Episode 52 – Differential Privacy, macOS Sierra Reviews, iPhone 7 Reports

We returned to our usual format this week, kicking things off with a News Roundup, and including a Question of the Week and Weekly Pick.

Our News Roundup covered three topics: Instagram’s release of user numbers, including 500 million monthly active users and 300 million daily active users; Tencent’s acquisition of a majority stake in Supercell for $8.6 billion; and BlackBerry’s earnings.

Our Question of the Week is: “How can differential privacy make my life better?” Aaron did a bunch of homework on this concept, which Apple introduced to many of us at WWDC last week but has actually been around for much longer. He tells us what differential privacy is, what some of the real-world applications are, and the benefits and limitations of this approach. We’ve included some links to some of Aaron’s reading material in the show notes.

Lastly, we discussed some other topics relating to WWDC which we didn’t get to last time or which have emerged since last week’s episodes, including the reviews of the macOS Sierra release which came out this week, and reports from the Wall Street Journal that Apple’s next iPhone will largely stick to the iPhone 6 and 6s form factor while ditching the 3.5mm headphone jack. We wrapped up the episode with our Weekly Pick, this week a recommendation from Jan.

As usual, you’ll find some links to related content as well as other ways to listen to the podcast beneath the embedded Soundcloud player below.

We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson@aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com). We also have a dedicated Podcast Twitter handle at @BDPcast.

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Show notes:

Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:

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