{"id":304,"date":"2026-08-25T15:54:19","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/?post_type=news&#038;p=304"},"modified":"2026-08-26T07:42:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T06:42:38","slug":"openai-and-apple-the-rumor-circulating","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/en\/tech-news\/openai-and-apple-the-rumor-circulating\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI and Apple: The rumor circulating"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Social media posts and warning messages have been claiming that OpenAI has entered a partnership with Apple, through which ChatGPT can now access a user&#8217;s entire message history and send texts on their behalf. Anyone wanting to protect their privacy should reportedly avoid the plugin \u2014 and since one&#8217;s own contacts might have enabled it too, some suggest avoiding iMessage altogether. As circulated, this claim is inaccurate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Factual correction<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>No partnership \u2014 the two companies are actually in a legal dispute<\/strong>: Apple was not part of the announcement. Apple sued OpenAI in July 2026, accusing it of trade secret infringement. The two companies are opposing parties in litigation, not partners.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Not system-wide iMessage access, but an optional Mac plugin<\/strong>: This is a plugin for the ChatGPT desktop app, installed via the Plugins interface, that can search, draft, analyze, and \u2014 after approval \u2014 send messages. It works exclusively on Apple-silicon Macs, not Intel machines, iPhones, or other platforms.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Sending is not automatic<\/strong>: Sending a message requires user approval by default, and OpenAI explicitly warns against granting persistent approval.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>The access is genuinely concerning \u2014 but technically different from &#8220;Apple opened up access&#8221;<\/strong>: The feature requires the user to grant Full Disk Access, and this permission reads the locally decrypted message database directly \u2014 iMessage&#8217;s end-to-end encryption offers no protection here, since it only covers transit, not local storage.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>The real risk to third parties is genuine, but framed backwards<\/strong>: it&#8217;s not that &#8220;your contacts enabled the plugin&#8221; \u2014 rather, if you enable it, the messages of everyone you&#8217;ve corresponded with potentially become accessible to the AI, without their knowledge or consent. That is where the data privacy issue lies.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Social media posts and warning messages have been claiming that OpenAI has entered a partnership with Apple, through which ChatGPT can now access a user&#8217;s entire message history and send texts on their behalf. Anyone wanting to protect their privacy should reportedly avoid the plugin \u2014 and since one&#8217;s own contacts might have enabled it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","news_typ":[],"class_list":["post-304","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/304\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news_typ","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dirkspacek.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news_typ?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}