Ultimately, the thing is this: at some point the Google Now-like service has to be something that does all its data mining and processing locally on the phone itself. Independent or at least agnostic of service provider, able to get useful info out of your work email without compromising your security in doing so and able to leverage whatever personal email provider you use without relying on Google’s technology. In a way, that’s already present in iOS – for instance, if you get email with a tracking number from UPS or FedEx and tap on that tracking number, you’ll see “Track Shipment” as an option, irrespective of whence came the email. Apple Data Detectors – a technology that Apple first rolled out in 1997 then largely ignored until two or three years ago – can do that right now, already parsing out addresses to be sent to the address book (or soon to Maps) or dates to be sent to the calendar. So the technology is there and it doesn’t take much to suggest that it could be extended to include things like flight confirmation numbers or the like.
All of this is a very roundabout way of saying that I fully expect an Apple watch before long, and I expect it to rely on the functionality of iOS 7 to deliver a thin but satisfying slice of data to a glorified wrist-bound FitBit. And in doing so, obviate the need for the phone itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting that currently makes it difficult if not impossible to use the iPhone itself as your fitness/presence tracker (see: the battery-slaughter of Saga or Human or Moves). Anything that can be staffed out to something with its own separate battery is good for your phone.
So now we wait. Every man his own Big Data. It’s coming.
– 4 Sept 2013
I think I might have been onto something. Four years later, this is more or less what Apple is pitching with CoreML.The promise is that all the processing of your data, all the heavy lifting of sorting through your information to find the patterns and tease out the useful interactions, can be done ENTIRELY on the phone without ever exposing your information to offsite processing. Do I buy it? Maybe. The fact of the matter is, though, Apple is the only vendor in this space explicitly touting the privacy and security of their solution. Amazon pays it lip service, and Google…well, Google has never made any secret of the fact that you’re the product, not the customer. (Another reason I try to avoid their products at all costs, and mostly succeed – except for occasional use of YouTube or text messages to a Google Voice number, or the old Moto X experiment.)
The problem is, there’s just so much that goes to the cloud anyway now. It’s not just storage – Apple had the 100 MB iDisk product as part of the original iTools in 2000, which is probably why Steve Jobs dismissed Dropbox as a feature rather than a product – it’s processing. Try using Siri offline. Doesn’t work. That external processing is mandatory for parsing voice commands. Signal is only slightly above battery in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Modern Needs. And then there’s the whole bit about how the Big Four kind of have you stuck. Only Apple isn’t really doing much with services beyond what is needed for independence from the others for email and music and the line – Google, Amazon and Facebook all have the ability to reconstruct fairly detailed profiles of your interest and behaviors.
And that’s before taking into account the fact that their information is probably not dissimilar to what the big credit bureaus have, and Equifax just demonstrated how well protected that is. The majority of American adults now have their golden-ticket personal ID out somewhere for the use of nefarious types, to the point that we may have to institute credit-freeze-by-default as a security measure. Which they don’t want, obviously, because they make their money providing your information to others. And before saying “that’s different”, consider that the use of Facebook and other social media in credit ranking is already out there.
We’ve poured our lives into the Internet with no thought of security. Facebook in particular got away with the greatest bait and switch in history, offering a walled garden in exchange for your real identity before dynamiting the walls. Throw in the whole “we accidentally the election” and Fuckerberg deserves to be in Gitmo trading cigarettes, not acting like nobody notices him running for President. Too many companies have spent too much time and made too much money off our data without protecting it. A genuinely populist movement would be pushing back against that. Hard. But we don’t have populism in this country, just redneckery dressed up as populism by the kind of assholes who assume that “people” means “white.”
Meanwhile, get as far off Google and Facebook as you can. Maybe you can keep secure and unprobed. I doubt it, though.