But because Apple did not announce this feature and poorly documents it, we simply do not know. One document says trust us to analyze your photos remotely; another says here are all the technical reasons you can trust us. Nowhere does Apple plainly say what is going on.
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I see this feature implemented with responsibility and privacy in nearly every way, but, because it is poorly explained and enabled by default, it is difficult to trust.
Like Johnson, I don’t fully understand Apple’s research blogs and Apple didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment about Johnson’s concerns. It seems as though the company went to great lengths to keep the data private, in part by condensing image data into a format that’s legible to an ML model.
We asked readers to tell us what they use to make sure they’re not glued to their phones. Among the more than 200 responses, people told us they used apps to lock them out of their phones after a certain amount of time; others just deleted all social media; and some went as far as to use “dumb” phones all the time.
One politician who wasn’t in attendance at the glitzy celebration was Paddy Tipping, a Labour MP who spent the night in the Cabinet Office. Tipping was minister for the millennium bug. After 25 years, it might be hard to recall just how big a deal the bug – now more commonly called Y2K – felt then. But for the last few years of the 90s, the idea that computers would fail catastrophically as the clock ticked over into the year 2000 was near the top of the political agenda in the UK and the US. Here was a hi-tech threat people feared might topple social order, underlining humanity’s new dependence on technological systems most of us did not understand. Though there are no precise figures, it’s estimated that the cost of the global effort to prevent Y2K exceeded £300bn (£633bn today, accounting for inflation).
So Tipping spent the night at 70 Whitehall, among boxy grey computers and a small group of civil servants in communication with other world governments. “We watched the sun rise across the world,” he recalls, “first in Australia, New Zealand, right through Asia. There were no reports of any real problems. Come midnight, I was actually quite relaxed about things.” After a few hours, when it became clear disaster would not strike, he walked back across the bridge to his home in Lambeth. The streets were full of drunken revellers, the mood was joyous, and the world was resolutely not ending.
I was just a 'young' lad back at Y2k, and all the programming codes then I was responsible then were written no earlier than the 1990s. So, I wasn't in any form of panic to make sure things still worked after the clock striked midnight. All we had to do back then was to make sure the web servers are still up and running. And even if they failed, it's just our websites that were not working and we would have lost some money because advertisements were not running. No biggies (on hindsight).
I almost never go out on New Year's Eve in my entire life. I didn't like crowds. (Still don't.) I cannot really remember now, but I was probably at home just refreshing my web browser.
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Thanks for reading.