The way Apple Health exchanges data with 3rd-party trackers (Fitbit, Garmin, etc.) is very well built and a good model of how other components in iOS could allow data exchange with very granular permissions.
Apple touts the "Private Cloud Compute". If they found a way to share your personal context to process on their cloud in a private and anonymized way, there is no reason the same process couldn't be used to handoff data to a 3rd party AI provider.
One of the issues here is that there are many people with strong opinions that don't understand the thing they have strong opinions about. Which is the normal state of human affairs.
It looks like Apple is framing this as a privacy issue as a marketing tactic so that consumers will blame the EU when Apple COULD implement it without endangering privacy.
EU can’t and won’t enforce the same rigour for 3rd party cloud AI. Which is the problem for Apple.
If said 3rd party service leaks private data, guess which company is going to be in the BIG HEADLINE and which one will hardly be mentioned in the news?
Why should they? If the user decides to trust a third party, Apple shouldn't retain veto power for the customer's choice.
This is how macOS treats apps like OpenClaw. It can absolutely work for iOS too.
You have more safeguards if it’s running on your own metal. It’s reasonable to want to understand that better, perhaps with your own red team, before opening up customer data to actual potential hostiles.
Well then explain me this: There are absolutely no restriction on MacOS where I can give Claude free access to everything. If you are a Mac and iPhone user that essentially gives it access to the exact same data. Why is the data only protect worthy when accessed on the phone directly?
This is the rhetoric used against right to repair. "What if enemies get access to our citizens' data if we allow anyone but us to repair your car?"
No. Only if you would consider the Linux/macos/windows filesystem API a backdoor too. On your desktop any app with sufficient permissions can read all your data. Would you call that a backdoor?
Is Apple incapable of designing a permissions system that allows a user to grant access to email and messages to an app of their choice?
We already download apps and grant them permissions to subsections of personal data on our devices.
I don’t believe Apple is incapable of designing a system that respects a user’s choices and granted permissions.