Apple has launched the first developer beta for iOS 18.2, which includes several of the Apple Intelligence features for the iPhone. One of these is the promised ChatGPT integration with Siri.
iOS 18.2 allows users to ask ChatGPT questions directly through Siri rather than needing to swap apps. Users can also ask ChatGPT via Siri to generate images, which uses ChatGPT's image generation tools rather than Apple's Visual playground. However, Apple Intelligence's integration of Open AI has drawn some criticism in the past regarding security and data privacy.
Thankfully, Apple has given a full insight into how the integration will handle user privacy and data. Firstly, you as the user have full control over when ChatGPT is used and which features it will have access to. ChatGPT is set to off by default so you will need to enable it to use it with Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence with the Camera Control. When enabled your requests will be analyzed to gauge if you are explicitly asking ChatGPT to process the request, in which case it will use OpenAI's program.
If your request doesn't specifically ask for ChatGPT, but the analysis of your request reveals that it might have useful results, then Siri will ask if you wish to use ChatGPT. It is possible to disable this in the settings, even while keeping the direct question option. What this means is that you can be sure that your requests only ever go where you choose. Next, we need to look at what data is collected.
The data being sent varies depending on whether you have a linked ChatGPT account or not. If you don't then the only information being sent will be the request itself and any attached documents, document contents or the photo being sent. There is no attached information linked to your Apple Account and your IP will also be masked. Added to this, OpenAI will not be able to use the data to train its model; however, your location is shared to help prevent fraud.
If you have a linked account then that means that you can access some of ChatGPT's paid features through Siri, it also means that OpenAI's own data privacy policies will apply. As such, Open AI may log your requests, attachments and session history to help train or improve its models. However, none of this data is linked to your Apple account. You can find out more here.
However, it isn't only Open AI that gathers data when using ChatGPT. Apple collects limited information about your requests and ChatGPT's response. These include the number of requests that have been sent and the response in order to operate the service and prevent fraud. You can find all the details here.
Apple is big on user data protection, so it's good to see it all laid out to help users feel comfortable using the feature.
