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

311–320 of 1001 posts

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

#311

Post by hahahacorn »

lapcat wrote: post #297
hahahacorn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why in the world am I supposed to be an expert on homomorphic encryption? How many people in the world are experts on homomorphic encryption? No one, at any point, implied you had to be an expert on homomorphic encryption. But if you're going to evaluate the security risk of a feature, and then end up on the front page of HN for said security risk, I think it's fair to criticize your lack of objectivity (or attempt…

> if you're going to evaluate the security risk of a feature I wouldn't characterize that as the point of my blog post. It's primarily about user consent, or lack thereof. > and then end up on the front page of HN for said security risk I have no control over that. I didn't even submit the article to HN. > Apple's list of Security releases is long and storied. By comparison, the Solana Saga Web3 phone's list of secur…

I don't think you're trying to understand what I'm saying, e.g. > 3. Ignore relevant information from said article I didn't ignore the relevant information from said article. I read the article, but some of the technical details are beyond my current knowledge. > make an uninformed decision What uninformed decision are you talking about?

I don't think I need to specify that by uninformed decision I mean evaluating the security risk of the feature. I think I criticized too harshly, and you're (understandably) not engaging with me fairly in retaliation. If you actually want to engage with me and discuss this further, feel free to shoot me an email (in my about section). Otherwise, obligatory https://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html.

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

#312

Post by z3phyr »

nicce wrote: post #203
nimih wrote: 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.

It is probably reasonable for average end-user to expect that landmark based search works without enabling the extra setting. They have option to disble if they care.

The initiative is for the user to command their computer to communicate or not with the information of their choosing.

"Computer, I command thee to send this and only this information over the channel of my choosing, using following encryption scheme, for here be my seal of approval for anyone who might want to verify, and here be the key"

"Sicut Vult"

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

#314

Post by ls612 »

goodluckchuck wrote: post #299
paxys wrote: 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'…

How cannot tell the picture contains the Eiffel Tower if the image is not decrypted?

Because it turns out that mathematicians and computer scientists have devised schemes that allow for certain computational operations to be performed on encrypted data without revealing the data itself. You can do a+b=c and it doesn’t reveal anything about what a and b are is the intuition here. This has been mostly confined to the realm of theory and mathematics until very recently but Apple has operationalized it for the first time.

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

#315

Post by lapcat »

dan-robertson wrote: post #289
amatecha wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

The article was published by an Apple developer and user, i.e., myself, on my personal blog, which is followed mainly by other Apple developers and users. My blog comprises my own personal observations, insights, and opinions. If you see any rage, it would be my own personal rage, and not "bait". Bait for what?

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

#316

Post by parasubvert »

ab_testing wrote: post #195
bobsomers wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or just use Linux where no component phones home.

Plenty of Linux distributions phone home, in some way, by default.

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

#317

Post by lapcat »

hahahacorn wrote: post #311
lapcat wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're going to evaluate the security risk of a feature I wouldn't characterize that as the point of my blog post. It's primarily about user consent, or lack thereof. > and then end up on the front page of HN for said security risk I have no control over that. I didn't even submit the article to HN. > Apple's list of Security releases is long and storied. By comparison, the Solana Saga Web3 phone's list of secur…

I don't think you're trying to understand what I'm saying, e.g. > 3. Ignore relevant information from said article I didn't ignore the relevant information from said article. I read the article, but some of the technical details are beyond my current knowledge. > make an uninformed decision What uninformed decision are you talking about? I don't think I need to specify that by uninformed decision I mean evaluating th…

> I don't think you're trying to understand what I'm saying

I'm trying, but obviously I'm failing.

> I don't think I need to specify that by uninformed decision I mean evaluating the security risk of the feature.

For the third time, that wasn't what I was trying to do with the blog post.

> you're (understandably) not engaging with me fairly in retaliation

I don't think you're understanding me either. I'm not retaliating. I was trying to clarify.

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

#318

Post by kjreact »

Let’s step back and go through the thought process of the team that’s implementing this feature. If they leave the feature disabled by default most likely casual users will never use it because they won’t be able to find the setting buried under all the menus. Thus after adding all their privacy layers the team felt that it should be safe enough to enable by default while remaining true to the company’s ethos of privacy.

Now what would you have done differently if you were in charge of rolling out such a feature? While I don’t like Apple phoning home without my consent, in this case my photos are not being sent to Apple; only anonymized hashes used to match well known landmarks.

The author of the article goes on to show his bias against Apple with phrases like “You don't even have to hypothesize lies, conspiracies, or malicious intentions on the part of Apple to be suspicious of their privacy claims” or “Apple's QA nowadays is atrocious.”

Or this rich quote “I never wanted my iPhone to phone home to Apple.” What smartphone or computing device never communicates back to their company servers? Even when I use open source libraries I have to communicate with repositories to check for dependencies. Does the author hide every online transaction he makes? Never using email or text messages or cloud services which will leak his private information? Unlikely. He just wants to grind his axe against Apple.

So let’s step back and look at it reasonably and see if Apple is trying to erode our privacy with this feature. I personally don’t see this particular feature as being harmful, but I will thank the overzealous author of bringing it to my attention and I’ll be disabling the feature since I don’t need it. This feature is no where near as invasive as the CSAM detection tool that was proposed, which did warrant critical discussion.

Let’s let the team, undoubtedly one of many with the unenviable task of making Apple Intelligence relevant, who rolled out the feature get their yearly bonus and move on to discuss more enlightening topics such as as the merits of keeping tabs on the urination habits of the crew on the ISS via the Mac menubar.

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

#319

Post by lapcat »

kemayo wrote: post #308
lapcat wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stor…

> It's probably a pretty large set of people, perhaps even the majority

As the article notes, this new feature is so "popular" that neither Apple nor the Apple media have bothered to mention it. AFAICT it's not even in Apple's document listing all the new features of iOS 18: https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-18/pdf/iOS_18_All_New_Features...

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

#320

Post by amatecha »

Schiendelman wrote: post #303
dan-robertson wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think about it this way: for people who turn off any & everything that phones home (aka anyone who is frustrated by this new "feature"), the chances of them having turned on something like that upon install is almost nil.
Post reply on HN