Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

Yes! For so many reasons!

If an adversary is able to intercept encrypted communications, they can store it in hopes of decrypting it in the future in the event that a feasible attack against the cryptosystem emerges. I don't know how likely this is to happen against homomorphic encryption schemes, but the answer is not zero.

I'm not suggesting everyone should spend time worrying about cryptosystems being cracked all day long, and I'm not saying Apple's encryption scheme here will prove insecure. Even if this particular scheme is cracked, it's very possible it won't reveal much of great interest anyways, and again, that is simply not the point.

The point is that the correct way to guarantee that your data is private is to simply never transmit it or any metadata related to it over a network in any form. This definitely limits what you can do, but it's a completely achievable goal: before smartphones, and on early smartphones, this was the default behavior of taking pictures with any digital camera, and it's pretty upsetting that it's becoming incredibly hard to the point of being nearly impractical to get modern devices to behave this way and not just fling data around all over the place willy-nilly.

And I know people would like Apple to get credit for at least attempting to make their features plausibly-private, but I feel like it's just the wrong thing right now. What we need today is software that gives agency back to the user, and the first part of that is not sending data off to the network without some form of user intent, without dark patterns to coerce said intent. At best, I can say that I hope Apple's approach to cloud services becomes the new baseline for cloud services, but in my opinion, it's not the future of privacy. The future of privacy is turning the fucking radio off. Why the fuck should we all buy mobile devices with $1000 worth of cutting edge hardware just to offload all of the hard compute problems to a cloud server?

I'd also like to ask a different question: if there's no reason to ever worry about this feature, then why is there even an option to turn it off in the first place?

I worry that what Apple is really doing with pushing out all these fancy features, including their maligned CSAM scanning initiative, is trying to get ahead of regulations and position themselves as the baseline standard. In that future, there's a possibility that options to turn off features like these will disappear.

I know someone whose MS account was permabanned because they had photos of their own kid in the bathtub. I mean, I guess the person could have been lying, but I doubt they would even have been talking about it if the truth was less innocuous.

The problem invoked by the article is that data is being sent back to Apple by default. Saying "it's fine because it's encrypted" and "don't use apple if you're not fine with that" doesn't help.

The post complains about a product that stored sensitive customer content locally now sends that data to Apple, and given the combination of abuse on privacy and horrendous, generalized security failures that we've seen across the industry, those concerns seem genuine. Your comment is very dismissive of these concerns, which would explain why it's being down voted.

The backlash against Microsoft's Windows Recall should serve as a good indicator of just how deeply people have grown to distrust tech companies. But Microsoft can keep turning the screws, and don't you know it, a couple years from now everyone will be running Windows 11 anyways.

It's the same for Android. If you really want your Android phone to be truly private, you can root it and flash a custom ROM with microG and an application firewall. Sounds good! And now you've lost access to banking apps, NFC payments, games, and a myriad of other things, because your device no longer passes SafetyNet checks. You can play a cat-and-mouse game with breaking said checks, but the clock is ticking, as remote attestation will remove what remains of your agency as soon as possible. And all of that for a notably worse experience with less features and more problems.

(Sidenote: I think banking apps requiring SafetyNet passing is the dumbest thing on planet earth. You guys know I can just sign into the website with my mobile browser anyways, right? You aren't winning anything here.)

But most users are never going to do that. Most users will boot into their stock ROM, where data is siphoned by default and you have to agree to more data siphoning to use basic features. Every year, users will continue to give up every last bit of agency and privacy so as long as tech companies are allowed to continue to take it.

Or only that they don’t know which landmark it matched?