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Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

lapcatsoftware.com

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

#51

Post by ustad »

Holy crap! Enabled by default! Thank you for letting everyone know.

“Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides IP address. This prevents Apple learning about the information in your photos. You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.”

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

#52

Post by JustExAWS »

latexr wrote: post #42
JustExAWS wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

None of that is relevant to my point. You seem to be trying to catch people in some kind of gotcha instead of engaging honestly with the problem at hand. But alright, I’ll bite. Yes, I always start with clean installs, both on iOS and on macOS. Sometimes I even restart fresh on the same device, as I make sure my hardware lasts. I don’t sync bookmarks, I keep them in Pinboard and none of them has any private or remote…

No I am trying to say with a connected device using online services, the service provider is going to have access to your data that you use to interact with them.

To a first approximation, everyone in 2024 expects their data and settings to be transferred across devices.

People aren’t working as if it is 2010 when you had to backup and restore devices via iTunes. If I’m out of town somewhere and my phone gets lost, damaged or stolen, I can buy another iPhone, log into my account and everything gets restored as it was.

Just as I expect my watch progress to work when I use Netflix between my phone, iPad, Roku devices etc.

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

#53

Post by oneplane »

gigel82 wrote: post #41
oneplane wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The "network" mention was in reply to your comment about "participating in a network" which was never the case for one's personal photos (unless explicitly shared on a social network I guess). I did read the article, yes :) Maybe our photos are not sent bit-by-bit but enough data from the photos is being sent to be able to infer a location (and possibly other details) so it is the same thing: my personal data is bein…

No, your photos aren't sent, also not 'pieces' of it. They are creating vector data which can be used to create searchable vectors which in turn can be used on-device to find visual matches for your search queries (which are local).

You can imagine it as hashes (created locally), some characters of that hash from some random positions being used to find out if those can be turned into a query (which is compute intensive so they use PCC for that). So there is no 'data' about what it is, where it is or who it is. There isn't even enough data to create a picture with.

Technically, everything could of course be changed, heck, Apple could probably hire someone with binoculars and spy on you 24/7. But this is not that. Just like baseband firmware is not that, and activation is not that, yet using them requires communication with Apple all the same.

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

#54

Post by latexr »

Msurrow wrote: post #40
Gabriel54 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Your second paragraph is exactly the point made in the article as the reason why it should be an informed choice and not something on by default.

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

#55

Post by JustExAWS »

stackghost wrote: post #45
JustExAWS wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use iCloud to store your photos?

I hate this type of lukewarm take. "Ah, I see you care about privacy, but you own a phone! How hypocritical of you!"

If you care about your “privacy” and no external service providers having access to your data - that means you can’t use iCloud - at all, any messages service, any back up service, use Plex and your own hosted media, not use a search engine, etc.

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

#56

Post by latexr »

scosman wrote: post #44
Gabriel54 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I'm saying: you're not sending "your data" off device. You are sending a homomorphically encrypted locally differentially private vector (through an anonymous proxy). No consumer can really understand what that means, what the risks are, and how it would compare to the risk of sending someone like Facebook/Google raw data. I'm asking: what does an opt in for that really look like? You're not going to be able…

Asking the user is perfectly reasonable. Apple themselves used to understand and champion that approach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo

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

#57

Post by oneplane »

lysace wrote: post #32
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?

I don't have a list on hand, but at least Cloudflare and Akamai are part of the network hops. Technically you only need 2 hops to make sure no origin or data extraction can be done.

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

#58

Post by latexr »

JustExAWS wrote: post #52
latexr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is relevant to my point. You seem to be trying to catch people in some kind of gotcha instead of engaging honestly with the problem at hand. But alright, I’ll bite. Yes, I always start with clean installs, both on iOS and on macOS. Sometimes I even restart fresh on the same device, as I make sure my hardware lasts. I don’t sync bookmarks, I keep them in Pinboard and none of them has any private or remote…

No I am trying to say with a connected device using online services, the service provider is going to have access to your data that you use to interact with them. To a first approximation, everyone in 2024 expects their data and settings to be transferred across devices. People aren’t working as if it is 2010 when you had to backup and restore devices via iTunes. If I’m out of town somewhere and my phone gets lost, d…

And that should rightfully be your informed choice. Just like everyone else should have the right to know what data their devices are sending before it happens and be given the informed choice to refuse. People shouldn’t have to learn that from a random blog post shared on a random website.

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

#59

Post by JustExAWS »

Gabriel54 wrote: post #38
JustExAWS wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you start fresh with an iOS installation after each upgrade or do you back up your iPhone using your computer and iTunes?

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

#60

Post by Gabriel54 »

scosman wrote: post #44
Gabriel54 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I'm saying: you're not sending "your data" off device. You are sending a homomorphically encrypted locally differentially private vector (through an anonymous proxy). No consumer can really understand what that means, what the risks are, and how it would compare to the risk of sending someone like Facebook/Google raw data. I'm asking: what does an opt in for that really look like? You're not going to be able…

In response your second question, opt in would look exactly like this: don't have the box checked by default, with an option to enable it: "use this to improve local search, we will create an encrypted index of your data to send securely to our servers, etc..." A PhD is not necessary to understand the distinction between storing data locally on a machine vs. on the internet.
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