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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

#351

Post by SteveNuts »

dmix wrote: post #268
amatecha wrote: post #123

Completely, 100% agreed: > the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device. > It ought to be up to the individual user to decide their own tolerance for the risk of privacy violations. [...] By enabling the "feature" without asking, Apple disrespects users and their preferences. I never wanted my iPhone to phone home to Apple. Regardless of how obfuscated or "secure" or otherwise "priva…

How much size would it take to store a model of every known location in the world and common things? For ex: I sent a friend a photo of my puppy in the bathtub and her Airpods (via iphone) announced "(name) sent you a photo of a dog in a bathtub". She thought it was really cool and so do I personally. That's a useful feature. IDK how much that requires going off-device though.

> That's a useful feature.

I’m really curious how this feature is considered useful. It’s cool, but can’t you just open the photo to view it?

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

#352

Post by kemayo »

abctx wrote: post #348
kemayo wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, since I'd suspect that most people don't pay for additional iCloud storage and can't fit their photo library into 5GB. Large set? Yes. Majority? No. CIRP says 2/3 of US Apple users pay for iCloud storage[0]. It's this popular for the exact reason you mentioned. Almost no one can fit their photo library into 5GB so they opt in to the cheap 50GB f…

Huh, I'm honestly kind of surprised. Good to learn something!

Well, I'll take back what I said about the majority. I do still think that the remaining 1/3 of users who don't have enough storage to turn on iCloud Photos qualify as what lapcat was asking for, though.

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

#353

Post by stevenAthompson »

emchammer wrote: post #153
Msurrow wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it does address the main problem. What he is saying is that multiple layers of security is used to ensure (mathematically and theoretically proved) that there is no risk in sending the data, because it is encrypted and sent is such a way that apple or any third party will never be able to read/access it (again, based on theoretically provable math) . If there is no risk there is no harm, and then there is a d…

Hypothetical scenario: Theo de Raadt and Bruce Schneier are hired to bring Apple products up to their security standards. They are given a public blog, and they are not required to sign an NDA. They fix every last vulnerability in the architecture. Vladimir Putin can buy MacBooks for himself and his generals in Moscow, enable Advanced Data Protection, and collaborate on war plans in total confidence. Where are the bo…

Freedom of speech can not exist without private communications. It is an inalieanable right, therefore privacy is as well.

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

#354

Post by supriyo-biswas »

The referenced Apple blog post[1] is pretty clear on what this feature does, and I wish the author at lapcatsoftware (as well as folks here) would have read it too, instead of taking the blog post as-is.

Apple has implemented homomorphic encryption[2], which they can use to compute distance metrics such as cosine similarity without revealing the original query/embedding to the server. In the case of photos, an on-device model is first used to detect if a landmark may be possibly present in the image, and then sends an encrypted embedding[3] for the image region containing said landmark, which is evaluated on the server using HE techniques and then the encrypted results are sent back.

I'm sure someone will come along and say Apple does none of these things; in which case, said commenter should probably not use Apple devices since, there is no reason to trust the toggles for "Enhanced Visual Search", and perhaps more importantly, the one for "Advanced Data Protection" either. However, I rarely see any other major company researching ML and HE together, so that alone is a sufficient positive indicator in my eyes.

(It's interesting that this is also being downvoted. Please go ahead, I can't stop you :P but please also write the parts that you disagree with. Thank you.)

[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

[3] https://mlr.cdn-apple.com/video/HE_Fig_3_PNNS_889f3a279c.m4v

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

#355

Post by EagnaIonat »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #306

Is this just a smokescreen around slowly sneaking CSAM scanning back in after the pushback last time? The "default on" behavior is suspect. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-commun...

That whole incident was so misinformed.

CSAM scanning takes place on the cloud with all the major players. It only has hashes for the worst of the worst stuff out there.

What Apple (and others do) is allow the file to be scanned unencrypted on the server.

What the feature Apple wanted to add was scan the files on the device and flag anything that gets a match.

That file in question would be able to be decrypted on the server and checked by a human. For everything else it was encrypted in a way it cannot be looked at.

If you had icloud disabled it could do nothing.

The intent was to protect data, children and reduce the amount of processing done on the server end to analyse everything.

Everyone lost their mind yet it was clearly laid out in the papers Apple released on it.

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

#356

Post by j45 »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #354

The referenced Apple blog post[1] is pretty clear on what this feature does, and I wish the author at lapcatsoftware (as well as folks here) would have read it too, instead of taking the blog post as-is. Apple has implemented homomorphic encryption[2], which they can use to compute distance metrics such as cosine similarity without revealing the original query/embedding to the server. In the case of photos, an on-dev…

I thought less about the data, as much as the metadata, direct and indirect.

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

#357

Post by j45 »

sneak wrote: post #324
jchw wrote: post #292

What I want is very simple: I want software that doesn't send anything to the Internet without some explicit intent first . All of that work to try to make this feature plausibly private is cool engineering work, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with implementing a feature like this, but it should absolutely be opt-in. Trust in software will continue to erode until software stops treating end users and their data…

Developers of software want, and feel entitled to, the data on your computer, both about your usage within the app, as well as things you do outside of the app (such as where you go and what you buy). Software will continue to spy on people so long as it is not technically prohibited or banned.

Only recently. If anyone's grown up with a world only knowing this, it might be part of why it might not stand out as much.

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

#358

Post by penguinburglar »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #354

The referenced Apple blog post[1] is pretty clear on what this feature does, and I wish the author at lapcatsoftware (as well as folks here) would have read it too, instead of taking the blog post as-is. Apple has implemented homomorphic encryption[2], which they can use to compute distance metrics such as cosine similarity without revealing the original query/embedding to the server. In the case of photos, an on-dev…

Thank you for posting the apple blog post. As usual, it's really interesting research, and it's fascinating to see how they solve potentially gnarly privacy issues.

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

#359

Post by gigel82 »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #354

The referenced Apple blog post[1] is pretty clear on what this feature does, and I wish the author at lapcatsoftware (as well as folks here) would have read it too, instead of taking the blog post as-is. Apple has implemented homomorphic encryption[2], which they can use to compute distance metrics such as cosine similarity without revealing the original query/embedding to the server. In the case of photos, an on-dev…

That's not the point of the outrage though (at least not for me). They enabled by default a feature that analyzes my pictures (which I never upload to iCloud) and sends information about them to their (and others') servers. That is a gross violation of privacy.

To be clear, I don't care about any encryption scheme they may be using, the gist is that they feel entitled to reach into their users' most private data (the photos they explicitly said they don't want to upload to iCloud) and "analyze" them.

This is the same as that time Microsoft enabled OneDrive "by mistake" and started slurping people's private documents and photos saved in default locations (arguably worse since no one takes pictures with their PC's webcams).

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

#360

Post by joe_the_user »

jchw wrote: post #292

What I want is very simple: I want software that doesn't send anything to the Internet without some explicit intent first . All of that work to try to make this feature plausibly private is cool engineering work, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with implementing a feature like this, but it should absolutely be opt-in. Trust in software will continue to erode until software stops treating end users and their data…

and there's absolutely nothing wrong with implementing a feature like this, but it should absolutely be opt-in

This feature is intended to spy on the user. Those kinds of features can't be opt-in. (And yeah, holomorophic "privacy preserving" encryption song-and-dance, I read about that when it came out, etc).

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