Live Updates: Apple Event; iPhone 16 debuts, designed for AI

Apple is expected to unveil its new iPhone lineup powered by artificial intelligence today, but this has also raised questions about data protection and privacy for some users.

Apple Intelligence—the catch-all term for all of Apple's AI tools—is intended to be more of a personal assistant than anything else. It collects specific information about your relationships and contacts, messages and emails you've sent, events you've attended, meetings on your calendar, and other highly individualized data about your life.

But while Apple Intelligence can access a wide range of your personal data, it lacks what company executives call “world knowledge” — more general information about history, current events and other things less directly related to you.

This is where ChatGPT comes in. Users can tell Siri to forward questions and prompts to ChatGPT – on an opt-in basis – or have ChatGPT help them write documents in Apple apps.

What about your data: Because Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT are used for largely different purposes, the amount and type of information users send to each AI may also be different. ChatGPT does not necessarily or automatically have access to your most personal data, although you may choose to share some of that data and more with OpenAI if you decide to use ChatGPT through Apple. During a demo in June, Apple showed Siri asking the user for permission to send a prompt to ChatGPT before doing so.

While Apple users will need to send their personal data and AI requests to OpenAI if they want to use ChatGPT, Apple has stated that most of the time Apple Intelligence will not send user data anywhere. As much as possible, Apple will try to process AI prompts directly on your device using smaller AI models.

This is similar to the way Apple already handles FaceID and other sensitive data. The idea is that processing the data directly on the device limits risky exposure. Your data can't be intercepted or hacked by a central server if it never goes anywhere.