Understanding Aggregate Trends for Apple Intelligence Using Differential Privacy

Summary

At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. And we believe in giving our users a great experience while protecting their privacy. For years, we’ve used techniques like differential privacy as part of our opt-in device analytics program. This lets us gain insights into how our products are used, so we can improve them, while protecting user privacy by preventing Apple from seeing individual-level data from those users. This same need to understand usage while protecting privacy is also present in Apple Intelligence. One of our principles is that Apple does not use our users' private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models, and, for content publicly available on the internet, we apply filters to remove personally identifiable information like social security and credit card numbers. In this post, we’ll share how we’re developing new techniques that enable Apple to discover usage trends and aggregated insights to improve features powered by Apple Intelligence, without revealing individual behavior or unique content to Apple. Improving Genmoji One area where we’ve been applying our work on differential privacy with Apple Intelligence is Genmoji. For users who opt in to share Device Analytics with Apple, we use differentially private methods to identify popular prompts and prompt patterns, while providing a mathematical guarantee that unique or rare prompts aren’t discovered and that specific prompts cannot be linked to individual users. Knowing popular prompts is important because it helps Apple evaluate changes and improvements to our models based on the types of prompts that are most representative of real user engagement. For example, understanding how our models perform when a user requests Genmoji that contain multiple entities (like “dinosaur in a cowboy hat”) helps us improve the responses to those kinds of requests. This approach works by randomly polling participating devices for whether they’ve seen a particular fr...