Apple Makes Smarter, More Proactive and Privacy-Concerned Siri

by Monica Joshi

We have asked it for the location of the nearest restaurant, we have asked if it knew what happiness is, and we have even gone so far as asking it out on a date. It is Siri. Since Siri launched in 2011, it has changed the way that Apple product users see their phone. Now, Apple wants to change it up even more to protect your privacy and bring you more contextually based search results via Proactive.

At its annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) last Monday, the company announced the biggest change to our beloved Siri yet: an initiative called Proactive. The initiative, which will span across both Siri and Spotlight (the search bar at the top of the iPhone and Mac), will nuance search results. Proactive will also be used for apps such as Contacts, Calendar, Facebook and other third-party apps to deliver revelant and interesting information to iOS device users throughout the day.

Spotlight will also now be capable of recommending restaurants around your office during lunch time and playing a playlist as soon as you plug headphones into your device. Even better, Spotlight and Siri will get smarter as you continue to use your iPhone or iPad.

Microsoft and Google have created intelligent apps (i.e. Google Now and Microsoft Cantana) that work in similar ways to Apple's new and exciting contextual search initiative. However, Apple plans to differentiate themselves from Google and Microsoft by focusing on giving users privacy and security.

Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, said that:

“We’re doing [contextual search] in a way that does not compromise your privacy. We honestly don’t want to know [about your information]. It stays on your device and under your control. It’s not associated with your Apple ID or Apple services.”

Apple’s Proactive initiative announcement comes just one week after Apple CEO Tim Cook lashed out against rival companies at a recent event, the EPIC Champions of Freedom, where he was honoured for his 'corporate leadership'.

“Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security. We can, and we must provide both in equal measure. We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. The American people demand it, the constitution demands it, morality demands it.”

His comments were only a few months after he went on PBS Charlie Rose to ridicule other cloud-based services for mining people’s data.

"When we (Apple) design a new service we try not to collect data. So we're not reading your email. We're not reading your iMessage. If the government laid a subpoena on us to get your iMessages we can't provide it."

These interesting developments in Siri through the Proactive initiative come at a time where we, as end users, are concerned about our privacy on the internet. Apple is betting the future of its personal assistant services on privacy and security and rightly so, as Facebook has been under consistent scrutiny for changing its privacy settings without the knowledge of consumers. While we were busy being concerned with notions that “privacy is dead”, Apple made it a point to focus on a solution and is giving us what we need to put our minds at rest: a more private, secure, proactive search experience that hasn't been matched, at least not yet.

Apple might be heading in the right direction. As Brad Templeton has argued, we're all a part of a surveillance apparatus that would be beyond even the imagination of George Orwell. The problem, he says, is the belief that privacy and security are mutually exclusive.