Apple’s research secrecy hurts industry and academic research
networkworld.com
networkworld.com
In the field of software, Apple uses open source and provides a lot of open source of their doing to the community. So, if there is an imbalance in the field of science, it should be discussed for sure. But if I am offended by Apple's Photos, it is for other reasons.
Edit: my comment refers to the top headline of the article, also used in the link from Hacker News when I wrote it "Why Apple’s Photos announcement should offend you"
It is frustrating to make a comment then get a response, "ugh, didn't you even read the article?" Uh, yes, I did, but it was a different article!
Secondly, the author betrays himself by dismissing Apple's open source efforts. Their contribution to WebKit is the only reason there is competition in the browser space, and saying Swift and LLVM are 'proprietary' and dismissing their impact is either ignorant or dishonest. As far as I can see LLVM is the backbone of a huge amount of academic programming language research.
Thirdly, Apple's photos 'AI' seems like a pretty modest application. Hardly groundbreaking stuff that they are keeping 'secret'. If they owe taxes for this, then all corporations owe taxes for ideas they've incorporated.
There have been competing closed-source browsers, plus Mozilla, that weren't dependent on WebKit. Without Apple's open-source work on WebKit, maybe Google wouldn't have done Chrome (or maybe Google would have forked Firefox as its starting point, instead), but there'd still be browser competition.
What a click-baity article.
Apples approach towards research and privacy is designed to make press headlines and fool reporters similar to Theranos. Its time to hold Apple to standards of Peer Review as practiced by Google, Facebook and others.
https://research.googleblog.com/2014/10/learning-statistics-...
Wait what?! Do you have any evidence of this or you just pulling this out of your butt?
https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/14/apple-differential-priva...
Hell given the amount of information people store on cloud, It might not even be a big deal.
But its not wrong to seek verification via peer review since they are making bold claims.
Can you imagine Apple claiming to implement a non NIST crypto and refusing to divulge details claiming security by obscurity. Everyone would cry bloody murder.
Apples behavior couldn't be further from theranos in this case. Apple is essentially selling kool-aid and you are drinking it.
Do you have any idea what kind of data google collects from Android users and stores as part of their profile?
I thought not.
Apple makes some bold claims about how they respect user privacy and don't create profiles across their whole system.
Could there be bugs in that causing it to be imperfect? Sure.
Could they just be deceiving their customers? Very unlikely given the number of employees who would need to collide in such a fraud.
Asking Apple to open their systems to enable this to be audited is as reasonable as asking Google to open-source the search algorithm so it can be audited for political bias.
Are you calling for that too?
And just to be clear - Google doesn't make any claims about not creating a detailed identifiable profile on each user, incorporating all the data across all their services as they see fit.
If you are going to accuse Apple of lying, the burden of proof is on you.
If Apple like Theranos claims to have developed "Novel Differential Privacy algo" / "finger prick blood testing", it ought to have its claims examined via peer review. The burden of proof lies on the entity making ground breaking claims.
Good!