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 produ

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.