Apple Intelligence Privacy Dark Patterns
After I got off the beta waitlist, I went to enable Apple Intelligence, and it wouldn’t let me do so without also enabling Siri. I don’t find Siri to be useful on my Macs and tend to restrict it to my iPhone to prevent accidentally triggering the wrong device. It also doesn’t seem to work well with Mac microphones—this time it failed three times to accept the training test phrase but then eventually let me continue, anyway.
Not only that, but it also forced me to enable sharing audio recordings with Apple. See how the Continue button is disabled until I select the (lone!) radio button:
See how it says that you can change the privacy setting later in System Settings? Well, you still can’t do so from the Apple Intelligence & Siri pane. There are a button and a help link that seem to relate to privacy:
but they don’t let me control whether Apple stores my audio, nor explain where to do that. The relevant setting is in System Settings ‣ Privacy & Security ‣ Analytics & Improvements ‣ Improve Siri & Dictation.
Previously:
- The First Apple Intelligence Beta
- Keeping Your Data From Apple Is Harder Than Expected
- Siri Suggestions and Privacy
- Perfectly Cropped
- Opting Out of Sharing Siri Audio Recordings
- No Thanks vs. Later
- Apple Contractors “Regularly Hear Confidential Details” on Siri Recordings
Update (2024-08-07): See also: Hacker News.
Update (2024-09-12): Jonathan Wight notes another Siri window layout problem:
Update (2024-12-05): Nick Heer:
Spencer Ackerman has been a national security reporter for over twenty years, and was partially responsible for the Guardian’s coverage of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. He has good reason to be skeptical of privacy claims in general, and his experience updating his iPhone made him worried[…]
[…]
Even at the time of its launch, its wording had the potential for confusion — something Apple has not clarified within the Settings app in the intervening years — and it seems to have been enabled by default. While this data may play a role in establishing the “personal context” Apple talks about — both are part of the App Intents framework — I do not believe it is used to train off-device Apple Intelligence models. However, Apple says this data may leave the device[…]
[…]
While I believe Ackerman is incorrect about the setting’s function and how Apple handles its data, I can see how he interpreted it that way. The company is aggressively marketing Apple Intelligence, even though it is entirely unclear which parts of it are available, how it is integrated throughout the company’s operating systems, and which parts are dependent on off-site processing. There are people who really care about these details, and they should be able to get answers to these questions.
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Every time I see someone describe Apple Intelligence, I hug my 2019 Mac Pro and whisper to it how happy I am that Apple Intelligence is Apple Silicon only.
> "The relevant setting is in System Settings ‣ Privacy & Security ‣ Analytics & Improvements ‣ Improve Siri & Dictation."
I simply create a .mobileconfig file with the "Apple Configurator" app and set `allowDiagnosticSubmission` to `False`.
Install it, and it can never be randomly enabled again after some update or whatever. I install this on every new device...
Is it possible that's actually a scrollable view, with the second radio button (improperly occluded) below it? I seemed to recall that when I went through onboarding last week.
@Phil I swear that scrolling was the first thing I tried and nothing happened. But I just tried it again last night, and indeed it does scroll to reveal a Not Now radio button. Maybe I originally had the cursor in slightly the wrong location—only part of the window content scrolls. Anyway, it’s ridiculous because there’s plenty of space to make the sheet large enough not to require scrolling. Or, by reducing some of the abnormally thick padding, you probably wouldn’t even need to resize it.
Today, it spontaneously kicked me out of Apple Intelligence, so I had to join the waitlist again, and I guess I’ll get to test the Siri onboarding again…
But you see that sheet was designed in only thirty seconds with SwiftUI and this type of “developer productivity” is the only thing that matters! And that code will just work on iOS too!
It’s really sad that a UI like that is considered acceptable at Apple now. Beta or not.
Like programmers, designers are also kind of a pretentious and annoying group of people. But SwiftUI seems to make programmers think they are designers and designers think they are programmers; I don’t know whether I should take a shit or eat a banana. Everyone is getting overconfident meanwhile the quality of all the software on Apple platforms is going down the tubes.
Guess we can thank a schmuckie manager at Apple for all this.
All those non-resizable windows, dialogs and sheets, all that centered text... it just hurts my eyes.
It should be made a public punishment that any developer or designer working for Apple gets punched in the face in a public square every time they trample one of their old UI guidelines…
