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Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

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

#101

Post by mike_d »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #96
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.

When your phone sends out a ping to search for cellular towers, real estate brokers collect all that information to track everywhere you go and which stores you visit. Owning a phone is a privacy failure by default in the United States.

> When your phone sends out a ping to search for cellular towers, real estate brokers collect all that

Care to provide a pointer to what device they are using? I would absolutely get my real estate license for this.

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

#102

Post by brookst »

homofermic wrote: post #36
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.

Does the noise addition not help? Is that a mitigation for a different attack?

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

#103

Post by gigel82 »

oneplane wrote: post #53
gigel82 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intens…

That is incorrect. If everything was local they wouldn't need HE and OHTTP and everything else.

I would be ok with this being a local feature, where I can download the signature database to my device and run the search locally (as you say), but as it stands some information about my photos (enough to detect places at least, possibly more in the future) is being sent out of my device. I want zero information about my photos to leave my device.

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

#104

Post by NavinF »

nox101 wrote: post #97
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…

Except for the fact (?) that quantum computers will break this encryption so if you wanted to you could horde the data and just wait a few years and then decrypt?

Quantum computers don't break Differential Privacy. Read the toy example at https://security.googleblog.com/2014/10/learning-statistics-...

>Let’s say you wanted to count how many of your online friends were dogs, while respecting the maxim that, on the Internet, nobody should know you’re a dog. To do this, you could ask each friend to answer the question “Are you a dog?” in the following way. Each friend should flip a coin in secret, and answer the question truthfully if the coin came up heads; but, if the coin came up tails, that friend should always say “Yes” regardless. Then you could get a good estimate of the true count from the greater-than-half fraction of your friends that answered “Yes”. However, you still wouldn’t know which of your friends was a dog: each answer “Yes” would most likely be due to that friend’s coin flip coming up tails.

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

#105

Post by mike_d »

zaroth wrote: post #4

I don’t even use iCloud Photos and this was on by default. Very bad move by Apple to ship my photos off my device, without my permission, in any shape or form, I don’t care.

That isn't what is happening. The author of this blog post has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

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

#106

Post by mentalgear »

thought_alarm wrote: post #8
hu3 wrote: post #6

So it sends your photos to be indexed on Apple servers. Turned on by default. This is probably done to compete with Google Photos which has a great photo search by word feature. With that said, Apple can use whatever privacy measures to protect user data. But at the end of the day, a subpoena can easily force them to hand over data. The best privacy measure is to just not have the data. I guess indexing photos offlin…

It does not send your photos to be indexed on Apple servers.

it literally says it uses global search index on the label below the check mark. It seems more than likely that (now or at least in the long run) they will use user data to enhance this index.

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

#107

Post by talldayo »

oneplane wrote: post #53
gigel82 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intens…

> Just like baseband firmware is not that, and activation is not that, yet using them requires communication with Apple all the same.

I mean, this is just wrong. Baseband firmware and carrier activation can be managed entirely independently of Apple, they just choose to manage it themselves. The number of places where Apple chooses to insert their own services as arbitrary middlemen has been a perennially worrying topic among Apple enthusiasts. It's not just disrespectful to people that pay a premium for fewer service advertisements, it's downright unsafe and does not reflect the sort of forward-thinking security that people in the industry respect.

There was a time when Apple focused on real and innovative product differentiation, but I'll be damned if you can give me a post-Wozniak example that isn't under antitrust scrutiny. Apple relies on marketing and branding to make people feel unsafe in a fundamentally insecure system - I don't respect that as a proponent of innovation and competitive digital markets.

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

#108

Post by threeseed »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #78
oneplane wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

O good, cloudflare gets one more data point on me, a ping every time I add a photo to my library.

a) Cloudflare doesn't know about you. It sees an IP address.

b) If we follow your tortured logic then every hop along the path from your phone to Apple will have one more data point on you. That's thousands of companies a day.

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

#109

Post by throw0101d »

nox101 wrote: post #97
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…

Except for the fact (?) that quantum computers will break this encryption so if you wanted to you could horde the data and just wait a few years and then decrypt?

> Except for the fact (?) that quantum computers will break this encryption […]

Quantum computers will make breaking RSA and Diff-Hellman public key encryption easier. They will not effect things like AES, nor things like hashing:

> Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash).

And for RSA and DH, there are algorithms being deployed to deal with that:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_Post-Quantum_Cryptography...

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

#110

Post by throw0101d »

amelius wrote: post #100
brookst wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice is always good and Apple should implement notice. However, "my data is being sent off my device" is incorrect, as GP explained. Metadata, derived from your data, with noise added to make it irreversible, is being sent off your device. It's the equivalent of sending an MD5 of your password somewhere; you may still object, but it is not factually correct to say your password was transmitted.

> It's the equivalent of sending an MD5 of your password somewhere; you may still object, but it is not factually correct to say your password was transmitted. Hackers love to have MD5 checksums of passwords. They make it way easier to find the passwords in a brute force attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table

>> It's the equivalent of […]

> Hackers love to have MD5 checksums of passwords.

Hackers love not understanding analogies. :)

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