This whole thing is reminding me of the outrage over Apple and Google's privacy preserving 'Exposure Notification System' system from the Covid years. It defies intuition that they can alert you to exposure without also tracking you, but indeed that's what the technology lets you do. Similarly here, it feels like the author is leaning into a knee jerk reaction about invasion of privacy without really trying to evalua…
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.
Of course it is not the whole technology stack, but it is something at least. If your evaluation leads to potential problems, you can create issues right there on the github project!
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…
Arrogant Apple always knows best! Which is why I've always said, and I'll continue saying, fuck Apple.
This whole thing is reminding me of the outrage over Apple and Google's privacy preserving 'Exposure Notification System' system from the Covid years. It defies intuition that they can alert you to exposure without also tracking you, but indeed that's what the technology lets you do. Similarly here, it feels like the author is leaning into a knee jerk reaction about invasion of privacy without really trying to evalua…
That COVID feature was opt-in. Author is complaining about a lack of opt in now.
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.
This has absolutely nothing to do with "might makes right". If a fast food store decides to offer a Vietnamese Peanut Burger and Sugar Cane Juice combo, nut allergy suffers are not "morally entitled" to a nut-free option and diabetics are not "morally entitled" to a sugar-free juice option. This applies whether the fast food store is a small family run business, or McDonalds.
To suggest that customers are "morally entitled" to a Samsung phone with zero tracking and zero telemetry is similarly absurd. If you don't like Samsung's product, don't buy it.
"I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog post" I do: - Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash). - Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is q…
> if you want features that require larger-than-disk datasets, or frequently changing content, you need tools like this. Well I want them to fuck off. Hidden in your commentary here is the fact that the vector representation of the image is _the contents of the image_. It very well may be that they cannot reverse the exact image. But it’s still a representation of the image that has to be good for something. Without…
If you read the research you'd know that they don't have access to the vector either. They never decrypt the data. All operations on their server are done directly on the encrypted data. They get 0 information about your photos. They cannot even see which landmark your vector was closest to.
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.
I’m not an expert, but I would say extremely small. For comparison Hunyuan video encodes a shit-ton of videos and rudimentary real world physics understanding, at very high quality in only 13B parameters. LLAMA 3.3 encodes a good chunk of all the knowledge available to humanity in only 70B parameters. And this is only considering open source models, the closed source one may be even more efficient.
Maybe we have different understandings of what extremely small is (including that emphasis) but an LLM is not that by definition (the first L). I'm no expert either but the smaller value mentioned is 13e9. If these things are 8-bit integers, that's 13 GB data (more for a normal integer or a float). That's a significant percentage of long term storage on a phone (especially Apple models) let alone that it would fit in RAM on even most desktops which is afaik required for useful speeds. Taking this as upper bound and saying it must be extremely small to encode only landmarks, idk. I'd be impressed if it's down to a few dozen megabytes, but with potentially hundreds of such mildly useful neural nets, it adds up and isn't so small that you'd include it as a no-brainer either
> I don't want anything sent from MY device without my consent Then don’t run someone else’s software on your device. It’s not your software, you are merely a licensee. Don’t delude yourself that you are morally entitled to absolute control over it. The only way to have absolute control over software is with an RMS style obsession with Free software.
That's absurd. We can regulate these problems. If the EU can regulate away the lightning connector they can regulate away this kind of stuff.
You're seriously arguing that it's absurd for customers to have "absolute control" over all software?
No EU regulation could regulate away all "moral" concerns over software. More specifically, they EU could regulate, but the overwhelming majority of software companies would either strip significant features out for EU customers, or exit the market altogether.
It is a notification summary. There is a large number of people out there who receive hundreds of notifications (willingly but mostly unwillingly) daily from apps they have installed (not just messengers), and nearly all of them can't cope with the flood of the notifications. Most give up on tending to the notifications altogether, but some resort to the notification summaries which alleviate the cognitive overload (…
Hundreds of notifications daily is not unwillingly, nor is it healthy. You can disable IG trash notifications, for example.
The power of defaults is strong.
Most people using the device will never go into the notification settings, if an app on install tells you they need notifications to tell you about your driver arriving…and then sends you marketing notifications on the same channel most people will just accept that.
No, this is not on by default. After system install at first boot it asks if you want to help improve search and it describes how your data will be handled, anonymized, etc. If you clicked on yes it is on. There is a choice to opt out.
I was on by default for me, both after the macOS 14 -> 15 upgrade and after installing macOS 15 cleanly. I wonder if they ask for consent in some regions only.
Yeah this seems to be on by default for me as well, I definitely take issue with that.
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…
> please also write the parts that you disagree with. Thank you 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 an…
Apple also makes a mandatory API call to captive.apple.com from every device with a web view, just about every time they connect to a network.
If someone is willing to take a hardline stance that a vendor should inform the user and require opt-in consent for every type of exchange, they are going to have to run platforms specifically targeted toward that mindset.