I’ve been saying on the Lab Report for years that Apple needs to own the age of the person holding the device. This year they did something about it. The piece that matters is the new Declared Age Range API. It lets an app…
Continue reading →Posts Tagged → privacy
DEVONthink 4.3 and a Privacy-First MCP
DEVONthink 4.3 shipped last week, and the headline for me is a single feature. DEVONthink now has its own MCP server. If you’ve been following along with the Robot Assistant work, you know why that matters. MCP is the connector standard that lets an…
Continue reading →When the Machines Remember
Early in my experience with ChatGPT’s voice feature, my daughter walked into the room and I told it to say hello to her. It did, cheerfully, and it totally creeped her out. I turned the voice off. A week later, I fired ChatGPT back…
Continue reading →Black Boxes and Bad Habits
I had to chuckle when I read this Verge article about Meta’s attorneys botching their document redactions during the FTC antitrust trial. Having spent three decades in the legal racket, it was shocking to me how often lawyers (and their staff) were completely flummoxed…
Continue reading →Apple’s New Child Safety Update: A Step in the Right Direction
Apple recently posted a white paper called Helping Protect Kids Online, where, among other things, they disclosed an upcoming software update that will make it easier to set up child accounts and provide age ranges to developers. I am sure part of the reason for…
Continue reading →Apple Disables Advanced Data Protection in the UK
In another chapter of its ongoing battle with the UK government, Apple has pulled the plug on Advanced Data Protection for UK customers. In a statement, Apple explained, “We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our…
Continue reading →The UK’s Encryption Backdoor and Apple’s Privacy Crossroads
For a long time, I felt it was only a matter of time before some nation called Apple’s bluff on iOS security and demanded a secret backdoor into user data. While the United States has made several threats over the years without following through,…
Continue reading →Apple’s Angle for HomeKit Products: Privacy
While Apple has been in the HomeKit game for many years, thus far they have shied away from making HomeKit products like locks and cameras. If the rumors are to be believed, that’s going to change over the next few years. Apple is rumored…
Continue reading →Apple’s Image Playground: Safety at the Cost of Utility?
As I’ve spent considerable time with Apple’s Image Playground in the recent iOS 18.2 beta, I’m left with more questions than answers about Apple’s approach to AI image generation. The most striking aspect is how deliberately unrealistic the output appears — every image unmistakably reads as…
Continue reading →Hope Springs Eternal for Apple Intelligence
Yesterday, Apple announced its new name for artificial intelligence tools on its platform: Apple Intelligence. If you watched the keynote carefully, it was almost humorous how they danced around the term “artificial intelligence” throughout. At the beginning, Tim made reference to “intelligence” without the…
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