The shocking truth about Proactive intelligence in iOS 9
Working alongside Siri, Apple’s iOS 9 flagship feature, Proactive tries to work out what you want to do next. It then tries to support and help you to do what you want to do.
Proactive will do things like:
How to use it
Accessed when you swipe to the left on the iOS home screen, or by tapping the shortcut logo at the bottom left corner of your Apple device, (where Handoff also sits), the Proactive screen contains:
As the software learns your habits it will offer you shortcuts to do new things, and third party apps will also offer Proactive tools as developers build support for the feature into their software.
In future Proactive will also share other information, upcoming flights, local weather, traffic warnings, and other relevant items of information – all it needs to do is (1) have features enabled and (2) learn about you.
Training
Proactive bases its information on what you do. This means that when you first install it the services it provides will be limited, contact recommendations will be skewed, app recommendations faulty – the more you use it the better it should become.
To make this a little easier, Siri in iOS 9 has developed understanding of concepts like “today”, “tomorrow”, “when”. This means you can ask Siri to “Remind me to buy milk on the way home today”. Siri will then try to identify where you work and drop you a reminder as you leave.
Shocking truth
So, with all this information inside of iOS 9, what about privacy Do you really want Apple knowing where you go, who you know, where you work and what you do
Apple wants you to keep your private lives private.
This is why (unlike competitors who want to make money from insights into your private lives) it has engineered Proactive to process its data directly on your device, rather than in the cloud. This means your life does not become some Alphabetized telephone book for surveillance, sale or sociopathic snooping.
The shocking thing about this is that Apple's execution of the feature proves there’s no real need to sacrifice privacy for convenience. You can remain in control.
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