apple: Apple’s Siri won’t be able to make purchases like Amazon Alexa, plans scrapped due to privacy concerns – Times of India

Apple users won’t be able to use Siri to place orders online or make purchases for apps and services like Amazon’s Alexa. The Cupertino-based tech giant explored this feature with its digital assistant three years ago. According to a MacRumors report, Apple’s engineers have now scrapped the idea of using Siri to place online orders following certain privacy concerns.
The report mentions how Apple engineers have limited users’ access to some other services offered by the company like — Apple TV+ and Apple Maps.
The report also reveals that Apple explored the possibility of letting users use ‌Siri‌ to make purchases in 2019, but the team in charge of the project eventually had to abort the idea due to privacy concerns. As per the report, the effort has been stalled due to the strict privacy rules that prevent Siri “from tying a person’s Apple ID to their voice request.” The team in charge of the project “couldn’t find an alternative way to reliably authenticate users to bill them.”
The report mentions that this is not the first time Apple’s privacy policy has limited the engineers’ ability. Apart from Siri developers, employees working on the App Store, and even the Apple Card frequently needed to “find creative or costly ways to make up for the lack of access to data.”
One of these creative ways that Apple engineers came up with to bypass the strict privacy policies was first demonstrated at WWDC 2016. Apple explained that its use of differential privacy enabled it “to learn about the user community without learning about individuals in the community.” However, even with the company’s differential privacy policy engineers remain concerned with what they can and can not do.
The report has also revealed privacy concerns that were involved during the development of the Apple Watch. The report even mentioned some citings of the people who worked on the Apple Watch. Some features that are included in the wearable like the Raise to Speak faced concerns initially. This feature allows users to speak to ‌Siri‌ by just raising their wrist without saying “Hey ‌Siri‌”. The concerns were regarding the microphone and accelerometer collecting user data.