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Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15

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

#681

Post by Aaargh20318 »

GlumWoodpecker wrote: post #677
andybak wrote: post #666

Users of my (free, open-source) app seem surprised to learn that we've got zero insight into usage patterns. There are situations where a small amount of anonymous telemetry would be extremely helpful but I'm not going to touch it with a barge-pole. Opt-in makes the data useless - not just in terms of the huge drop in quantity but because of the fact it introduces a huge bias in the data selected - the people that wo…

This can only ever be opt-in if you want to stay on the legal side of the GDPR (and equivalents in other jurisdictions). You can ask, but the default needs to be "no" if no answer is given. I provide telemetry data to KDE, because they default to collecting none, and KDE is an open-source and transparent project that I'd like to help if I can. If I used your app, I would be likely to click yes, since it's open-source…

> This can only ever be opt-in if you want to stay on the legal side of the GDPR

The GDPR only applies to personal data. You can collect things like performance data without opt-in (or even an opt-out option) as long as you are careful to not collect any data that can be used to identify an individual, so no unique device IDs or anything like that. Of course, you should be transparent about what you collect. You also have to be careful about combinations of data points that may be innocuous on their own but can be used to identify a person when combined with other data points.

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

#683

Post by supermatt »

bambax wrote: post #672
supermatt wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Efficiency and scalability have nothing to do with "upholding one's commitment to privacy". This shows they're insincere. "private, efficient, and scalable" means "private AND efficient AND scalable". What makes you think they are being insincere about the privacy aspect?

If they said To uphold our commitment to privacy while delivering these experiences, we have implemented a combination of technologies to help ensure these server lookups are private then it would be fine. It would also be a tautology. When they add that server lookups are also "efficient and scalable", it means that they have had to ponder the privacy aspects with technical concerns regarding efficiency and scalabil…

> I actually think that's exactly what their wording is trying to say.

And herein lies the problem, because they are literally saying what they say - private AND efficient AND scalable. You are the one adding hypothetical caveats.

They are talking about offloading functionality that cannot occur on device. The scalability and efficiency is not being used as a reason to take privacy away, it is simply an additional requirement of how they must meet their pledge.

The quote you are referencing is literally about how these features are implemented using homomorphic encryption to perform lookups on anonymously accessed black boxes: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry... . Which part of that is them sacrificing privacy to make it scalable and efficient, and how would using a dedicated server per user increase privacy? Is there some specific privacy issue you can see with their implementation?

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

#684

Post by daneel_w »

It's been doing this since long before iOS 18. I first observed this behavior already on my 1st gen. iPhone SE with iOS 11 or maybe iOS 12. Every now and then, especially after having taken new pictures with the camera, I'd see the network activity spinner get going whenever starting Photos - and I've never enabled iCloud backups, but rather explicitly always disabled it everywhere I find a setting to do so. With Wi-Fi it'd be a short one second affair, and on cellular it'd take a few seconds more. I also observed the duration of the activity to vaguely extend with the number of new pictures taken between starting Photos. Curiously, when disabling cellular data permission for Photos and having no Wi-Fi connected, the network activity spinner would still pop up and just get stuck indefinitely without ever finishing whatever it's reporting.

My gut feeling has always been that it's returning digested machine learning feedback for Photos' facial/object recognition.

(add.: since moving from the iPhone 8 and iOS 16 to a modern iPhone and iOS 17/18 this behavior has gone away - at least the network activity spinner doesn't gossip anymore...)

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

#685

Post by talldayo »

snowwrestler wrote: post #650
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…

You may also be shocked to learn that Spotlight looks through every single file on your Mac.

I was. First by the md_worker processes that mysteriously started pinning all of my CPU cores after a git clone. Then by the realization that MacOS had built a full-text index of millions of lines of source code (it only took a few hours of my Mac being too hot to touch).

A lot of Apple's defaults are just plain bizarre. Why the hell is Spotlight seeing source code mimetypes and feeding it to the search index?

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

#686

Post by bambax »

supermatt wrote: post #683
bambax wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they said To uphold our commitment to privacy while delivering these experiences, we have implemented a combination of technologies to help ensure these server lookups are private then it would be fine. It would also be a tautology. When they add that server lookups are also "efficient and scalable", it means that they have had to ponder the privacy aspects with technical concerns regarding efficiency and scalabil…

> I actually think that's exactly what their wording is trying to say. And herein lies the problem, because they are literally saying what they say - private AND efficient AND scalable. You are the one adding hypothetical caveats. They are talking about offloading functionality that cannot occur on device. The scalability and efficiency is not being used as a reason to take privacy away, it is simply an additional re…

To "uphold one's commitment to privacy" the only thing to do is just that: uphold one's commitment to privacy. One doesn't need to make sure the lookups are "efficient" or "scalable" (or "clean" or "polite" or what have you). That is absolutely not needed for privacy.

Why would they need to add these qualifiers if not to explain/justify that privacy isn't the only concern, there are technical matters to consider as well.

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

#687

Post by diggan »

spacemanspiff01 wrote: post #668
andybak wrote: post #666

Users of my (free, open-source) app seem surprised to learn that we've got zero insight into usage patterns. There are situations where a small amount of anonymous telemetry would be extremely helpful but I'm not going to touch it with a barge-pole. Opt-in makes the data useless - not just in terms of the huge drop in quantity but because of the fact it introduces a huge bias in the data selected - the people that wo…

Would there be a way to do the stats gathering on device, then once every few months send a popup with statistics? Not sure what bias it adds Like "hey, we make this app, and we care about privacy, here is the information we have gathered over your usage for the past month, can we send this to ourselves, so that we can use it to improve the app?" And then show human readable form of what data was collected.

Just as a reference of existing implementations of this: This is essentially how Valve/Steam collects hardware details from users/clients. Every now and then, a popup appears asking the user if they'd like to participate in the "Hardware Survey", together with all the data that would be submitted if they accept.

Seems to me like a great implementation.

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

#688

Post by nfriedly »

mvkel wrote: post #629
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…

This mindset is how we got those awful cookie banners. Even more dialogs that most users will blindly tap "Allow" to will not fix the problem. Society has collectively decided (spiritually) that it is ok signing over data access rights to third parties. Adding friction to this punishes 98% of people in service of the 2% who aren't going to use these services anyway. Sure, a more educated populous might tip the scales…

u-Block Origin's annoyances filters take care of the cookie banners, giving the best of both worlds: no banners and a minimal amount of tracking.

(The "I don't care about cookies" extension is similarly effective, but since I'm already running u-block origin, it makes more sense to me to enable it's filter.)

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

#689

Post by pbhjpbhj »

spacemanspiff01 wrote: post #668
andybak wrote: post #666

Users of my (free, open-source) app seem surprised to learn that we've got zero insight into usage patterns. There are situations where a small amount of anonymous telemetry would be extremely helpful but I'm not going to touch it with a barge-pole. Opt-in makes the data useless - not just in terms of the huge drop in quantity but because of the fact it introduces a huge bias in the data selected - the people that wo…

Would there be a way to do the stats gathering on device, then once every few months send a popup with statistics? Not sure what bias it adds Like "hey, we make this app, and we care about privacy, here is the information we have gathered over your usage for the past month, can we send this to ourselves, so that we can use it to improve the app?" And then show human readable form of what data was collected.

The podcast app I use, AntennaPod (far better for me than other apps, available on F-Droid, no affiliation!) just gave me a local-only year in review. I thought it was a great touch, and would be happy to have then shared the data from that with the app's makers.

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

#690

Post by rsync »

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…

“It seems Apple are very passionate about analysing your photos for some reason, regardless if you yourself are.”

Isn’t this fragile to pollution from end users?

What if we all ran A local Image generator trained on our own photos… But slightly broken… And just flooded their photo hash collection with garbage?

Now what ?

This would be a very good flushing action. Lot would be learned by seeing who got angry about this and how angry they got…

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