> Apple, Google, MS and others could deliver the same products [...] without sacrificing privacy [..]
Could they? My amateur understanding is that a lot of today's success in machine learning is due mainly to having enormous amounts of data to work with.
When I look at Google Now, for example, I can't imagine a way to build it without collecting an ocean of detailed personal data. Or your example of finding common behaviors and having computers do the right thing: that gets much, much easier if you have the daily behavior data of 10m people so you can start extracting concepts like "typical morning routine", testing recognizers for that, and having them not do anything in low-confidence situations.
Could they? My amateur understanding is that a lot of today's success in machine learning is due mainly to having enormous amounts of data to work with.
When I look at Google Now, for example, I can't imagine a way to build it without collecting an ocean of detailed personal data. Or your example of finding common behaviors and having computers do the right thing: that gets much, much easier if you have the daily behavior data of 10m people so you can start extracting concepts like "typical morning routine", testing recognizers for that, and having them not do anything in low-confidence situations.