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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

#581

Post by Argonaut998 »

t0bia_s wrote: post #572

I'm genuinely surprised that there are many software developers that defend Apple products as great tool for privacy even though we are not able to inspect their code that is closed. Am I missing something or is it just hypocrisy?

It's just hypocrisy. I don't know how people can defend Apple as a privacy company when they phone home more than their Google counterparts.

People will say that at least Apple don't have a vested interest in their data since they are not an advertising company like Google or Meta. But Apple collects an absurd amount of data, it is phoning home every second. Some Apple traffic is hard-coded to go through VPNs.

Apple has already experimented with ads in Maps. Shareholders demand infinite growth, so it is only a matter of time before Apple dives into ads themselves.

The only valid point is that Apple does protect your privacy – only towards other companies.

I switched to Apple around 3 years ago because I don't like having my data coupled to Google. But I am regretting my decision, I will probably switch back to Android + Linux instead of IOS + Mac at this rate.

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

#582

Post by Klonoar »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #30
scosman wrote: post #11

"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…

This must be the first consumer or commercial product implementing homomorphic encryption is it not? I would be surprised if doing noisy vector comparisons is actually the most effective way to tell if someone is in front of the Eiffel tower. A small large language model could caption it just as well on device, my spider sense tells me someone saw an opportunity to apply bleeding edge, very cool tech so that they can…

Apple themselves have already used it in the past (Caller ID)

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

#583

Post by fragmede »

walterbell wrote: post #558
fragmede wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And of course you've reported every single crash you've encountered via email or support portal?

Normal people don't email support with crash logs, they just grumble about it to their coworkers and don't help fix the problem. You can't fix a problem you don't know about.

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

#584

Post by Klonoar »

ls612 wrote: post #314
goodluckchuck wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How cannot tell the picture contains the Eiffel Tower if the image is not decrypted?

Because it turns out that mathematicians and computer scientists have devised schemes that allow for certain computational operations to be performed on encrypted data without revealing the data itself. You can do a+b=c and it doesn’t reveal anything about what a and b are is the intuition here. This has been mostly confined to the realm of theory and mathematics until very recently but Apple has operationalized it f…

It’s not the first time Apple operationalized it, they did it for Caller ID awhile back.

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

#585

Post by calf »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #271
Gabriel54 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the explanation. However, I think you do not address the main problem, which is that my data is being sent off my device by default and without any (reasonable) notice. Many users may agree to such a feature (as you say, it may be very secure), but to assume that everyone ought to be opted in by default is the issue.

I’m a cryptographer and I just learned about this feature today while I’m on a holiday vacation with my family. I would have loved the chance to read about the architecture, think hard about how much leakage there is in this scheme, but I only learned about it in time to see that it had already been activated on my device. Coincidentally on a vacation where I’ve just taken about 400 photos of recognizable locations.…

In engineering we distinguish the "how" of verification from the "why" of validation; it looks like much comments disagreement in this post is about the premise of whether ANY outgoing data counts as a privacy consent issue. It's not a technical issue, it's a premises disagreement issue and that can be hard to explain to the other side.

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

#586

Post by miki123211 »

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…

Opt in doesn't work, it never did.

The vast majority (>95%) of users does not understand what those pop-ups say, seems fundamentally incapable of reading them, and either always accepts, always rejects, or always clicks the more visually-appealing button.

Try observing a family member who is not in tech and not in the professional managerial class, and ask them what pop-up they just dismissed and why. It's one of the best lessons in the interactions between tech and privacy you can get.

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

#587

Post by namtab00 »

thrance wrote: post #563
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.

You sadly can't fix a systemic issue by telling individual workers what not to do. There's too much money on the line.

And in sw dev, especially the US flavor, individual workers are highly directly incentivized to hit that next earnings target via vesting programs...

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

#588

Post by opan »

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 happily used LineageOS without gapps for years across several OnePlus devices. If I ever need a new phone I check their supported devices list to pick, and the stock ROM on my new device gets overwritten the day it arrives. Currently using a OnePlus 8T. When I move on from this device as my primary someday, I may put postmarketOS on it to extend its usefulness.

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

#589

Post by Klonoar »

sgammon wrote: post #552

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…

Consumers seem to think well of their pro-privacy standpoints, even if the devil is in the details with regards to how effective it might be.

The people giving “poor reports” are often the hardcore tech users (or LARPers) who grew up in a different era and mindset and are slowly being shoved out.

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

#590

Post by Klonoar »

hmage wrote: post #374

Reading comments here feels like being on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan combined - a lot of people not listening to each other. What happened to old HN?

My view is that a large group of people interested in building companies, tools, etc moved on and only come back when there’s a PR issue that pushes then to comment. What’s left behind is basically the same old /. esque crowd from the internet of old.
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