In summary:
- Macworld reports that Apple’s revamped Siri in iOS 27 will automatically delete interaction history by default as its primary privacy weapon against competitors.
- Apple’s privacy-first approach has slowed AI development compared to rivals, forcing partnerships with Google Gemini and ChatGPT to enhance capabilities.
- The company uses synthetic data generation instead of broad user data collection, potentially limiting Siri’s functionality versus OpenAI and Google’s offerings.
With Apple’s long-awaited Siri revamp set to finally launch as part of iOS 27 this summer, a new report has revealed one of the main issues which has caused the delay, and how the company will spin this into a competitive advantage.
In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman claims that Apple’s focus on user privacy has held back its ability to develop industry-leading AI tech. He cites the company’s self-imposed “more restrictive approach to collecting, analyzing, and using customer information to train models and improve features” as a major factor in its failure to catch up with rivals.
“Rather than broadly tapping into real user data, it often relies on techniques such as synthetic data generation,” Gurman explains. “Apple argues that consumers shouldn’t need to give up their personal data to get top-notch AI features. [But] in practice, this hasn’t always worked out.”
The result, as well as a slower development cycle, has been an Apple AI platform whose features are shallower and less functional than those of rival companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The company has attempted to solve both problems by patching AI tech made by other companies into its products, principally Google Gemini and ChatGPT, which comes with its own issues. Namely, can other companies be trusted to safeguard user data as carefully as Apple?
Apple doesn’t prioritise privacy out of the goodness of its heart. It understands many of its users distrust the way their data is harvested and sold by software companies, and the way their activity online is tracked and used for personalised advertising. Apple identified an underserved demographic (privacy-conscious users) and created a unique selling point for itself. Working with companies that don’t have the same philosophy risks tarnishing Apple’s pro-privacy reputation.
According to Gurman, the revamped Siri (which we already understand will exist as a standalone app for the first time) will attempt to maintain its privacy credentials by offering a unique feature: it will automatically delete the history of interactions with the user, much as Messages can be set to delete messages after 30 days or a year. Some other AI chatbots allow the user to delete chat history or temporarily work in an untracked incognito mode, but Apple will reportedly make this the default.
“Apple’s position is that such protections should be built into the system itself,” he explains, “rather than treated as an optional setting users have to manually enable.”
Like the company’s other pro-privacy policies, this could come at a price. Chatbots use chat histories as a source of context about the user and a shortcut to quicker and more knowledgeable responses to queries. Siri may therefore struggle to keep up with rivals, even in its revamped iOS 27 form–but as Gurman notes, it will be able to point to the system’s superior privacy options as both excuse and compensation for any shortfalls in performance.
The revamped version of Siri is expected to be announced as part of iOS 27 at WWDC this coming June. For all the latest news and rumors, bookmark our regularly updated iOS 27 superguide.
Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld
David has been writing about technology for well over two decades, and got on board the Apple hype train when covering the original iPhone launch in 2007. He is an enthusiastic Apple Watch evangelist and feels that the HomePod is misunderstood.