141–150 of 1001 posts
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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.
Then don't enable this feature?
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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
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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?
You've succinctly identified a (maybe the) huge problem in the computing world today. Computers should not do anything without the user's command/consent. This seems like a hopeless and unachievable ideal only because of how far we've already strayed from the light.
Even Linux, supposedly the last bastion of user control... it's a mess. Do a fresh install and type ps ax at a shell. You'll see dozens of processes in the background doing god knows what. I didn't consent to any of this! The distribution's maintainer simply decided on my behalf that I want the computer to be running all these processes. This is totally normalized!
I don't expect my computer to ask for consent again and again for every byte sent over the network, but I do expect it to obtain my consent before generally accessing the network and sending bytes over the network.
"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…
Well I want them to fuck off.
Hidden in your commentary here is the fact that the vector representation of the image is _the contents of the image_. It very well may be that they cannot reverse the exact image. But it’s still a representation of the image that has to be good for something. Without being too familiar I would be willing to hazard a guess that this could include textual labels and classifications of what is in the image.
I don’t give a shit how good your internal controls are. I don’t have anything particularly interesting to hide. I still do not want you taking my pictures.
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
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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 "…
Then don’t run someone else’s software on your device. It’s not your software, you are merely a licensee. Don’t delude yourself that you are morally entitled to absolute control over it.
The only way to have absolute control over software is with an RMS style obsession with Free software.
To me it seems like a reasonable feature that was, for the most part, implemented with great consideration for user privacy, though maybe I’m too trusting of the description. I mostly think this article is rage-bait and one should be wary of ‘falling for it’ when it shows up on hacker news in much the same way that one should be wary when rage-bait articles show up in tabloids or on Facebook. It seems likely to me th…
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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.
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.
a) MD5 is reversible, it just cost GPU time to brute force
b) It is unproven that their implementation is irreversible
"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…
Furthermore, Apples privacy stance is generally a sham as their definition of “human rights” doesn’t extend to China. Which either means Apple doesn’t respect human rights, or they don’t view Chinese people as human.