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

131–140 of 1001 posts

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

#131

Post by tredre3 »

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…

> This is probably done to compete with Google Photos which has a great photo search by word feature.

Apple Photos is already capable of searching your photos by word/content fully offline on-device.

Google Photos is unable to search your photos by word/content fully offline on-device. Hell, it can't even search by file name if you don't sync your photos to the cloud!

I don't think Apple has to worry about Google at all.

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

#132

Post by yesfitz »

What “places” would Apple be able to match that aren’t either obvious or irrelevant? (e.g. “The Grand Canyon” is obvious. The interior of a home is irrelevant.) Maybe the interior of a restaurant?

I hate to jump to conspiracy theories, but the mechanism seems like a more effective version of their prior CSAM scanning scheme[1]. Best part? It doesn’t even require iCloud usage.

1: https://www.macworld.com/article/1428633/csam-photo-scanning...

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

#133

Post by jhatemyjob »

scosman wrote: post #122
Gabriel54 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even here with HN crowd: it's not an index, it's not stored on a server, and it's not typical send-securely encryption (not PK or symmetric "encrypted in transit", but homomorphic "encrypted processing"). Users will think that's all gibberish (ask a user if they want to send an index or vector representation? no clue). Sure, you can ask users "do you want to use this". But why do we ask that? Historically it's user c…

[flagged]

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

#134

Post by jazzyjackson »

threeseed wrote: post #108
jazzyjackson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm just griping that cloudflare has many eyeballs and sees most of the traffic on the internet at this point. How many websites have I used with Cloudflare DDoS protection that checks if I'm a bot by fingerprinting my device? They know plenty about me.

I'm also griping that "the data is encrypted !" is not a good enough excuse seeing as how we've known for years that the metadata is a bigger pot of gold for intelligence agencies. That my mac address is taking a photo and hitting a particular cell tower is pretty detailed information, even without knowing the content of the photo.

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

#136

Post by lapcat »

scosman wrote: post #122
Gabriel54 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even here with HN crowd: it's not an index, it's not stored on a server, and it's not typical send-securely encryption (not PK or symmetric "encrypted in transit", but homomorphic "encrypted processing"). Users will think that's all gibberish (ask a user if they want to send an index or vector representation? no clue). Sure, you can ask users "do you want to use this". But why do we ask that? Historically it's user c…

> I think there were technically flawed statements in the original blog article under discussion.

Such as?

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

#137

Post by dylan604 »

threeseed wrote: post #86
Gabriel54 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Other than their entire reputation

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

#138

Post by simondotau »

ryandrake wrote: post #119
Gabriel54 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. It's the height of arrogance to insist that normal users just can't understand such complex words and math, and therefore the company should not have to obtain consent from the user. As a normal lay user, I don't want anything to leave my device or computer without my consent. Period. That includes personal information, user data, metadata, private vectors, homomorphic this or locally differential that. I do…

The average smartphone is probably doing a hundred things you didn’t knowingly consent to every second.

Should Apple insist that every end user consents to the user agent string sent on every HTTP request?

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

#139

Post by nrki »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #14

I'm moving my family out of apple photos, self hosted options have come a long way. I landed on immich [0] and a caddy plugin that allows for PKI certificate for account access while still allowing public shared URLs [1]* There's also LibrePhotos which is packed with features but doesn't have as much polish as immich. They do however have a list of python libraries that can be used for offline/local inference for thi…

Immich is amazing, truly great software, and it's oss

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

#140

Post by omolobo »

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…

So what? Why should the application talk over the Internet to begin with? And why isn't that functionality off by default under a settings option that clearly warns the user of the consequences? I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.

And the claims that this is good privacy/security are not at all obvious either. And who are those third-parties anyway? Did you verify each one of them?

Post reply on HN