Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

lapcatsoftware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 1001 posts

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

#551

Post by sgammon »

jchw wrote: post #411
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.

> If the data is encrypted, does the concern still apply? 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…

> 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.

Appeal to bandwagon; opinion discarded

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

#552

Post by sgammon »

It is frankly nothing short of amazing that Apple ships things like homomorphic encryption, and differential privacy, and client-side vectorization, and encrypted vectors, at the scale that they inhabit... and they still get a bad report card back from consumers about privacy.

Comparing Apple and Google, or Apple and Microsoft, it seems to me that Apple's track record on these issues is actually not as bad as public opinion might suggest. Meta doesn't even make the list for comparison, and neither does Amazon.

It makes me wonder if picking privacy as a strategy is workable in the first place. People trust TLS; people use banking apps on their phone now without thinking. I remember in 2008 or so when people still didn't quite trust SSL.

I'm not sure if Apple will be able to bridge the gap here, though, if _all_ of their competition simply chooses not to ship those features. Do customers know the difference? Do they... care? In theory they want their data to be private, yes. But if they are not willing to educate themselves to perform their counterparty obligation in fulfilling "informed consent," there may be no action Apple could take to avoid catching the same bad rap everyone else does.

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

#553

Post by ctxc »

s3p wrote: post #397
gigel82 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the point of the outrage though (at least not for me). They enabled by default a feature that analyzes my pictures (which I never upload to iCloud) and sends information about them to their (and others') servers. That is a gross violation of privacy. To be clear, I don't care about any encryption scheme they may be using, the gist is that they feel entitled to reach into their users' most private data (the…

If you really didn't want your photos to be analyzed, would you be using an iPhone? Or any modern smartphone? Google photos doesn't have nearly the privacy focus and no HE whatsoever but I rarely see that mentioned here. It almost seems like Apple gets held to a higher standard just because they have privacy preserving initiatives. Do you use a keyboard on your iphone? You may not have heard but apple is tracking whi…

Like parent mentioned - I don't upload photos to Google photos, assume parent doesn't upload photos to iCloud.

Should photo info be sent to Apple/Google in this case?

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

#554

Post by hmottestad »

Krasnol wrote: post #541
hmottestad wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that this isn’t necessary and that Apple should have asked for consent from the user.

I do want to point out that Apple doesn’t get to see your photo. Homomorphic encryption is really cool in that way. Apple isn’t able to decrypt the photo and the results they produce are also encrypted. That’s the beauty of homomorphic encryption. I can send you an encrypted spreadsheet and you can compute the sum of a column for me. I’m the only one who can see the actual sum since you can only see the encrypted sum.

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

#555

Post by jitl »

kureikain wrote: post #537

Just ged rid if icloud and apple photos. slow as f*ck, crash all the time once the library get big enough on my mac. damn slow to scoll in the photos app with lot of picture. 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.

I have 60k photos using 1.2TB and Photos.app feels faster than Google Photos or Lightroom to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#556

Post by machinestops »

UnreachableCode wrote: post #521
machinestops wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphene mitigates the locked bootloader issue by only supporting one line of phones (Pixel), which have unlocked bootloaders. A large amount of work has been put into making Graphene specifically work with banking apps. Mine does, for instance.

Are Calyx or Lineage worth a look? It’s a tough choice between the 3.

I've used Lineage. I'd say it's worth a look, yes. I got a Pixel for Graphene, though.

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

#557

Post by ghjfrdghibt »

sgammon wrote: post #547
ghjfrdghibt wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 companie…

No I've not read them, I don't see why I would as I'm not an apple customer. But I do wonder if apple are in charge/control the encryption keys to your encrypted data...

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

#558

Post by walterbell »

fragmede wrote: post #488
callc wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you assume it's MBA driven? As a software developer, I like knowing when my software crashes so that I can fix it. I don't care or even want to know who you are, your IP address, or anything that could be linked back to you in any way, but I can't fix it if I don't know that it's crashing in the first place.

Customers can (optionally) submit crash logs via email or support portal.

Apple iOS provides crash logs via the following navigation path:

  Privacy & Security
    Analytics Data
      AppName-date-time.ips
Notice Apple's choice of top-level menu for crash logs?

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

#559

Post by newZWhoDis »

fragmede wrote: post #494
amatecha wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The server must know what it's matching at some point, to be able to generate a response: > The server identifies the relevant shard based on the index in the client query and uses HE to compute the embedding similarity in this encrypted space. The encrypted scores and set of corresponding metadata (such as landmark names) for candidate landmarks are then returned to the client. Even with the server supposedly not kn…

> The server must know what it's matching at some point, to be able to generate a response The entire point of homomorphic encryption is that it doesn't. The homomorphic encrypted Wikipedia lookup example is pretty neat. https://spiralwiki.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31668814

The setup for “that wasn’t real homomorphic encryption!” is in, when in 2-4 years it comes out that they were doing this exact thing.

The entire concept of a homomorphic encryption system is a land mine outside of obscure academic discussions. In practice systems marketed to the public as “homomorphic encryption” will result in user data exfil mark my words.

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

#560

Post by hmottestad »

larusso wrote: post #469
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...

Yes my thoughts as well. The tech was so expensive I guess that they had a need to test / run it to proof it’s private? I mean the model to find landmarks in your photos could run locally as well or? Ok I’m not 100% sure here.

I assume that the model couldn’t run locally for some reason. Probably either uses too much power or needs too much memory.
Post reply on HN