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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

#81

Post by cma »

oneplane wrote: post #63
cma wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantum makes the homomorphic stuff ineffective in the mid-term. All they have to do is hold on to the data and they can get the results of the lookup table computation, in maybe 10-25 years. Shouldn't be on by default.

What makes you think that this is the biggest problem if things like AES and RSA are suddenly breakable? If someone wanted to get a hold of your cloud hosted data at that point, they would use their capacity to simply extract enough key material to impersonate a Secure Enclave. That that point, you "are" the device and as such you "are" the user. No need to make it more complicated than that. In theory, Apple and oth…

This is ostensibly for non-cloud data, derivatives of it auto uploaded after an update.

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

#82

Post by JustExAWS »

walterbell wrote: post #72
JustExAWS wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that doesn’t help with internally stored data within apps, settings, which apps you have installed on what screen, passwords, etc

iOS supports local device backups.

[flagged]

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

#83

Post by JustExAWS »

stackghost wrote: post #76
JustExAWS wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I also don’t use Plex, have my own file syncing service running, run my own email server, etc. I also don’t run a private chat server that people log into - I’m like most of the iPhone and Android using world

Maybe lay off the sanctimonious attitude then.

[flagged]

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

#85

Post by doctorpangloss »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #48

At this point, Mac Mini M4's are cheap enough and capable enough to just purchase two: one for off-line use, another on-. Perhaps this is marketing genius (from an AAPL-shareholder POV)? ---- I'm laughing at the insanity of all this interconnectivity, but an NDA prevents me from typing the greatest source of my ironic chuckles. Described in an obtuse way: a privacy-focused hardware product ships with an undisclosed p…

Can you be more clear?

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

#86

Post by threeseed »

Gabriel54 wrote: post #69
Msurrow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone with a background in mathematics I appreciate your point about cryptography. That said, there is no guarantee that any particular implementation of a secure theoretical algorithm is actually secure.

There is also no guarantee that Apple isn't lying about everything.

They could just have the OS batch uploads until a later point e.g. when the phone checks for updates.

The point is that this is all about risk mitigation not elimination.

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

#87

Post by threeseed »

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

This is a dumb take. They literally own the entire stack Photos runs on.

If they really wanted to do a coverup we would never know about it.

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

#88

Post by sensanaty »

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…

I don't care if all they collect is the bottom right pixel of the image and blur it up before sending it, the sending part is the problem. I don't want anything sent from MY device without my consent, whether it's plaintext or quantum proof.

You're presenting it as if you have to explain elliptic curve cryptography in order to toggle a "show password" dialogue but that's disingenuous framing, all you have to say is "Allow Apple to process your images", simple as that. Otherwise you can argue many things can't possibly be made into options. Should location data always be sent, because satellites are complicated and hard to explain? Should we let them choose whether they can turn wifi on or off, because you have to explain IEEE 802.11 to them?

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

#89

Post by talldayo »

latexr wrote: post #73
CapcomGo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. This isn't a feature or setting that users check often or ever. Now, their data is being sent without their permission or knowledge.

Which is wrong but doesn’t make it a coverup, which by definition assumes trying to hide evidence of wrongdoing.

It is a coverup. Apple is overtly and completely aware of the optics surrounding photo scanning - they know that an opt-in scheme cannot work as they found out previously.

Since they cannot convince users to enable this feature in good-faith, they are resorting to subterfuge. We know that Apple is vehement about pushing client-side scanning on users that do not want it, I do not believe for a second that this was a mistake or unintended behavior. If this was a bug then it would have been hotfixed immediately to prevent the unintended behavior from reaching any more phones than it already had.

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

#90

Post by threeseed »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #48

At this point, Mac Mini M4's are cheap enough and capable enough to just purchase two: one for off-line use, another on-. Perhaps this is marketing genius (from an AAPL-shareholder POV)? ---- I'm laughing at the insanity of all this interconnectivity, but an NDA prevents me from typing the greatest source of my ironic chuckles. Described in an obtuse way: a privacy-focused hardware product ships with an undisclosed p…

> letting the feds see every time you use the product

This does not happen.

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