Apple Scrapped Plans to Let Users Use Siri to Make Purchases Due to Privacy Concerns

According to a new report by The Information, Apple considered allowing users to make purchases with their voice assistant, similar to how users can use Amazon's voice assistant, but engineers scrapped the idea due to privacy concerns.

The report shows how engineers at Apple have limited access to how users use their services. Apple's strict privacy procedures make it harder for engineers to have direct access to usage data, making it harder for the company to compete with other companies.

The team in charge of the effort to let users use the siri to make purchases had to abandon the project.

Some proposed Apple features never see the light of day because of privacy restrictions. In 2019, employees explored whether a customer could use Siri to purchase apps and other online services by using their voice, similar to how customers of Amazon buy products using its voice assistant, Alexa, according to a person with direct knowledge of the project. The effort stalled in part because of strict privacy rules that prevented Siri from tying a person's Apple ID to their voice request. The Apple media products team in charge of the project couldn't find an alternative way to reliably authenticate users in order to bill them, this person said.

According to the report, this isn't the first time that Apple's privacy policy has limited what its engineers can do. Engineers and staffers working on the Apple Card and the App Store have to find creative ways to make up for the lack of data.

differential privacy was first demoed by Apple's Craig Federighi at the 2016 World Wide Developers Conference. In a technical PDF overview, Apple describes its implementation of differential privacy as allowing it to learn about the user community without knowing about individuals in the community. Differential privacy transforms the information shared with Apple before it ever leaves the user's device.

Even with differential privacy, Apple still attempts to aggregate as much user data as possible without making it traceable back to specific users, and engineers still feel constrained with what they can and cannot do, according to the report.

Despite those efforts, the former Apple employees said that differential privacy and other attempts to work around customer data restrictions have had limited or mixed results and that it can be tough for new employees to adapt to Apple's strong privacy culture, which comes directly from CEO Tim Cook and other senior vice presidents. Apple's efforts to reduce how much customer data it collects are based on fears that employees could try to look at the information for improper reasons—the kind of well-known violations that have occurred at Google and at Uber—or that hackers could compromise the data.

Privacy concerns were raised during the development of the Apple Watch. According to people who worked on the project, features like Raise to Speak, which lets users speak without a verbal expression, were popular.