Despite the many improvements made to its personal assistant, Apple refuses to allow it to place an order for you.
If you have ever used Amazon’s personal assistant, Alexa, you know that it allows you to place an order on the online store with a simple voice command. In a very intuitive way, Alexa makes the purchase, and then tells you what the delivery times for your order will be. A very practical feature, but unfortunately not yet available with Siri. According to Apple, shopping with Siri is out of the question.
According to a report by the American media The Information, the engineers of the Apple have interrupted all research on this subject, and this, in order to comply with the rules enacted by the company in terms of confidentiality. Indeed, Apple developers would have very limited access to user data on how they use Apple services, such as Apple TV+ and Maps.
In 2019, Apple reportedly seriously considered taking action and enabling purchase via Siri. Eventually, she backed down, facing serious limitations regarding user privacy.
“The effort stalled in part because of strict privacy rules that prevented Siri from linking a person’s Apple ID to their voice request. The ‘Apple Media’ product team in charge of the project might not find another way to reliably authenticate users in order to charge them”says The Information.
Differential confidentiality that limits engineers
For several years, Apple has been working hard to keep user data private as much as possible. By thus limiting access to private data for its engineers, Apple seriously restricts their development possibilities. They therefore regularly experience difficulties working on the App Store, the Apple Card or even… Siri.
As pointed out by our colleagues from MacRumors, Apple had set up a differential confidentiality system for this. Simply put, instead of analyzing data from a specific individual, engineers will analyze data regarding a group of individuals. “Differential Privacy transforms information shared with Apple before it even leaves the user’s device so that Apple can never duplicate the real data”specifies Apple on this subject.
For Siri fans, it will probably take a few more months, if not years, before you can make a purchase in the online Apple Store or App Store.
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