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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

#381

Post by Thorrez »

isodev wrote: post #371
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the data is encrypted, does the concern still apply? You bring up the example of Onedrive, but there is no use of e2e encryption or HE techniques there.

> does the concern still apply? Yes it does and the blogpost specifically explains why. In short, both iOS and macOS are full of bugs, often with the potential of exposing sensitive information. Also, it’s on by default - nobody in their sane mind would have bits of their photos uploaded somewhere, regardless of “we promise we won’t look”. Finally, Photos in iOS 18 is such a bad experience that it seems the breach of…

>regardless of “we promise we won’t look”.

AIUI, even if Apple's servers tried to look, they cannot, because of the encryption.

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

#382

Post by WuxiFingerHold »

hmage wrote: post #374

Reading comments here feels like being on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan combined - a lot of people not listening to each other. What happened to old HN?

I've noticed that too. I think it depends on the topic. Many are biased when it comes to Apple (me too). Some even defend their misbehaving. My emotional reaction to Apple misbehaving is usually anger because I somehow feel disappointed, even betrayed by Apple. "Apple, how can you build such gorgeous hardware and still act so unethical?". This is of course irrational: Apple is a company that does everything to grow.

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

#383

Post by Thorrez »

amatecha wrote: post #334
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...

Yup, this is their way of injecting the "phone home" element via an innocuous rationale, "location matching". The global index will of course also match against other markers they deem worthy of matching, even if they don't return that to the user.

But wouldn't the homomorphic encryption prevent Apple's servers from knowing if there was a match or not?

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

#384

Post by MBCook »

joe_the_user wrote: post #365
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…

Just from memory when the scheme came up in earlier discussion. The system is essentially scanning for the signature for some known set of images of abuse so that it aims to capture abusers who would naively keep just these images on their machines. (It can't determine if a new image is abusive, notably). It's conceivable some number of (foolish and abusive) people will be caught this way and those favoring a long dr…

That was the CSAM thing that they have announced they gave up on.

This is totally different.

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

#385

Post by Nullabillity »

scosman wrote: post #44
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 think I'm saying: you're not sending "your data" off device. You are sending a homomorphically encrypted locally differentially private vector (through an anonymous proxy). No consumer can really understand what that means, what the risks are, and how it would compare to the risk of sending someone like Facebook/Google raw data. I'm asking: what does an opt in for that really look like? You're not going to be able…

If you can't meaningfully explain what you're doing then you can't obtain informed consent. If you can't obtain informed consent then that's not a sign to go ahead anyway, it's a sign that you shouldn't do it.

This isn't rocket surgery.

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

#386

Post by Nullabillity »

simondotau wrote: post #330
int_19h wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might not be legally entitled to it, but that's just because of our shitty "intellectual property" laws. Morally speaking, OP is absolutely entitled to have a device that they own not spying on them.

Regardless of one's opinion of intellectual property laws, nobody is morally entitled to demand that someone else build the exact oroduct they want. In fact it is immoral to demand that of other people — and you certainly wouldn’t like it if other people could demand that of you. Want a phone that doesn’t spy on you? Make it yourself. If you can’t, find some like-minded people and incentivise them (with money or othe…

This is just "might makes right" bullshit with slightly prettier framing.

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

#387

Post by hu3 »

accrual wrote: post #277
hu3 wrote: post #6

So it sends your photos to be indexed on Apple servers. Turned on by default. This is probably done to compete with Google Photos which has a great photo search by word feature. With that said, Apple can use whatever privacy measures to protect user data. But at the end of the day, a subpoena can easily force them to hand over data. The best privacy measure is to just not have the data. I guess indexing photos offlin…

> I guess indexing photos offline in phone is not very feasible yet. There has been a form of on device indexing since at least iOS 12. My understanding is it performs a basic indexing typically overnight when the phone is charging and allows one to perform searches like "dog" or "car" and pull up matching images. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/search-in-photos-iph3...

That's nice but clearly not enough to compete with Google Photos.

Hence why Apple started sending photo hashes to their servers for indexing by default.

There's only so much offline computing power.

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

#388

Post by hu3 »

tredre3 wrote: post #131
hu3 wrote: post #6

So it sends your photos to be indexed on Apple servers. Turned on by default. This is probably done to compete with Google Photos which has a great photo search by word feature. With that said, Apple can use whatever privacy measures to protect user data. But at the end of the day, a subpoena can easily force them to hand over data. The best privacy measure is to just not have the data. I guess indexing photos offlin…

> This is probably done to compete with Google Photos which has a great photo search by word feature. Apple Photos is already capable of searching your photos by word/content fully offline on-device. Google Photos is unable to search your photos by word/content fully offline on-device. Hell, it can't even search by file name if you don't sync your photos to the cloud! I don't think Apple has to worry about Google at…

Neither is Apple, FTA.

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

#389

Post by beeflet »

parasubvert wrote: post #160
echelon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your threat model can tolerate an "oopsie woopsie". Politically exposed persons probably cannot.

If you don't personally write the software stack on your devices, at some point you have to trust a third party.

The developer-to-user trust required in the context of open-source software is substantially less than in proprietary software. this much is evident.

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

#390

Post by hu3 »

0points wrote: post #190
mentalgear wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it literally says it uses global search index on the label below the check mark. It seems more than likely that (now or at least in the long run) they will use user data to enhance this index.

It's funny how one can use "literally" while almost demonstrating illiteracy. It's right there in the help text: > Allow this device to privately match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple so you can search by almost any landmark or point of interest. They are saying that they match your photo against their global index. They are not saying that they will add your photo to their global index.

> They are not saying that they will add your photo to their global index.

Nobody said that except you.

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