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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

#691

Post by yndoendo »

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…

Consent is the key issue binding all. There is complete lack of consent when there is no opt-out and great degradation when the default is opt-out. Trust is the only means to consent.

1) Opt-in, Opt-survey, Opt-out is the only ternary to build trust. Survey is an active validator of trust and assists in low-bandwith communication. Question should be presented to the end user the first time using it or the next time the application starts and this feature was added.

2) Provide the exact analytical information you want to the end user so they can parse it too. The means to self-evaluate allowed information to be shared with providing the reports or views improves trust.

3) Known privilege to trust leads to more consent. Having priority support with features and bugs could be aligned with those that Opt-in. Analytical history / performance may assisting in solving the recent bug that was reporter.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, and all apply ambiguity to their analytical sharing without details, not how they use it and can abuse it. Most don't even provide an Opt-out. I don't trust these organizations but I must engage with them through my life. I don't have to use Facebook or Twitter and don't. I accept the Steam survey.

RFC with an agreed upon analytical standard could be step to solving the latch of analytical information the open source community would benefit from. Both parties consenting to agreed upon communication.

*My Point of View; meta data is still personal data. Without the user the data and the meta data would not existing. Since the end user is the entropy to meta data they own the meta and the data.

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

#692

Post by galleywest200 »

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.

This sort of sounds like the Steam Hardware Survey. They do not collect the data willy-nilly, they ask you every few months if you want to participate in a one-time check.

I have an incentive to see if the Linux desktop share has increased, so I usually run the survey for them to get my data point in. I also suppose the "gamer" crowed likes to show off how powerful their "rig" is, so I would imagine they commonly also run the survey for that reason as well.

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

#693

Post by lloeki »

amatecha wrote: post #499
fragmede wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Oh, if that's the case, they really could have explained that better. The language used in Apple's article doesn't explain that the server cannot know the query or result (it implies as such, but doesn't make this clear, nor explain how/why)

> they really could have explained that better. The language used in Apple's article

This one?

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...

I find that description perfectly clear for someone who doesn't already know what homomorphic encryption means:

> One of the key technologies we use to do this is homomorphic encryption (HE), a form of cryptography that enables computation on encrypted data (see Figure 1). HE is designed so that a client device encrypts a query before sending it to a server, and the server operates on the encrypted query and generates an encrypted response, which the client then decrypts. The server does not decrypt the original request or even have access to the decryption key, so HE is designed to keep the client query private throughout the process.

Later:

> HE excels in settings where a client needs to look up information on a server while keeping the lookup computation encrypted.

And there's more perfectly layman-understandable in PIR and PNSS sections, complete with real-life examples and simple diagrams.

One just has to read the goddamn thing, which apparently is an insurmountably tall order these days for content that is more than 250 characters.

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

#694

Post by replwoacause »

Argonaut998 wrote: post #577

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…

Oh damn you’re right. This was turned on by default for me, I don’t think I would have opted into this.

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

#695

Post by magnat »

sofixa wrote: post #669
spacemanspiff01 wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd still have extremely biased data - people who blindly click OK on every pop up are not representative of your typical user; people who get nightmares after hearing the word "telemetry" and will gather the pitchforks if they hear any hint of will always refuse, but depending on your app, might be your typical user (e.g. for self-hosted picture sync and catalogue, who is the target audience - people who don't tru…

> people who blindly click OK on every pop up are not representative of your typical user

You could unbias the data by including the metric determining how long did it took them to click "Ok" and whether they actually reviewed the data before agreeing.

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

#696

Post by andrepd »

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…

Not really. A mandatory opt-in option at the browser level would be the correct way to do it, but legislation forced instead those cookie banners onto the webpage.

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

#698

Post by hamilyon2 »

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…

Data collection and telemetry is sadly lemon market type of situation. The most trustworthy developers are precisely the ones who don't collect data from users

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

#699

Post by Koshkin »

simondotau wrote: post #222
Koshkin wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “moral entitlement” has nothing to do with this. The software is legally required to abide by its license agreement (which, by the way, you are supposed to have read, understood, and accepted prior to using said software).

I honestly can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. A license grants the end user permission to use the software. It is not a series of obligations for how the software operates. This would be excruciatingly obvious if you read any software license.

A license agreement is, well, an agreement between the manufacturer and the consumer which may include a requirement to acknowledge certain aspects of how the software operates (e.g. the user may be required to agree to “share” some data).

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

#700

Post by andybak »

yndoendo wrote: post #691
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…

Consent is the key issue binding all. There is complete lack of consent when there is no opt-out and great degradation when the default is opt-out. Trust is the only means to consent. 1) Opt-in, Opt-survey, Opt-out is the only ternary to build trust. Survey is an active validator of trust and assists in low-bandwith communication. Question should be presented to the end user the first time using it or the next time t…

Yes - I understand but in many (or even most) cases, opt-in makes the data worthless. There's literally no point collecting it.
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