when millions and billions of dollars are at stake, it’s quite likely that all kinds of businesses commonly hire all kinds of consultants, industrial spies, PR firms and troll farms to try to gather and manipulate information about their competitors.
I doubt more than 5% of consumers on the entire planet care about personal privacy.
Not relevant; nowhere near true.
Most people have nothing worthwhile to hide from anyone except some little white lies.
You do not get to dictate what is worthwhile. You clearly do not comprehend the topic of discussion, either. Here’s what people “have to hide” (which isn’t even the fucking point of privacy).
Video summary: What if we stop treating you like a human being and start treating you as only the sum total of the data that comprises you? What if, when we’re missing this parts of this data, we use computers to suggest that you buy things from us that will help us complete this data? What if, when you don’t like anything we offer you that exists, we use what data we DO have on you to create something entirely new, designed for the express and sole purpose of psychologically manipulating you–and you alone–to purchase it so that we may get that missing data? What if, once we have enough of those data holes filled, we continue to psychologically manipulate you so that your behavior itself is modified in a way that we desire?
And this is from 2016, which means they started doing this at least 5 years before the pretty video presentation was made. There aren’t words to describe this. They don’t exist. Perfidy isn’t sufficient. Sedition isn’t enough. Treason “against humanity” doesn’t cut it. Torture is close, but doesn’t do justice to the scope of what’s going on here. “Ideological holodomor” perhaps. This is the true purpose of privacy. This is why only the companies which attempt to embody ethical behavior will keep existing after much longer.
If Apple wants to go about advocating privacy, that's fine, but Apple is going to end up dead last when it comes to intelligent assistants.
No, a machine does not need to know your personal information to serve you.
Zuckerberg and Facebook are doing absolutely fine no matter how much data they harvest from consumers. Ethics are for losers and Zuckerberg is a winner.
The day of reckoning is fast approaching for businesses and people like you. Think long and hard about what side of this wall you want to fall on.
Zuckerberg is practically a god on Wall Street because his highly profitable business can't be touched by any regulating bodies.
That’s really laughable.
If consumers don't care what happens to their personal data, why should anyone else care for them?
It physically hurts me to see someone as brainwashed as you.
...privacy is a right is simply wasting his breath.
Leave the Western world and never look back.
If anything, the Feds are going to keep going after Apple because they hate the idea of iPhone encryption.
Good for them? Privacy is a right regardless of what they hate.
The Feds believe…
Good for them? They don’t have the right to do that.
To most consumers personal privacy isn't worth anything, so giving it up is not such a big deal.
Yes, that’s what 70 years of literal brainwashing will do to a culture.
I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
I’d be interested in knowing how well voice match has been implemented on HomePod competitors’ devices. It’s not unusual for blood relatives in a household to have very similar voices. A static appliance in the house using voice match to access individual accounts, playlists, etc. would need to have a very low fail rate at matching voices. Is the question that Apple can’t implement this as well as others, or is it that they have a higher expectation for quality before they’re willing to roll it out?
Other vendors did face recognition before Apple’s faceID, but their implementation was decidedly inferior. Could be the same issue with voice match on the HomePod.
Could be, I'm not sure. I guess the assumption is that most people trust those living with them and if they don't, they'll limit access to such a device. There's definitely room in the market for both approaches - lock it down by default and keep it open by default.
It’s not necessarily about trusting family members or roommates. If daughter asks Siri to play some music and Siri misidentifies her voice as mom, Siri will serve up The Rolling Stones instead of Ariana Grande. In keeping with the theme of the editorial above, it’s not hard to imagine that Apple would be reluctant to roll out that feature until it’s really good at differentiating voices of even close family members. If the feature is offered by Apple, there’s a very high expectation that it works well, even when it’s not a security issue.
I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
The article doesn't say that every HomePod limitation is an intentional privacy-based decision.
However, Apple is also not racing to rapidly throw out ideas in the voice category because:
d) from your point of view but I've not seen anything to validate it
Are you completely unaware of “antenna-gate” and signal attenuation on iPhone 4? Signal attenuation was nothing new at the time but it exploded when exhibited on the iPhone 4. Heck, I even had a manual to a previous phone that had a drawing of a hand holding that model of phone and basically saying if held in that way the signal may be affected. Nobody cared. But when Apple released a phone that exhibited the same behavior as other cell phones it was suddenly front page, screaming headlines news.
That’s just one example.
Apple has around 30-40% market share in the US. I'd be surprised if it wasn't headline news. We have an inbuilt negative bias that the media exploits. Every big company makes headlines when something happens - Samsung's exploding batteries, Facebook's CA problems, Google's issues around diversity, tax avoidance, censorship, car crashes, demonitising some youtube channels, screw ups on messaging, email scanning, book scanning. And we are currently commenting on one of many articles about Amazon's Echo spying.
Apple's moral stance isn't a virtue of bieng inherently "good" but a feature of corporate branding, if Apple really cared about the environment or privacy they wouldn't advertise to us so much about their efforts, but they do because as you can see by this thread it sell more iPhones,
I’ve always figured the reason they talk about their efforts regarding the environment was to head off being called out by, for example, Greenpeace. And even if that’s not the reason, there’s nothing wrong with eliminating/reducing toxic chemicals or conflict minerals in their devices. If they didn’t mention it from time to time how would anyone know? I doubt there are that many people making their buying decisions based on Apple’s environmental stance. If it helps other companies to do the same then that’s great.
By the way, when does Apple advertise “so much” about their environmental efforts? I’ve seen it mentioned during keynotes and I see things on AI but I have yet to see a print ad or television spot by Apple touting their environmental efforts.
Go to their YouTube channel there was an entire ad series about how green iMassage was coz Apple servers are 100% renewable and Jackson's always doing interviews so they do talk about it, though it's not TV campaigns if that's what you're referring to, it's more subtle and less in you're face "hey look our products are environmentally considerate, so if you don't want children in Africa to die buy from us ok" , but notice how many article and stories about Apple Park tend to nicely mention the " powered by 100% renewable energy" from sola panels on the roof of the cool ring building. But I fully agree with you though that this is a good thing, there is nothing wrong with Apple advocating for such issues and telling us all about it, what I do have a problem with is the suggestion that it has nothing to do with business and Apple is just a " good and hole-sum" company and Google and Amazon are evil or villainous, though neither of those things are mutually exclusive with good business, but if moral stances started threatening the business they would be dropped as they were in China (privacy) in that chase by Apple which ofcause was nothing personal to Chinese customers, just business.
So far, Apple is deeply invested in pursuing such thoughtful contemplative efforts, while its rivals do not even seem to recognize this as an issue. That's not going to work out well for them.
That seems like a logical conclusion but based on the minimal fallout that Facebook has had since the whole CA thing, I’m not sure how accurate it is.
It’s interesting that CA had to close down because their business tanked, but Facebook, the originator of the data collection that CA used, seems to have only been slightly bruised.
Considering that, I’m not sure many people care about ethics or privacy.
The fan masturbation editorials on here are out of control. In one voice we should be screaming at Apple to fix this garbage software not maligning Amazon for building a 30$ superior product.
This privacy nonsense should die. Nothing and no one on the internet is private. Period. It’s a marketing scheme and it will also fail.
Tneyve been recording our 411 calls without our Permission for over a decade.
Helllo? That’s how this works. Data.
Yeah, no. This privacy “nonsense” should remain very much alive, and should become increasingly important. I’m personally glad that Apple is choosing to differentiate themselves in that direction. Somebody needs to.
Just because it’s the Wild West right now doesn’t mean that civilization should not be implemented in place of lawlessness.
I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
The article doesn't say that every HomePod limitation is an intentional privacy-based decision.
However, Apple is also not racing to rapidly throw out ideas in the voice category because:
d) from your point of view but I've not seen anything to validate it
Are you completely unaware of “antenna-gate” and signal attenuation on iPhone 4? Signal attenuation was nothing new at the time but it exploded when exhibited on the iPhone 4. Heck, I even had a manual to a previous phone that had a drawing of a hand holding that model of phone and basically saying if held in that way the signal may be affected. Nobody cared. But when Apple released a phone that exhibited the same behavior as other cell phones it was suddenly front page, screaming headlines news.
That’s just one example.
Apple has around 30-40% market share in the US. I'd be surprised if it wasn't headline news. We have an inbuilt negative bias that the media exploits. Every big company makes headlines when something happens - Samsung's exploding batteries, Facebook's CA problems, Google's issues around diversity, tax avoidance, censorship, car crashes, demonitising some youtube channels, screw ups on messaging, email scanning, book scanning. And we are currently commenting on one of many articles about Amazon's Echo spying.
Agreed, it's Apple loons who think that there actually are people who seriously dedicte their time and energy to hating and conspiring against a near trillion $ company. It seems DED can no longer write an Apple article without bringing up the same companies that aren't really even in any significant way directly competing with Apple. Google is a search engine ad company, Amazon is an everything online store, Samsung is the everything electronics and appliances store, Apple is the iPhone/computer company, in what universe can you reasonably equate any of these business models ? constantly implying that since Apple is the only one succeeding at the computer business (which is their model) means the rest are implicitly evil and out to exploit and harm people is ridiculous. Apple's moral stance isn't a virtue of bieng inherently "good" but a feature of corporate branding, if Apple really cared about the environment or privacy they wouldn't advertise to us so much about their efforts, but they do because as you can see by this thread it sell more iPhones, if it didn't it be out the window i.e China.
I think the companies you claim here “aren’t really even in any significant way directly competing with Apple” would all be surprised to learn that they aren’t. Today, particularly the folks at Samsung, who just were told by a jury to fork over half a billion dollars to Apple for reasons that really do seem to relate to direct competition. Doesn’t Google produce Android OS? I could swear Samsung, Google and Amazon have all manufactured phones, speakers and other devices that compete directly with Apple.
Yeah, I am almost certain these companies (and others) are all direct competitors with Apple. I also think, when millions and billions of dollars are at stake, it’s quite likely that all kinds of businesses commonly hire all kinds of consultants, industrial spies, PR firms and troll farms to try to gather and manipulate information about their competitors.
You missed "in any significant way", yes Sammy makes Phones but that is not their primary business and yes Goog make phones and owns the most used mobile OS in the world but again that is not their primary money maker and Amazon makes a hole lotta things and any that are coincidentally also made by Apple are a rounding error in the books, but Zulu ( I can speak Zulu btw) you can't seriously claim Samsung, Google and Amazon are all phone/computer companies in the same way and to the same degree that Apple is, no one can, Apple killed off all the phone companies, Nokia, Moto, BB were all directly comparable to what Apple is today and all are dead. Samsung make washing machines for haven's sake, glad the case is over though God that dragged on for ever, I had even forgotten, Sammy is in no way shape or form Apple's peer.
American and European will talk and make laws to force corporations and institutions to create,implement and use AI ethically(do no harm) but who will make Chinese,Russians and other evil human race/country to follow the same ?
I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
I’d be interested in knowing how well voice match has been implemented on HomePod competitors’ devices. It’s not unusual for blood relatives in a household to have very similar voices. A static appliance in the house using voice match to access individual accounts, playlists, etc. would need to have a very low fail rate at matching voices. Is the question that Apple can’t implement this as well as others, or is it that they have a higher expectation for quality before they’re willing to roll it out?
Other vendors did face recognition before Apple’s faceID, but their implementation was decidedly inferior. Could be the same issue with voice match on the HomePod.
Could be, I'm not sure. I guess the assumption is that most people trust those living with them and if they don't, they'll limit access to such a device. There's definitely room in the market for both approaches - lock it down by default and keep it open by default.
It’s not necessarily about trusting family members or roommates. If daughter asks Siri to play some music and Siri misidentifies her voice as mom, Siri will serve up The Rolling Stones instead of Ariana Grande. In keeping with the theme of the editorial above, it’s not hard to imagine that Apple would be reluctant to roll out that feature until it’s really good at differentiating voices of even close family members. If the feature is offered by Apple, there’s a very high expectation that it works well, even when it’s not a security issue.
Maybe, maybe not. Some people had trouble with the Watch HR monitor due to skin colour etc but it wasn't significant enough to prevent Watch existing. If it works for 95% of people then many companies happily roll it out and let the 5% return the product, especially if it's not a top 5 feature. Sometimes Apple follows the same path. In fact, look at Siri. There are plenty of issues that are not security related. I can't even get a good answer from "Is it cold outside?"
I'm not sure I agree with the assumptions that this article is based on. Could Apple have developed something like Voice Match to differentiate between less personal accounts, e.g. News or Apple Music without opening up access to contacts or calling? If the issue was privacy not technology then why wouldn't they at least start with those? This looks very much like retrofitting a privacy excuse that was never the main reason for HomePod's limitations.
The article doesn't say that every HomePod limitation is an intentional privacy-based decision.
However, Apple is also not racing to rapidly throw out ideas in the voice category because:
d) from your point of view but I've not seen anything to validate it
Are you completely unaware of “antenna-gate” and signal attenuation on iPhone 4? Signal attenuation was nothing new at the time but it exploded when exhibited on the iPhone 4. Heck, I even had a manual to a previous phone that had a drawing of a hand holding that model of phone and basically saying if held in that way the signal may be affected. Nobody cared. But when Apple released a phone that exhibited the same behavior as other cell phones it was suddenly front page, screaming headlines news.
That’s just one example.
Apple has around 30-40% market share in the US. I'd be surprised if it wasn't headline news. We have an inbuilt negative bias that the media exploits. Every big company makes headlines when something happens - Samsung's exploding batteries, Facebook's CA problems, Google's issues around diversity, tax avoidance, censorship, car crashes, demonitising some youtube channels, screw ups on messaging, email scanning, book scanning. And we are currently commenting on one of many articles about Amazon's Echo spying.
Agreed, it's Apple loons who think that there actually are people who seriously dedicte their time and energy to hating and conspiring against a near trillion $ company. It seems DED can no longer write an Apple article without bringing up the same companies that aren't really even in any significant way directly competing with Apple. Google is a search engine ad company, Amazon is an everything online store, Samsung is the everything electronics and appliances store, Apple is the iPhone/computer company, in what universe can you reasonably equate any of these business models ? constantly implying that since Apple is the only one succeeding at the computer business (which is their model) means the rest are implicitly evil and out to exploit and harm people is ridiculous. Apple's moral stance isn't a virtue of bieng inherently "good" but a feature of corporate branding, if Apple really cared about the environment or privacy they wouldn't advertise to us so much about their efforts, but they do because as you can see by this thread it sell more iPhones, if it didn't it be out the window i.e China.
Says what authority? If you think the level of effort apple has put into environment or privacy values is equal to other corps you’re delusional.
I didn't say it was equal, just that it's not pure nobility it's marketing intended to generate sales like all marketing. Apple isn't good or evil, there are no good or evil companies, they are all out to make money, Apple like all other brand companies is selling a brand, like Chanel or BMW, the brand transmits a massage about the company that the company hopes will resonate with their targeted customers to the point of generating a sale, the company associates the brand with social causes and ideas that will best achieve this, Biz school 101 really. Strange can you honestly say that Apple's environmental and privacy efforts aren't one of the reasons we are so loyal and infatuated with Apple and why its brand holds such esteem and people are proud to own Apple products to the irrational point that we absolutely loathe Google or Samsung ? does Apple not do these things in part to paint it self in a light that it knows will romance the pants/cash off it's customers ? BTW I don't see this as bad, evil or deceitful, its great, after all it's just business
You said "if Apple really cared about the environment or privacy..." which clearly implies your claim that they don't really care. But you're reasoning is poor -- your claim is because it's good for their business and brand, therefore they don't really care. Sorry, but that's just dumb. Two two ideas are not self-exclusionary -- you can really care about a thing and promote it as part of your brand. Companies do this all over the world. As consumers, part of our decision making on who to align our spending with is ranking what the brand values.
Apple values privacy and the environment. And they promote it.
My response to this editorial is a new variant on Heinlein's Razor: "Never attribute to 'authentic ethics' that which is adequately explained by an inferior product and dumb luck."
"Authentic Ethics" is a visionary-type person who understands what Siri *should* do, and then implements it. Wake me up when anyone at Apple articulates this vision. Saying "Security!" as the reason why your product doesn't do xyz isn't a vision, or ethics; it's just an excuse. At best it's a halfplanation.
Comments
By the way, when does Apple advertise “so much” about their environmental efforts? I’ve seen it mentioned during keynotes and I see things on AI but I have yet to see a print ad or television spot by Apple touting their environmental efforts.
2. Multiple timers keeps turning up as a criticism, and while it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard to implement, I find it difficult to believe that it’s that important a thing to anyone. Seems more like a critic’s talking point.
3. You can turn off messages for your HomePod. They’re disabled on mine. I’m not sure how “thats a security weakness which still hasn't been dealt with.” It’s been dealt with on my HomePod.
4. You want HomePods to “discriminate (determine?) the person nearest to them (it?).” Just in your description here you highlight the engineering challenges and subjective choices required for making a device like that serve multiple masters. How is it going to know who is nearest to it? Does everyone have to be wearing an Apple Watch or have an implanted RFID chip? Would it listen for your heartbeat? Would it require an always-on camera watching the whole room? Why would personal distance be the determining factor for who it serves? If it’s playing music from my preferences and someone else sits in a seat slightly closer to it, should it automatically switch to her preferences? If she’s sitting next to it listening to music, and I call out from the next room to turn on some lights, should it ignore me because I’m not the one closest to it?
The point here is, you can list all sorts of things it would be cool if HomePods could do, and they might one day do some of those things. You’re describing both difficult engineering feats, however, as well as choices that might meet one person’s preferences and make another really unhappy. The point of the editorial at the top of this thread is that Apple takes a slower pace at working things like this out, both to make certain that the engineering is well implemented, and also that questions of functional preferences are handled well, rather than just pushed out there to say they “did it.” A multi-user HomePod that is less than spectacularly effective at understanding and differentiating those multiple users would draw far more and far harsher criticism than a HomePod that simply doesn’t do that yet.
This privacy nonsense should die. Nothing and no one on the internet is private. Period. It’s a marketing scheme and it will also fail.
Tneyve been recording our 411 calls without our Permission for over a decade.
Helllo? That’s how this works. Data.
Try this on your iPhone with Siri:
Me: "Please set an alarm for 11:59 and 10 seconds."
Siri: "Ok I've set an alarm for 10 PM."
im glad I don’t have alexa at home, I made lots of noise in the bedroom and I don’t want my friends to know....ouch:-((
Yeah, I am almost certain these companies (and others) are all direct competitors with Apple. I also think, when millions and billions of dollars are at stake, it’s quite likely that all kinds of businesses commonly hire all kinds of consultants, industrial spies, PR firms and troll farms to try to gather and manipulate information about their competitors.
You do not get to dictate what is worthwhile. You clearly do not comprehend the topic of discussion, either. Here’s what people “have to hide” (which isn’t even the fucking point of privacy).
Video summary: What if we stop treating you like a human being and start treating you as only the sum total of the data that comprises you? What if, when we’re missing this parts of this data, we use computers to suggest that you buy things from us that will help us complete this data? What if, when you don’t like anything we offer you that exists, we use what data we DO have on you to create something entirely new, designed for the express and sole purpose of psychologically manipulating you–and you alone–to purchase it so that we may get that missing data? What if, once we have enough of those data holes filled, we continue to psychologically manipulate you so that your behavior itself is modified in a way that we desire?
And this is from 2016, which means they started doing this at least 5 years before the pretty video presentation was made. There aren’t words to describe this. They don’t exist. Perfidy isn’t sufficient. Sedition isn’t enough. Treason “against humanity” doesn’t cut it. Torture is close, but doesn’t do justice to the scope of what’s going on here. “Ideological holodomor” perhaps. This is the true purpose of privacy. This is why only the companies which attempt to embody ethical behavior will keep existing after much longer.
No, a machine does not need to know your personal information to serve you.
The day of reckoning is fast approaching for businesses and people like you. Think long and hard about what side of this wall you want to fall on.
That’s really laughable.
It physically hurts me to see someone as brainwashed as you.
Leave the Western world and never look back.
Good for them? Privacy is a right regardless of what they hate.
Good for them? They don’t have the right to do that.
Yes, that’s what 70 years of literal brainwashing will do to a culture.
Yeah, no. This privacy “nonsense” should remain very much alive, and should become increasingly important. I’m personally glad that Apple is choosing to differentiate themselves in that direction. Somebody needs to.
Just because it’s the Wild West right now doesn’t mean that civilization should not be implemented in place of lawlessness.
Apple values privacy and the environment. And they promote it.
Expediting takes a little longer!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm9sbG93ZXJz