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

171–180 of 1001 posts

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

#171

Post by ketralnis »

bobsomers wrote: post #166
throwaway81523 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what a good privacy story looks like. A good privacy story actually looks like not sending any info to anyone else anywhere at any time.

Sure, but if we follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, we must move to a cabin in the woods, 100 miles from the nearest civilization, growing our own food and never connecting our computing devices to anything resembling a network.

No? You can have a photos app that doesn't phone home while not having to move to a cabin in the woods. See: every photos app that doesn't phone home, and I currently don't live in a cabin in the woods.

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

#172

Post by icehawk »

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

Nobody responding seriously to this because you seem to have missed the part where GP said "with noise added to make it irreversible" and the third sentence in that wikipedia article.

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

#173

Post by eptcyka »

bobsomers wrote: post #166
throwaway81523 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what a good privacy story looks like. A good privacy story actually looks like not sending any info to anyone else anywhere at any time.

Sure, but if we follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, we must move to a cabin in the woods, 100 miles from the nearest civilization, growing our own food and never connecting our computing devices to anything resembling a network.

It is a spectrum, and I'd love to be able to draw my own line. I have my own photo storage solution. I do not need Apple's.

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

#174

Post by codys »

bobsomers wrote: post #166
throwaway81523 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what a good privacy story looks like. A good privacy story actually looks like not sending any info to anyone else anywhere at any time.

Sure, but if we follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, we must move to a cabin in the woods, 100 miles from the nearest civilization, growing our own food and never connecting our computing devices to anything resembling a network.

It's not charitable to construct a contrived situation no one is talking about and place that into the mouth of a commenter.

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

#175

Post by amiga386 »

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…

> This is what a good privacy story looks like.

A good privacy story starts with "Do you consent" and not transmitting a byte if you answer "no"

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

#177

Post by Koshkin »

simondotau wrote: post #147
sensanaty wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

> I don't want anything sent from MY device without my consent 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.

The “moral entitlement” has nothing to do with this. The software is legally required to abide by its license agreement (which, by the way, you are supposed to have read, understood, and accepted prior to using said software).

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

#178

Post by fmajid »

threeseed wrote: post #90
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.

Traffic analysis by the government totally happens: https://lifehacker.com/how-cia-director-david-petraeuss-emai...

Now they probably don't care about you personally, but you'd be surprised how many people are connected indirectly to a person of interest. Google "Maher Arar" for the horrific consequences of false positives.

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

#179

Post by urronglol »

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…

[dead]

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

#180

Post by st3fan »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #161
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…

> This is what a good privacy story looks like. A good privacy story actually looks like not sending any info to anyone else anywhere at any time.

Your answer shows how we all have a very different idea of what our own desired privacy level is. Or what privacy even means.
Post reply on HN