Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

lapcatsoftware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#31

Post by oneplane »

gigel82 wrote: post #29
oneplane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that binary. Nobody is forcing anything, you can not buy a phone, you can not use the internet. Heck, you can even not install any updates! What is happening, is that people make tradeoffs, and decide to what degree they trust who and what they interact with. Plenty of people might just 'go with the flow', but putting what Apple did here in the same bucket as what for example Microsoft or Google does is a gr…

I don't want my photos to take part in any network; never asked for it, never expected it to happen. I never used iCloud or other commercial cloud providers. This is just forceful data extraction by Apple, absolutely egregious behavior.

Your photos aren't taken. Did you read the article at all?

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#32

Post by lysace »

scosman wrote: post #11

"I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog post" I do: - Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash). - Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is q…

> - OHTTP relay: it's sent through a 3rd party so Apple never knows your IP address. The contents are encrypted so the 3rd party never doesn't learn anything either (some risk of exposing "IP X is an apple photos user", but nothing about the content of the library).

Which 3rd party is that?

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#33

Post by JustExAWS »

latexr wrote: post #28
JustExAWS wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use iCloud to store your photos?

I’m not the person you asked, but I agree with them. To answer your question: No, I do not use iCloud to store my photos. Even if I did, consent to store data is not the same as consent to scan or run checks on it. For a company whose messaging is all about user consent and privacy, that matters. This would be easily solvable: On first run show a window with: > Hey, we have this new cool feature that does X and is to…

When iCloud syncs between devices how do you think that happens without storing some type of metadata?

You don’t use iCloud for anything? When you change phones do you start fresh or use your computer for backups? Do sync bookmarks? Browsing history?

Do you use iMessage?

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#34

Post by oneplane »

talldayo wrote: post #27
oneplane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that binary. Nobody is forcing anything, you can not buy a phone, you can not use the internet. Heck, you can even not install any updates! What is happening, is that people make tradeoffs, and decide to what degree they trust who and what they interact with. Plenty of people might just 'go with the flow', but putting what Apple did here in the same bucket as what for example Microsoft or Google does is a gr…

> What is happening, is that people make tradeoffs, and decide to what degree they trust who and what they interact with. People aren't making tradeoffs - that's the problem. Apple is making the tradeoffs for them, and then retroactively asking their users "is this okay?" Users shouldn't need to buy a new phone to circumevent arbitrary restrictions on the hardware that is their legal property. If America had function…

People make plenty of tradeoffs. Most people trade most of their attention/time for things that are not related to thinking about technical details, legal issues or privacy concerns. None of this exists in their minds. Maybe the fact that they implicitly made this tradeoff isn't even something they are aware of.

As for vectorised and noise-protected PCC, sure, they might have an opinion about that, but people rarely are informed enough to think about it, let alone gain the insight to make a judgment about it at all.

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#35

Post by latexr »

talldayo wrote: post #15
scosman wrote: post #11

"I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog post" I do: - Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash). - Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is q…

The right call is to provide the feature and let users opt-in. Apple knows this is bad, they've directly witnessed the backlash to OCSP, lawful intercept and client-side-scanning. There is no world in which they did not realize the problem and decided to enable it by default anyways knowing full-well that users aren't comfortable with this. People won't trust homomorphic encryption, entropy seeding or relaying when n…

> This is what a coverup looks like.

That’s starting to veer into unreasonable levels of conspiracy theory. There’s nothing to “cover up”, the feature has an off switch right in the Settings and a public document explaining how it works. It should not be on by default but that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith. Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#36

Post by homofermic »

scosman wrote: post #11

"I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog post" I do: - Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash). - Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is q…

Regarding HE: since the lookup is generated by the requestor, it can be used as an adversarial vector, which can result in exfiltration by nearest neighbor (closest point to vector) methods. In other words, you can change what you are searching for, and much like differential power analysis attacks on crypto, extract information.

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#37

Post by do_not_redeem »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #30
scosman wrote: post #11

"I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog post" I do: - Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash). - Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is q…

This must be the first consumer or commercial product implementing homomorphic encryption is it not? I would be surprised if doing noisy vector comparisons is actually the most effective way to tell if someone is in front of the Eiffel tower. A small large language model could caption it just as well on device, my spider sense tells me someone saw an opportunity to apply bleeding edge, very cool tech so that they can…

> This must be the first consumer or commercial product implementing homomorphic encryption is it not?

Not really, it's been around for a bit now. From 2021:

> The other major reason we’re talking about HE and FL now is who is using them. According to a recent repository of PETs, there are 19 publicly announced pilots, products, and proofs of concept for homomorphic encryption and federated analytics (another term for federated learning) combined. That doesn’t seem like a lot … but the companies offering them include Apple,7 Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, IBM, and the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, and users and investors include DARPA, Intel, Oracle, Mastercard, and Scotiabank. Also, the industries involved in these early projects are among the largest. Use cases are led by health and social care and finance, with their use in digital and crime and justice also nontrivial (figure 1).

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology...

I do wonder why we don't hear about it more often though. "Homomorphic encryption" as a buzzword has a lot of headline potential, so I'm surprised companies don't brag about it more.

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#38

Post by Gabriel54 »

JustExAWS wrote: post #33
latexr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not the person you asked, but I agree with them. To answer your question: No, I do not use iCloud to store my photos. Even if I did, consent to store data is not the same as consent to scan or run checks on it. For a company whose messaging is all about user consent and privacy, that matters. This would be easily solvable: On first run show a window with: > Hey, we have this new cool feature that does X and is to…

When iCloud syncs between devices how do you think that happens without storing some type of metadata? You don’t use iCloud for anything? When you change phones do you start fresh or use your computer for backups? Do sync bookmarks? Browsing history? Do you use iMessage?

In response to your question in the parent comment, no, I do not use iCloud. And I do not sync any of the things you mentioned here. If someone already consented to using iCloud to store their photos then I would not consider the service mentioned this post to be such a big issue, because Apple would already have the data on their servers with the user's consent.

edit: I will just add, even if we accept the argument that it's extremely secure and impossible to leak information, then where do we draw the line between "extremely secure" and "somewhat secure" and "not secure at all"? Should we trust Apple to make this decision for us?

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#39

Post by walterbell »

JustExAWS wrote: post #33
latexr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not the person you asked, but I agree with them. To answer your question: No, I do not use iCloud to store my photos. Even if I did, consent to store data is not the same as consent to scan or run checks on it. For a company whose messaging is all about user consent and privacy, that matters. This would be easily solvable: On first run show a window with: > Hey, we have this new cool feature that does X and is to…

When iCloud syncs between devices how do you think that happens without storing some type of metadata? You don’t use iCloud for anything? When you change phones do you start fresh or use your computer for backups? Do sync bookmarks? Browsing history? Do you use iMessage?

Some iOS apps synchronize data with standard protocols (e.g. IMAP, WebDAV, CalDAV) to cloud or self-hosted services.

Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

#40

Post by Msurrow »

Gabriel54 wrote: post #13
scosman wrote: post #11

"I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog post" I do: - Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash). - Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is q…

I appreciate the explanation. However, I think you do not address the main problem, which is that my data is being sent off my device by default and without any (reasonable) notice. Many users may agree to such a feature (as you say, it may be very secure), but to assume that everyone ought to be opted in by default is the issue.

I think it does address the main problem. What he is saying is that multiple layers of security is used to ensure (mathematically and theoretically proved) that there is no risk in sending the data, because it is encrypted and sent is such a way that apple or any third party will never be able to read/access it (again, based on theoretically provable math) . If there is no risk there is no harm, and then there is a different need for ‘by default’, opt in/out, notifications etc.

The problem with this feature is that we cannot verify that Apple’s implementation of the math is correct and without security flaws. Everyone knows there is security flaws in all software, and this implementation is not open (I.e. we cannot review the code, and even if we could review code we cannot verify that the provided code was the code used in the iOS build). So, we have to trust Apple did not make any mistakes in their implementation.

Post reply on HN