Apple is researching ways to identify signs of childhood autism through iPhones (opens in new tab)

From the article: > Apple has partnered with Duke University to research the third brain using advanced medical technology powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based on people and documents.

What?

From the WSJ article > Apple has a third brain-related research partnership with Duke University that it hasn’t disclosed.

That makes more sense.

A remarkably cynical and negative take, but at least the headline was sanitized here on HN. Tying this to the CSAM misfire is quite a stretch.

For me, Apple lost the trust. So yes, I don’t not give Apple a benefit of the doubt on this one. The most generous explanation I could come up with is that this is an effort to introduce “good benefits” that could come from the surveillance. That’s of course my take on Apple corporate. I am sure the team within Apple, who is working on this, means well and kudos to them.

Here's the WSJ article mentioned in the first paragraph, although it is pay-walled:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-wants-iphones-to-help-det...

enabling creativity, Apple's original value proposition, comes full circle to relentless categorization and surveillance, the end-game of markets

I don't see anything here about productizing the research they're doing. Nor is there any indication of how it actually works (on-device or other). There's also a lot of words about medical data and monitoring children, but it would seem wild to me that Apple somehow gets classified as a healthcare provider based on their current offering.

It would seem that the technology mentioned looks at videos and makes a determination based on that. Does analyzing a video make it medical data? What about the other "medical data" that Apple has? Besides complying with COPPA, what data do they have that's not explicitly opted into?

I simply can't see past the alarmist rhetoric of this post. Especially when the cookie banner doesn't give an option to opt-out, with the option "Ahh, that's alright". Only a little ironic.

Apple is researching ways their health features and machine learning implementations can detect health conditions. Who would have thought.