611–620 of 1001 posts
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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...
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I’m not interested in telling you what to put on your blog. Do whatever you like. The headline is defensible but, in my opinion, quite sensationalised. People are likely to interpret it as being for an article making much stronger claims than the article actually does. I think a lot of the interactions people had with this submission, especially early on, were because the headline made them mad, rather than because o…
> The headline is defensible but, in my opinion, quite sensationalised. How would you write the headline? There's always a criticism of headlines, but headlines are necessarily short. It's like critics want the entire article text to appear in the headline, which is impossible. I don't know what defensible but sensationalized is supposed to mean. > I think a lot of the interactions people had with this submission, es…
I think the early comments on this submission were because the headline made them mad because they were incurious and not particularly related to the topic of the article making – most could be under any article about Apple Photos. One early comment was about switching to alternatives to Photos and another was, paraphrasing, ‘I’m so angry. I don’t care about homeomorphic encryption or differential privacy’. Others seemed to follow the theme of the latter. After a while a comment attempted an overview of some of the technical details, which I thought was better.
Perhaps a more precise complaint is that many of the early comments didn’t really depend on the contents of the article – they could go under many Apple submissions – and I think it’s more likely for comments like that to be written while incensed.
I don’t think you’re to blame for the comments people choose to leave.
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...
That whole incident was so misinformed. CSAM scanning takes place on the cloud with all the major players. It only has hashes for the worst of the worst stuff out there. What Apple (and others do) is allow the file to be scanned unencrypted on the server. What the feature Apple wanted to add was scan the files on the device and flag anything that gets a match. That file in question would be able to be decrypted on th…
If it’s for the children, then giving up our civil liberties is a small price to pay. I’d also like to give up liberties in the name of “terrorism”.
When we willingly give up our rights out of fear, these evil people have won.
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Hundreds of notifications daily is not unwillingly, nor is it healthy. You can disable IG trash notifications, for example.
My IG notifications are disabled in perpetuity precisely for that reason, even if it has come at a cost of not receiving IM arrival notifications from a couple of friends who message me exclusively via IG (another enigma – why, as both have my contact details on proper messaging platforms). Frankly, hundreds of daily notifications is the reality we can't change, and the question is: why do people choose to succumb to…
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…
This is everyone, it is universal, I've met many people "in tech" who also click the most "visually appealing" button because they are trying to dismiss everything in their way to get to the action they are trying to complete.
The microcosm that is HN users might not just dismiss things at the 95%+ rate, but that is because we are fed, every day, how our data is being misappropriated ate every level. I think outside of these tiny communities, even people in tech, are just clicking the pretty button and making the dialog go away.
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When iCloud syncs between devices how do you think that happens without storing some type of metadata? You don’t use iCloud for anything? When you change phones do you start fresh or use your computer for backups? Do sync bookmarks? Browsing history? Do you use iMessage?
In response to your question in the parent comment, no, I do not use iCloud. And I do not sync any of the things you mentioned here. If someone already consented to using iCloud to store their photos then I would not consider the service mentioned this post to be such a big issue, because Apple would already have the data on their servers with the user's consent. edit: I will just add, even if we accept the argument…
No, if you enable Advanced Data Protection for iCloud[1], the photos stored in Apple Photos are end to end encrypted.
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This sounds exactly like that CSAM "feature" they wanted to add but created a huge outrage because of how incredibly invasive it was. It sounds like it only needs a few extra lines of code to get exactly what they wanted before, they just packaged it differently and we all fell for it like frogs getting boiled in water.
Oh ffs, not this one again. The CSAM filtering was a best of class implementation. I'm pretty sure I'm one of maybe a dozen people who actually read the spec before throwing a hissy-fit about "muh privacy!" The only actual "flaw" was that maybe a state-level actor could make it scan for bad stuff on your device. BUT they can do it to your cloud data _today_. And if you disabled cloud uploads, the local scanning was d…
No, they can't if you enable ADP[1].
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the main criticism is about sending private and sensitive data to Apple without consent and warning
I imagine Apple might argue that no private information is sent thanks to the use of homomorphic encryption. But Apple’s explanation rings hollow without the user having the ability to verify that this system is working as described.
In a bit of personal news, in a previous job I once worked on doing something similarly private to user's browsing history, that is, the browsing history is sent to the server without the server being able to capture or store it. I was the tech lead for writing a prototype, but the whole idea was then vetoed by a VP.
I think I just noticed a similar thing for search that I'm pretty sure was not there before IOS 18. Going into Settings -> Search there's an option now for "Help Apple Improve Search", enabled by default. >Help improve Search by allowing Apple to store the searches you enter into Safari(!!), Siri and Spotlight in a way that is not linked to you. Searches include lookups of general knowledge, and requests to do things…
From deanonymization work even a decade ago it was clear that your search history will completely unmask you.
I would need lots of details before I believed that their method of storing the data reliably protected my privacy. (But of course that is not what the quote claims.)
The problem is the granularity. How do millions of people recover damages when a corporation knowingly (knows or should know) it is acting to enrich itself in a significant manner in small amounts. Let us suppose that an abstraction of the damage from this offense can be quantified at $1 per customer. A significant question is whether this action has any possible benefit to Apple. If it does not then once notified of this action, Apple would immediately (as in the next update of IOS or Sequoia) remedy this feature.
So step #1 is someone to send an official letter, perhaps with just a link to this article. Or perhaps someone from Apple is reading these comments and can inform us whether they are aware.
Next state is that Apple is aware of this problem (knows or should know) and ignores it. So are you helpless? Or could you file a claim in small claims court seeking to recover $1 for each photo that Apple has unloaded, requesting that Apple delete all photos as well as all data derived from the photos, plus filing fee.
Next state. You comment on this post as to how to improve the process and make it faster and easier. [And if you oppose this idea, could you please explain your position in a way that helps others understand?]