531–540 of 1001 posts
I don't mind the whole use of ML based features even if it requires elaborate schemes to run some computation in the cloud in some privacy preserving manner. However I do see that Apple marketing campaign tried to fool people into thinking somehow non Apple are not private and only Apple provides privacy.
This obviously requires location services to be enabled. Why does this need ML? Hit a GIS lookup API with the lat/long of the photo.
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So Signal messages aren't secure because they're transmitted and so their "obfuscation" isn't enough to protect your data? Have you read what the author cited (and then admitted to not understanding) what Apple says they actually do to the data before transmission? I could see an argument in the metadata (though there are multiple assumptions involved there, not least that they don't truly do OHTTP but instead conspi…
The obvious difference is that by sending your photos with Signal, you are doing it willingly. You let it encrypt and decrypt willingly. You decide who gets it. Here, Apple does that for you.
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That is not the point at all and you either didn’t try to understand one iota of it or are outright arguing in bad faith. I am not claiming for one moment that enabling this by default is OK. In fact, I have explicitly said it is not. What I am saying is that it is ignorant to call this a cover up, because a cover up requires subterfuge . This feature has a freaking settings toggle and public documentation . Calling…
Got it, so if Windows Defender (that is enabled by default on all Windows PCs) pushes an update that scans all your files on all connected drives and uploads hashes to the mothership, enables this by default and proceeds to execute the scan and upload immediately after update, but also includes a setting that lets you turn it off when you find out about its existence from some 3rd party article, that is all perfectly…
Clearly you have not. If you did, you wouldn’t continue to give an example which is not equivalent.
No, it would not be “perfectly fine”, I just said it wouldn’t. You can do something wrong without it being a cover up.
What metadata about the image do they get?
Are images from the web or social media or device screenshots accessible too?
Seems at the very least they are getting a database of things, objects and shapes. Can cohorts of users be identified? Useful for ad targeting?
They should be able to determine how many devices have a photo of a particular person. Or have a photo of a piece of art. Useful for capturing wanted people and stolen goods! They should see how many times users take a photo of another phone. When and how many users take a photo of a protest. Which side has which colour. Do people take selfies of themselves when sick with a novel pandemic.
Do people take more photos of dogs at Christmas than cats.
Anything that can be vectorized can be identified. But what data do they get and what could they do with it?
It's like telemetry and database of images.
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…
> Trust in software will continue to erode > there is an increasing discontent growing towards opt-out telemetry Really? That's news to me. What I observed is people giving up more and more privacy every year (or "delegating" their privacy to tech giants).
Are people giving up their privacy? Looks to me it’s being taken without consent, via enormous legalese and techniques of exhaustion.
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> Trust in software will continue to erode > there is an increasing discontent growing towards opt-out telemetry Really? That's news to me. What I observed is people giving up more and more privacy every year (or "delegating" their privacy to tech giants).
Absolutely! The important bit is that users have no choice in the matter. They're pushed into agreeing to whatever ToS and updating to whatever software version. 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 runni…
If people don’t have a choice, then they’re not giving up privacy, like the person you’re agreeing with said, it’s being taken away.
I switched to https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface and import all of my photo into it. 1.3TB and it's damn fast with all the face detection and ml features.
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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.
I don’t. I highly suggest everyone else does their darnedest not too either. Don’t do it in your own software. Refuse and push back against it at $dayJob. I realize that my small contribution as a privacy and data-respecting SWE is extremely small, but if we all push back against the MBAs telling us to do these things, the world will be better off.
It’s the prisoner’s dilemma, but one vs many instead of one vs one. So long as someone defects, everyone either defects or goes out of business.
It’s the same as with unethical supply chains. A business using slave labour in their supply chain will out-compete all businesses that don’t. So well-meaning business owners can’t really switch to better supply chains as it is the same as just dissolving their business there and then.
Only universal regulation can fix this. If everyone is forced not to defect, we can win the prisoners dilemma. But so long as even 10% of big tech defects and creates this extremely lucrative business of personal data trade that kills every company not participating, we will continue to participate more and more.
Read Meditations on Moloch for more examples.
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…
You're extensively describing the technical implementation while missing the fundamental issue: Why is Apple enabling this feature by default for what is, essentially, a luxury photo search feature? Let's break this down: 1. Nobody is questioning whether Apple's technical implementation is sophisticated or secure. It clearly is. 2. Nobody is suggesting the privacy toggles don't work. They do. 3. The issue is about Ap…