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Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

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241–250 of 1001 posts

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

#241
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. That’s starting to veer into unreasonable levels of conspiracy theory. There’s nothing to “cover up”, the feature has an off switch right in the Settings and a public document explaining how it works. It should not be on by default but that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith. Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.

> the feature has an off switch right in the Settings and a public document explaining how it works

Irrelevant.

This is Apple's proprietary software, running on Apple's computers, devices which use cryptography to prevent you from inspecting it or running software they don't control. Very few people have any idea how it actually works or what it actually does.

That there's some "public document" describing it is not evidence of anything.

> that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith

The mere existence of this setting is evidence of bad faith. The client side scanning nonsense proved controversial despite their use of children as political weapons. That they went ahead and did this despite the controversy removes any possible innocence. It tells you straight up that they cannot be trusted.

> Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.

We'll draw our own conclusions.

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

#242
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…

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

#243
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read the post you're responding to like 3 times, and after pondering it deeply, I'm pretty sure the conclusion of their line of thinking pretty definitively stops at "Apple should not be sending data off the device without the user requesting it." If you think otherwise, you should maybe provide more of an argument.

Because the conclusion is not workable. Almost every single app today interacts with the network in some way. You would be constantly annoying the user with prompt after prompt if you wanted to get consent for sending any relatively harmless data off the device.

It's telling that Android, for example, has all sorts of granular permissions you can set for an app, but "Network Access" is not one of them.

My Calculator app does not need to call home.

A good portion of the apps I use fall into this category, and a straightforward mechanism to opt them out of access would be welcome.

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

#244
post #183

So basically - You take a picture. Apple encrypts it and uploads it to their server. The server matches the (still encrypted) picture to a database and tells your device "this picture contains the Eiffel Tower". Later when you search for Eiffel Tower on your device the photo pops up. Is the complexity and security risk really worth it for such a niche feature? It's also funny that Apple is simultaneously saying "don'…

Not really. It's more like apple runs a local algorithm that takes your picture of the Eiffel tower, and outputs some text "Eiffel tower, person smiling", and then encrypts that text and sends it securely to apples servers to help you when you perform a search.

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

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what a good privacy story looks like. What a good privacy story looks like is that my photos aren’t sent anywhere in any way shape or form without explicit opt in permission.

Do you not sync to iCloud?

That sounds like "with opt in permission".

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

#246
post #176

I am on the latest iOS, just discovered this setting, it wasn’t turned on by default.

Maybe the new setting checks a certain combination of other settings first, like:

    if (setting_1 && setting_2 && !setting_3)
    {
        new_setting = true
    }
Mine was also enabled by default.

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what a good privacy story looks like. What a good privacy story looks like is that my photos aren’t sent anywhere in any way shape or form without explicit opt in permission.

Do you not sync to iCloud?

You can enable Advanced Data Protection and all your iCloud data will be stored as encrypted blobs.

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

#248
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.

I have an idea: send an encrypted, relayed, non-reversible, noised vector representation of your daily phone habits and interactions. That way you can be bucketed, completely anonymously of course, with other user cohorts for tracking, advertising, and other yet-to-be discovered purposes.

It's a great privacy story! Why would you have a problem with that?

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really fair; Apple's in a sticky wicket when it comes to the Chinese government, and they're not the only ones. The Chinese government are debatably inhuman. They've literally censored the word "censorship." (Then they censored what people used euphemistically for censorship--"harmonious.") It's funny from the outside but also a miserable state of affairs in 2024.

It’s very fair, Apple has historically been very happy to be the sponsor of horrible human rights violations in their supply chain, only marginally paying attention to suicides in their factories when the PR got too bad. Apples version of “human right” includes suicide nets as an alternative to treating people humanely. That’s why their stance is pure marketing - they have blood on their hands. And guess what? You ca…

Oh come on, it’s not like Google is better. 1. Google isn’t available in China not because of some moral reason, and they were in fact available in the past and Google has attempted to go back to China as a search engine, etc. before. They aren’t available because China hacked into their systems and took code and got access to certain accounts, and at the time Google essentially decided it wasn’t worth offering services there. There’s no reason Google wouldn’t start working in China again on a moral level. 2. Google works directly with the US Department of Defense, so as much as Apple has blood on their hands, so does Google.

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

#250
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every TCP session leaks some PRNG state for the ISN. That might leak information about key material. Every NTP session leaks time desync information, which reveals—on modern hardware—relativistic travel, including long airplane trips. Every software update leaks a fortune about what you run and when you connect. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask that people consent to these; I don’t think they can. I absolutely ag…

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