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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

#541

Post by Krasnol »

hmottestad wrote: post #532
Krasnol wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your ISP, a bunch of routers and switches and the servers run by Signal can also see your encrypted photo. You don’t really get to decide who sees the encrypted photo. You do get to decide which photo you encrypt and send though.

All of those are parts of the network infrastructure. They neither "see" the photo, edit it or need it. They don't even know if it's a photo.

Everybody knows that there is a network infrastructure where your content flows through. You willingly accept that as a connected device user because it is necessary to be connected.

What Apple did is not necessary and users don't know about it.

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

#542

Post by m463 »

raincole wrote: post #372
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…

> 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).

Come on, being forced to give up privacy is eroding privacy and increasing discontent.

forced can also mean the whole no privacy by default and dark patterns everywhere.

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

#543

Post by [deleted] »

sitkack wrote: post #403

I don't understand why this feature needs to exist at all. Ostensibly, if someone wanted to use this, they also have location data on, the phone not only knows its location but also which direction it is pointed via the magnetometer. I understand it is doing feature matching on the image, but if you were taking a picture of the statue of liberty, the phone would already know that from existing signals.

[deleted]

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

#544

Post by sgammon »

bergie wrote: post #520
sgammon wrote: post #517

Apple: Does backflips to protect your data Apple's competition: Steals your data outright Most of this thread: How could Apple act this way

> Apple: Does backflips to protect your data That's what their marketing says. I'm not sure how far you can actually trust that. They're an ad and media company as well.

I am merely comparing homomorphic encryption, client-side vectorization and ML, and so on, to not doing those things. Nothing to do with marketing. Read the manual

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

#545

Post by mschuster91 »

pmlnr wrote: post #455
gtdawg wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't run various banking apps and can't run PagerDuty on a rooted device due to Google Play API Integrity Check. The ecosystem is closing in on any options to not send telemetry, and Google is leading the way in the restrictions on Freedom.

You can, with magisk.

That's a cat and mouse game, and some banking apps still manage to detect rooting, and so does Netflix and Google Pay.

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

#546

Post by m463 »

chikere232 wrote: post #522

As trivia, on mac os, the photoanalysisd service will run in the background and look through your photos, even if you never open Apple Photos. It can't be disabled unless you disable SIP (system integrity protection) which requires a complicated dance of reboots and warnings. It will reenable if you turn SIP back on. It seems Apple are very passionate about analysing your photos for some reason, regardless if you you…

All kinds of nonsense runs and phones home throughout the os. The thing that annoyed me the most is trying to create an account will phone home to apple, such as setting up a local smtp/imap server on the local network.

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

#547

Post by sgammon »

ghjfrdghibt wrote: post #524
sgammon wrote: post #517

Apple: Does backflips to protect your data Apple's competition: Steals your data outright Most of this thread: How could Apple act this way

You're kidding yourself if you think apple is in the business of protecting your data beyond marketing itself as such. Just like all it's competition it's in the business of using your data like them.

> You're kidding yourself if you think apple is in the business of protecting your data beyond marketing itself as such.

It is entirely possible to create a business where others ignore user demands, like, say, privacy. Apple does not have a massive advertising incentive to process user data as others do. I am not a huge Apple fan (typing this from my Windows machine), but I am not ashamed to admit that some companies are good at some things, and others at other things (insane idea I know)

Apple does not have to homomorphically encrypt your data. They do so because they have "made privacy a feature," as they say in their marketing. You can also just read the research papers or code if you want, since they have published those, too. Have you read those?

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

#548

Post by tjoff »

latexr wrote: post #536
jchw wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Absolutely! The important bit is that users have no choice in the matter. 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.

Opt out is portrayed as a choice when it barely is. Because it is very tiresome to always research what avenues exist and explicitly opt put of them and then constantly having to review that option to make sure it isnt flipped in an update or another switch has appeared that you also need to opt out of.

Maybe you need to set an environment variable. Maybe that variable changes. It is pretty exhausting so I can understand people giving up on it.

Is that really giving up on it though? Or are they contorted to it?

If you do anything on the radio without the users explicit consent you are actively user hostile. Blaming the user for not exercising his/her right because they didn't opt out is weird.

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

#550

Post by sgammon »

kittikitti wrote: post #310

Here's a direct link to the paper that describes this as mentioned in the post, https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry... The homomorphic code is available in Swift https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-homomorphic-encr... I have concerns about how women would be affected by law enforcement who might use the location data to target abortions.

> I have concerns about how women would be affected by law enforcement who might use the location data to target abortions.

What? How?

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