How differential privacy can crowdsource meaningful info without exposing your secrets

Security and privacy expert Matthew Green reassures us, "Your iPhone is not going to kill you." But in his recent explanation of how Apple's differential privacy approach will send an obscured subset of our private activities to Apple, he explains that some studies demonstrate serious consequences to restricting privacy too much when collecting data related to medical research. Apple proposes initially to gather data in iOS 10 from typing to improve emoji substitution and predictive word suggestions for previously unrecognized words, and from deep links within apps (non-private internal destinations) to improve Spotlight search results. In macOS Sierra, it will use data to improve autocorrect. And in both, it will watch which Lookup Hints are selected in Notes to provide better help.