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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

#301

Post by walterbell »

makeitdouble wrote: post #285
matthewdgreen wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did a variation of A already happen in 2022, with "client-side scanning of photos"?

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

#302

Post by lapcat »

kemayo wrote: post #284
lapcat wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

What's the Venn diagram of people who both (1) deliberately refrain from enabling iCloud Photos but nonetheless (2) want the Photos app to phone home to Apple in order to identify landmarks in locally stored photos?

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

#303

Post by Schiendelman »

dan-robertson wrote: post #291
Schiendelman wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The OP is evidence. My phone had it turned on which I think is evidence. Together this feels like reasonably strong evidence but maybe something even stronger is easy to find. Vaguely related: https://markxu.com/strong-evidence

I think both of you had it turned on from past OS installs - it's bundled under other search metadata, the config isn't new to 18. And "it's on and I don't remember agreeing" is absolutely not evidence. This is super common - nobody remembers what they enabled a year ago.

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

#304

Post by userbinator »

nntwozz wrote: post #200
blindriver wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds exactly like that CSAM "feature" they wanted to add but created a huge outrage because of how incredibly invasive it was. It sounds like it only needs a few extra lines of code to get exactly what they wanted before, they just packaged it differently and we all fell for it like frogs getting boiled in water.

A frog that is gradually heated will actually jump out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Let's hope that part of the analogy also applies.

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

#305

Post by naruhodo »

ok_dad wrote: post #221
naruhodo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to evaluate the privacy of these technologies. Someone reply with a link to the source code so I can see exactly what it is doing, without having to take an internet rando's word for it. Better yet, let me compile it myself.

You had better build your own silicon chips and phone hardware as well in that case.

So my options are unreservedly trust Apple or etch my own transistors? Who pays your salary, Rando?

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

#307

Post by userbinator »

grishka wrote: post #295

> It ought to be up to the individual user to decide their own tolerance for the risk of privacy violations. It's a recurring theme in the modern IT industry that the user can somehow never trusted to take their own responsibility for anything. Like, can I please not have the "added security" on my Android phone where it would sometimes ask me for the pattern instead of the fingerprint? I know my own risks, thank you…

It's the rise of authoritarianism, and its appearance in IT mirrors what's happening in the rest of society too.

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

#308

Post by kemayo »

lapcat wrote: post #302
kemayo wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

What's the Venn diagram of people who both (1) deliberately refrain from enabling iCloud Photos but nonetheless (2) want the Photos app to phone home to Apple in order to identify landmarks in locally stored photos?

It's probably a pretty large set of people, perhaps even the majority, since I'd suspect that most people don't pay for additional iCloud storage and can't fit their photo library into 5GB.

In fact, I'm willing to bet that if they'd added this feature and gated it behind iCloud Photos being enabled, we'd have different articles complaining about Apple making a cash grab by trying to get people to pay for premium storage. :P

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

#309

Post by makeitdouble »

walterbell wrote: post #301
makeitdouble wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did a variation of A already happen in 2022, with "client-side scanning of photos"?

Yes. That also was a thoroughly botched version of A, but I think even a good version of A won't see them ship anything within this century.

IMO giving up on having it widely used and just ship it turned off would be the best choice. But it's so obvious, there must be other ceitical reasons (good or bad) that's not an option.

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

#310

Post by kittikitti »

Here's a direct link to the paper that describes this as mentioned in the post,

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...

The homomorphic code is available in Swift

https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-homomorphic-encr...

I have concerns about how women would be affected by law enforcement who might use the location data to target abortions.

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