Apple claims to offer data crunching at the device level, with that data which is remaining under user’s control and also offers end-to-end encryption in apps for example Face Time, Home Kit, Messages.
Apple is using a technology called “differential privacy” in IOS10, it will collect user’s data about customer’s data usage, this technology uses sub sampling and hashing to enable crowd sourced learning while keeping every user’s information completely private. It is still in research topic though in the area of data analytics and statistics.
Differential privacy is not free from controversy-
There is no denying that it has potential benefits, but still it is not free from controversy, its termed as Black Box problem, Apple’s is trying to make things more private by collecting lot of data, where no one knows yet what they are going to do with the data, It’s still in debate as it could work perfectly fine or it could go extremely wrong, compromising user’s data, which could be very risky for users and for Apple company itself.
Google also uses differential privacy in its RAPPOR (Randomized Aggregatable Privacy Preserving Ordinal Response used by google) since 2014, it enables the learning statistics as per the behavior of users while guaranteeing their privacy.
It’s too soon to assume if Apple’s vision of differential privacy in IOS 10, would work or not, but for sure the company hasn’t let down their clients so far ,Apple’s core principle has always been to enhance the privacy of their users, privacy has become their brand and it’s more likely that they’ll take every possible measure to not to risk their brand value and the trust of their clients.
