7 ms·

Apple's emphasis on 'differential privacy'

101 points by rargulati 10y ago

jmount 10y ago
Our intro to use of differential privacy in improving machine learning (admittedly, a different concern than preserving privacy): http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2015/10/a-simpler-explanation-of-differential-privacy/ http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2015/10/a-simpler-explanation...
cyann 10y ago
I would assume this will help Apple to be compliant with the EU General Data Privacy Regulation. The GDPR defines quasi-identifiers as PII.
- ClassyPuff 10y ago
  Yes exactly!!!!
- gwbas1c 10y ago
  ??? Quasi-identifiers are a Pentium 2?
  - tikhonj 10y ago
    Personally Identifiable Information, I assume.
jalfresi 10y ago
Article blocks those using an ad-blocker
- waterphone 10y ago
  Block their ad-block blocker with anti-adblock-killer https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/ https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/ Built into uBlock Origin with a checkbox to enable it in the settings.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Because you're entitled to their content.
    - waterphone 10y ago
      They're not entitled to execute code on my computer that I don't want executed. If they want to prevent access to their content, that's fine, but they aren't doing that, they're making an absurd attempt to keep their content online while forcing people to disable their adblockers, which protect people from excessive resource downloading, slow websites, behavior tracking, and malware. The correct response is to block the script that tries to force that, not disable the adblocker. Or, better yet, block the entire site.
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        No, the correct response is to not go to the site in the first place. All I saw from your response is that you should be entitled to go read their content, despite the fact that they don't wish for people with ad blockers to go to their site. So you are saying you are entitled to read their content, rather than simply not going to it in the first place.
        icebraining 10y ago
        Yes, obviously people are entitled to read content served to them. That's how the web works.
        Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
        Cool. Let's put ad-blockers in the UserAgent string so that both parties are approaching the transaction honestly, and see how that pans out.
        icebraining 10y ago
        You can't invent some new standard for "honest behavior" and then accuse others of dishonesty for not following it. There's nothing dishonest about not informing sites about what addons one is running. We're being just a straightforward as sites are with their information about exactly what PII is captured, by whom and exactly who gets a copy of it and for what purposes it is used. If new standards of reporting are to be expected, then sites - most of which can't even tell who is serving the ads they have on their site - would be screwed. I actually only use adblockers on my tablet, since I have misgivings about the effect of the end of web advertising on the availability of sites to poor people (since ads effectively act as a redistribution mechanism), but I don't blame anyone for not being willing to subject themselves to that crap.
- unfunco 10y ago
  Here's the thing about AdBlockers... Ironic, considering I'm trying to read an article about privacy, and the entire reason I use an adblocker is to try and protect that privacy.
- vitd 10y ago
  If you're using Safari, you can hit the Reader button and get the full article without crappy styling or ads! (It worked for me on Safari for OS X with AdBlock for Safari installed.)
mturmon 10y ago
Differential privacy is an interesting research area. I know there have been several survey talks, including at NIPS. I wanted to point out this: http://rsrg.cms.caltech.edu/netecon/privacy2015/program.shtml http://rsrg.cms.caltech.edu/netecon/privacy2015/program.shtm... which has some nice slides and discussion on the "reusable holdout" ("thresholdout") which is a technique to allow one to use all of the training data to fit a lot of models, but also offers guarantees against overfitting.
ClassyPuff 10y ago
Apple is really very determined to Privacy and security_!!!
marcuskaz 10y ago
How would this work for image and facial recognition, especially with regard to individuals? It seems the features needed to recognize a face are by definition identifying.
- samch 10y ago
  If you're referring to the new facial recognition system in iOS 10's Photos app, I believe they mentioned that the entire system would run locally on your own hardware. I took that to mean that they would not be sending anything, identifying or not, to Apple's servers.
- NovaS1X 10y ago
  From what I understand from the conference is that facial recognition is done locally on device and not transmitted. They said that quite clearly. There is probably some specifics I'm missing though, and it raises the question about how they identify others faces. I've not used the feature so I can't say. I'm guessing it's a manual tagging when the device can't find a match and then on device processing afterwards once the algorithm has learned.
- curt15 10y ago
  Google photos only groups similar faces and requires the user to assign a name to that group. Apple could presumably perform the grouping in the cloud and relegate the association of the group with an identity to the user's device.
  - droopyEyelids 10y ago
    In the keynote they specifically called out face & image recognition as something performed entirely on-device, without touching the network.
    - marcuskaz 10y ago
      That was my understanding too, but seems like to handle the vast amount of image recognition required for faces and also objects which they demoed; there would need to be a large data set to learn from, and results from that learning saved. The data set to learn from probably can be gathered from stock photos or other open source images, but can that learning be saved down to phone and used to compare against, or would it be too big? If too big, does that mean characteristics of an image would be computed on the phone sent to the cloud compared and the results sent back?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
chubot 10y ago
Google differential privacy technology, used in Chrome, starting in 2014: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2841954/googles-rappor-aims-to-preserve-privacy-while-snaring-software-stats.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2841954/googles-rappor-... https://github.com/google/rappor https://github.com/google/rappor https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981 https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981 (I worked on this) I don't see any mention in the article of what algorithms Apple is using, or a link to the code. In the area of privacy, the code should really be open source, for obvious reasons.
cm2187 10y ago
I find it incredible that along with "we will allow users to save their data in the cloud" comes now automatically "and we are going to exploit their data". Even to paying customers, who shouldn't be the product.
- chipotle_coyote 10y ago
  Paying customers are not the product. Programs that use machine learning techniques that require huge amounts of data input into them to be useful are the product. The problem is providing that data without compromising privacy, and this is Apple's solution to that. You can certainly argue that this is "exploiting" the user's data, but any computer program whose purpose is to summarize or make inferences from a provided data set is, by definition, exploiting provided data, right? Privacy questions mostly revolve around consent and tracking. Is it potentially a privacy concern for Google or Apple to deduce that the email that I have from American Airlines and Hilton relates to travel plans, add that trip information to my calendar, add the airline ticket to my phone's wallet, let me know about transit options to and from the airport (possibly calling an Uber for me), and so on? Sure. But it's also really useful. That Apple is trying to be able to provide ever more Google-esque assistance without leaving a whole bunch of trackable and user-identifiable information on their servers, instead keeping as much as possible on my personal devices, is something I find laudable, not overly concerning. My biggest question is more whether or not they're actually going to be able to make it work as well as Google does -- or at least close enouugh to Google's quality level that it's worth using.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    "We are exploiting your data so that we can provide you a better customer experience", i.e. targeted ads. I know the melody.
    - themartorana 10y ago
      iAd is dead at the end of the month. How else does Apple advertise to you?

101 points by rargulati 10y ago

Our intro to use of differential privacy in improving machine learning (admittedly, a different concern than preserving privacy): http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2015/10/a-simpler-explanation-of-differential-privacy/ http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2015/10/a-simpler-explanation...

cyann 10y ago

I would assume this will help Apple to be compliant with the EU General Data Privacy Regulation. The GDPR defines quasi-identifiers as PII.

ClassyPuff 10y ago
Yes exactly!!!!
gwbas1c 10y ago
??? Quasi-identifiers are a Pentium 2?
- tikhonj 10y ago
  Personally Identifiable Information, I assume.

jalfresi 10y ago

Article blocks those using an ad-blocker

waterphone 10y ago
Block their ad-block blocker with anti-adblock-killer https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/ https://reek.github.io/anti-adblock-killer/ Built into uBlock Origin with a checkbox to enable it in the settings.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Because you're entitled to their content.
  - waterphone 10y ago
    They're not entitled to execute code on my computer that I don't want executed. If they want to prevent access to their content, that's fine, but they aren't doing that, they're making an absurd attempt to keep their content online while forcing people to disable their adblockers, which protect people from excessive resource downloading, slow websites, behavior tracking, and malware. The correct response is to block the script that tries to force that, not disable the adblocker. Or, better yet, block the entire site.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      No, the correct response is to not go to the site in the first place. All I saw from your response is that you should be entitled to go read their content, despite the fact that they don't wish for people with ad blockers to go to their site. So you are saying you are entitled to read their content, rather than simply not going to it in the first place.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        Yes, obviously people are entitled to read content served to them. That's how the web works.
        Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
        Cool. Let's put ad-blockers in the UserAgent string so that both parties are approaching the transaction honestly, and see how that pans out.
        icebraining 10y ago
        You can't invent some new standard for "honest behavior" and then accuse others of dishonesty for not following it. There's nothing dishonest about not informing sites about what addons one is running. We're being just a straightforward as sites are with their information about exactly what PII is captured, by whom and exactly who gets a copy of it and for what purposes it is used. If new standards of reporting are to be expected, then sites - most of which can't even tell who is serving the ads they have on their site - would be screwed. I actually only use adblockers on my tablet, since I have misgivings about the effect of the end of web advertising on the availability of sites to poor people (since ads effectively act as a redistribution mechanism), but I don't blame anyone for not being willing to subject themselves to that crap.
unfunco 10y ago
Here's the thing about AdBlockers... Ironic, considering I'm trying to read an article about privacy, and the entire reason I use an adblocker is to try and protect that privacy.
vitd 10y ago
If you're using Safari, you can hit the Reader button and get the full article without crappy styling or ads! (It worked for me on Safari for OS X with AdBlock for Safari installed.)

mturmon 10y ago

Differential privacy is an interesting research area. I know there have been several survey talks, including at NIPS. I wanted to point out this: http://rsrg.cms.caltech.edu/netecon/privacy2015/program.shtml http://rsrg.cms.caltech.edu/netecon/privacy2015/program.shtm... which has some nice slides and discussion on the "reusable holdout" ("thresholdout") which is a technique to allow one to use all of the training data to fit a lot of models, but also offers guarantees against overfitting.

ClassyPuff 10y ago

Apple is really very determined to Privacy and security_!!!

marcuskaz 10y ago

How would this work for image and facial recognition, especially with regard to individuals? It seems the features needed to recognize a face are by definition identifying.

samch 10y ago
If you're referring to the new facial recognition system in iOS 10's Photos app, I believe they mentioned that the entire system would run locally on your own hardware. I took that to mean that they would not be sending anything, identifying or not, to Apple's servers.
NovaS1X 10y ago
From what I understand from the conference is that facial recognition is done locally on device and not transmitted. They said that quite clearly. There is probably some specifics I'm missing though, and it raises the question about how they identify others faces. I've not used the feature so I can't say. I'm guessing it's a manual tagging when the device can't find a match and then on device processing afterwards once the algorithm has learned.
curt15 10y ago
Google photos only groups similar faces and requires the user to assign a name to that group. Apple could presumably perform the grouping in the cloud and relegate the association of the group with an identity to the user's device.
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
  In the keynote they specifically called out face & image recognition as something performed entirely on-device, without touching the network.
  - marcuskaz 10y ago
    That was my understanding too, but seems like to handle the vast amount of image recognition required for faces and also objects which they demoed; there would need to be a large data set to learn from, and results from that learning saved. The data set to learn from probably can be gathered from stock photos or other open source images, but can that learning be saved down to phone and used to compare against, or would it be too big? If too big, does that mean characteristics of an image would be computed on the phone sent to the cloud compared and the results sent back?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

chubot 10y ago

Google differential privacy technology, used in Chrome, starting in 2014: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2841954/googles-rappor-aims-to-preserve-privacy-while-snaring-software-stats.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2841954/googles-rappor-... https://github.com/google/rappor https://github.com/google/rappor https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981 https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.6981 (I worked on this) I don't see any mention in the article of what algorithms Apple is using, or a link to the code. In the area of privacy, the code should really be open source, for obvious reasons.

cm2187 10y ago

I find it incredible that along with "we will allow users to save their data in the cloud" comes now automatically "and we are going to exploit their data". Even to paying customers, who shouldn't be the product.

chipotle_coyote 10y ago
Paying customers are not the product. Programs that use machine learning techniques that require huge amounts of data input into them to be useful are the product. The problem is providing that data without compromising privacy, and this is Apple's solution to that. You can certainly argue that this is "exploiting" the user's data, but any computer program whose purpose is to summarize or make inferences from a provided data set is, by definition, exploiting provided data, right? Privacy questions mostly revolve around consent and tracking. Is it potentially a privacy concern for Google or Apple to deduce that the email that I have from American Airlines and Hilton relates to travel plans, add that trip information to my calendar, add the airline ticket to my phone's wallet, let me know about transit options to and from the airport (possibly calling an Uber for me), and so on? Sure. But it's also really useful. That Apple is trying to be able to provide ever more Google-esque assistance without leaving a whole bunch of trackable and user-identifiable information on their servers, instead keeping as much as possible on my personal devices, is something I find laudable, not overly concerning. My biggest question is more whether or not they're actually going to be able to make it work as well as Google does -- or at least close enouugh to Google's quality level that it's worth using.
- cm2187 10y ago
  "We are exploiting your data so that we can provide you a better customer experience", i.e. targeted ads. I know the melody.
  - themartorana 10y ago
    iAd is dead at the end of the month. How else does Apple advertise to you?