Well, not necessarily confusing so much as “going behind your back and being very scary but once you figure it out you actually realize it’s smarter than you”.
Before we start, I want to say that I finally noticed a certain passage in the Apple TOS saying I was not allowed to blog about any betas. Â I have since been trying to honor that.
Key word: “Trying”.  This post was originally going to be how Proactive was underhanded and sneaky…but then I actually did some homework and figured out that Proactive is actually just really smart.  This is the story of how that happened.
Yes, this is just me fanboying about Proactive.  Bite me.
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Now, I recently reinstalled the beta after I got my phone replaced due to dropping it. Â I originally installed the beta when it was still Public Beta 1. Â When I reinstalled it, it was at 3. Â Now, apparently some defaults got switched around, and suddenly Bob Smith appeared in the first slot of my Siri-Contact Suggestions (and I wrote it that way because fudge naming schemes I guess).
I had not emailed Bob in two years.  And the only email I had sent him was a bug report for an app he made.  I also had not even made a contact out of him.  When I checked, the iPhone appeared to have his email and his Twitter handle.  I didn’t know he had a Twitter, and I had not followed him.
And then I found in the iPhone settings that there actually was a toggle that made contacts out of emails you sent things to so actually it was fine.  HOWEVER……
That is where Jim Adams comes in.  Jim was also a contact created by Proactive.  You might think I had emailed him at one point…but you’d be wrong.  There were no emails from him, n0 notes, no textual information, not a shred of evidence on my device that said he ever existed…except for a single, solitary calendar event from 2014.  This event contained his email (albeit an old discontinued one).
I spent all day attempting to figure all this out…and it was so annoying, because as I was doing it…well…
You have to understand the magnitude of what the hell Proactive is.  You can think of it like a little robotic spider in your phone, invisible to you.  It watches everything you do, and it reaches out through the Wi-Fi, downloading your calendar and email history, and crawls all over them, scanning for trends, contact information, and any other useful things.  The thing is…you don’t know what that creepy robotic spider is doing.  It could be contacting other related iPhones to correlate and pool data. Because did I mention Jim and Bob were two head honchoes of completely separate companies, and that my dad was a part of both?!
Yeah. Â Me and my dad both thought that Proactive was being invasive as hell!
But…Bob was from a single email (and backed by two emails from Twitter suggesting I follow him), and Jim was from a single calendar event (which I guess should be kind of a high priority since it’s your calendar…except it’s not my calendar.  I have a shared calendar thing.  And iOS seems to not know that.  At all.  I’ll talk more about it if I feel like it.).
So in fact…Proactive was actually being smart about what it did.
And…my dad figured out that Proactive seemed to be basing it’s algorithm (at least for Siri-Contact Suggestions) off of the CRM, or Customer Relations Model.  [And no alt text for that link because WordPress won’t allow me to have any fun anymore :p]
So…good job Apple!  I hated you when I was figuring it out but I did so good job!
(Also…I want to say “good job” again, because while I was getting g my iPhone replaced, dad touched the new MacBook’s trackpad…and was immediately tempted to ditch his old one just for the trackpad!  So GOOD JOB!)
Ahhhh…this is the Apple everyone knows and loves.  Welcome back. 🙂