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Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

lapcatsoftware.com

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

#281

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

It’s a nice story but Apple can change the implementation any time they want or are forced to.

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

#282

Post by astrange »

thegrim33 wrote: post #223
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.

Well that's what you're told is happening. As it's all proprietary closed source software that you can't inspect or look at or verify in any manner, you have absolutely zero evidence whether that's what's actually happening or not.

If you can't inspect it that just means you don't know how to use Ghidra/Hopper. ObjC is incredibly easy to decompile and Swift isn't much harder.

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

#283

Post by sneak »

chatmasta wrote: post #247
notyourwork wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not sync to iCloud?

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

ADP sends hashes of the plaintext and filenames to Apple effectively in the clear (non e2ee).

If only you and three other people have a unique file, Apple knows you are a group.

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

#284

Post by kemayo »

lapcat wrote: post #165
kemayo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree -- asking users about every single minor feature is (a) incredibly annoying, and (b) quickly causes request-blindness in even reasonably security-conscious users. So restraining the nagging for only risky or particularly invasive things makes sense to me. Maybe they should lump its default state into something that already exists? E.g. assume that if you already have location access enabled for P…

> Maybe they should lump its default state into something that already exists? It could be tied to iCloud Photos, perhaps, because then you already know that your photos are getting uploaded to Apple.

Insofar as the photos aren't getting uploaded to Apple for this, that seems a bit extreme.

(We could argue about it, but personally I think some kind of hash doesn't qualify.)

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

#285

Post by makeitdouble »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #271
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.

I’m a cryptographer and I just learned about this feature today while I’m on a holiday vacation with my family. I would have loved the chance to read about the architecture, think hard about how much leakage there is in this scheme, but I only learned about it in time to see that it had already been activated on my device. Coincidentally on a vacation where I’ve just taken about 400 photos of recognizable locations.…

To play Apple's advocate, this system will probably never be perfect, and stand up to full scrutinity from everyone on the planet. And they also need the most people possible activated as it's an adverserial feature.

The choice probably looks to them like:

  A - play the game, give everyone a heads up, respond to all feedback, and never ship the feature

 B - YOLO it, weather the storm, have people forget about it after the holiday, and go on with their life.
Wether B works is up to debate, but that was probably their only chance to have it ship from their POV.

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

#286

Post by kemayo »

sumedh wrote: post #232
kemayo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree -- asking users about every single minor feature is (a) incredibly annoying, and (b) quickly causes request-blindness in even reasonably security-conscious users. So restraining the nagging for only risky or particularly invasive things makes sense to me. Maybe they should lump its default state into something that already exists? E.g. assume that if you already have location access enabled for P…

"asking users about every single minor feature is (a) incredibly annoying" Then why lie and mislead customers that your data stays local?

I don't think that's a fair characterization of what they're doing.

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

#287

Post by griomnib »

yladiz wrote: post #249
griomnib wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 servi…

A) Google refused to censor in the mainland and that’s why they got blocked, B) Google employees had a walkout when they tried to go back to China. C) I’ve never seen an Apple employee protest anything.

Now, that happened under a different type of Google (I’m sure they’ll go back now that they torched the culture), but Apple employees who walk around SV like they are better than everybody else - which people on their privacy teams very much do - are pathetically deluded.

All the megacorps are evil, and while Apple likes to put on a holier-than-thou act, it’s just as much bullshit for them to claim they value human rights as it is for Google to say they value privacy.

They value money, that’s it.

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

#288

Post by fragmede »

do_not_redeem wrote: post #37
jazzyjackson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This must be the first consumer or commercial product implementing homomorphic encryption is it not? I would be surprised if doing noisy vector comparisons is actually the most effective way to tell if someone is in front of the Eiffel tower. A small large language model could caption it just as well on device, my spider sense tells me someone saw an opportunity to apply bleeding edge, very cool tech so that they can…

> This must be the first consumer or commercial product implementing homomorphic encryption is it not? Not really, it's been around for a bit now. From 2021: > The other major reason we’re talking about HE and FL now is who is using them. According to a recent repository of PETs, there are 19 publicly announced pilots, products, and proofs of concept for homomorphic encryption and federated analytics (another term fo…

But what are the products from them that implement HE and that consumers are using? Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and Google have all released libraries for HE, and there's Duality SecurePlu, but as far as actual consumer products, Apple's caller ID phone number lookup and other features in iOS 18 is very possibly the first.

As far as why it's not more of a buzzword, it's far too in the weeds and ultimately consumers either trust you or they don't. And even if they don't trust you, many of them are still going to use Apple/Google/Facebook system anyway.

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

#289

Post by dan-robertson »

amatecha wrote: post #126
dan-robertson wrote: post #25

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…

Literally all Apple needed to do was not have it enabled by default. Sending stuff over the network without asking is why trust in Apple is reduced further and further.

Not enabling something by default is pretty close to not having it at all. Accessibility is a reasonable exception where it makes sense to have the features even though they are off by default.

I mostly think the reaction to this article is overblown because it appeals popular ideas here about big tech. I think one should be wary of Apple’s claims about privacy: the reason is competition with Google and so they want users to be distrustful of the kinds of features that Google are better at implementing (I don’t want to say Apple isn’t trying to do the right thing either – if you look at accessibility, the competition was very bad for a lot of things for a long time and Apple was good despite the lack of commercial pressure). But I think one should also be wary of articles that make you angry and tell you what you suspected all along. (eg see the commenter elsewhere who doesn’t care about the details and is just angry). It’s much easier to spot this kind of rage-bait piece when it is targeting ‘normal people’ rather than the in-group.

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

#290

Post by do_not_redeem »

Schiendelman wrote: post #272
do_not_redeem wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

That's what rallying against Apple in the name of privacy is already...

Are you saying we shouldn't hold Apple accountable for privacy encroachments then?
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