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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

#701

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #65
geococcyxc wrote: post #21

Another setting that surprised me with being turned on by default apparently on macOS 15 is System Settings - Spotlight - "Help Apple Improve Search": "Help improve Search by allowing Apple to store your Safari, Siri, Spotlight, Lookup, and #images search queries. The information collected is stored in a way that does not identify you and is used to improve search results."

No, this is not on by default. After system install at first boot it asks if you want to help improve search and it describes how your data will be handled, anonymized, etc. If you clicked on yes it is on. There is a choice to opt out.

You're lying, it is on by default.

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

#702

Post by slashdave »

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…

> for some reason

It's directly tied to features they provide in their photo app. This is hardly obscure.

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

#703

Post by karaterobot »

Apple also does this thing where, after a major version update (or, seemingly, random incremental updates) it'll just go ahead and reset your app settings for you. So, make sure to check every single privacy option once a month or so, or just give in and let Apple do whatever it wants.

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

#704

Post by slashdave »

griomnib wrote: post #150
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…

I’m deeply familiar with all of these techniques, the core issue here is informed consent which they have not obtained. Furthermore, Apples privacy stance is generally a sham as their definition of “human rights” doesn’t extend to China. Which either means Apple doesn’t respect human rights, or they don’t view Chinese people as human.

Apple follows the law. First you need to get the Chinese government to respect those rights. The only other choice is to stop doing business entirely in the country.

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

#705

Post by Hilift »

ghjfrdghibt wrote: post #573

Every time one of these articles pops up about this sort of behaviour but one of the big tech companies, I'm always struck by the differences in the comments you get. I wonder if Google would be getting the benefit of the doubt like apple is currently getting were Google to implement the exact same thing as an opt-out feature?

A short while back, Google implemented what I call "Constantly Opt-Out". Google Photos frequently prompting you to "backup those photos to ...".

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

#706

Post by BlackFly »

josh2600 wrote: post #593
BlackFly wrote: post #566

This discussion got quite long without anyone mentioning the novel technical implementation paper "Scalable Private Search with Wally". Kudos to Apple for researching this, but shame on them for enabling this by default. As a somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme, each query releases some bits of information on what you searching for to avoid using the whole database. Subsequent queries from a given user will genera…

Hi, Very curious here as I haven’t seen any papers demonstrating attacks against the differential privacy systems proposed by Apple or Google that successfully deanonymize data. Such an attack in even a test database would be very interesting. Do you have any papers you can cite about this entropic leakage you’re describing?

The very difference between somewhat and full homomorphic encryption hinges on this leakage as explained in the paper. The definition of differential privacy as well. They directly admit to leaking a certain amount of information by stating that they apply differential privacy with those given parameters. The issue I am talking about is that such concerns are applied on a single query but correlations across query (the things that actually happen with metadata) aren't considered in the delta-epsilon differential privacy model, by definition.

So if you are curious, just read up in general about differential privacy, or this classic: https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity Discussed here (possibly in other places too): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9553494

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

#707

Post by slashdave »

ustad wrote: post #461
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #354

The referenced Apple blog post[1] is pretty clear on what this feature does, and I wish the author at lapcatsoftware (as well as folks here) would have read it too, instead of taking the blog post as-is. Apple has implemented homomorphic encryption[2], which they can use to compute distance metrics such as cosine similarity without revealing the original query/embedding to the server. In the case of photos, an on-dev…

You're extensively describing the technical implementation while missing the fundamental issue: Why is Apple enabling this feature by default for what is, essentially, a luxury photo search feature? Let's break this down: 1. Nobody is questioning whether Apple's technical implementation is sophisticated or secure. It clearly is. 2. Nobody is suggesting the privacy toggles don't work. They do. 3. The issue is about Ap…

> users may never want or need

Are you assuming that Apple did not perform a market analysis when implementing this feature? I think that is unlikely, considering the effort.

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

#708

Post by slashdave »

amelius wrote: post #135

Why does Apple keep insisting that I want anything to do with them after I bought the device? Let go of the freaking tether. And let me choose my own photo editing service provider.

> Why does Apple keep insisting that I want anything to do with them after I bought the device?

Um, because that is what their customers are asking for?

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

#709

Post by themaninthedark »

kalleboo wrote: post #296
themaninthedark wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am bit bit confused: Data is being sent to Apple, in such a way that it can not be traced back to the user. Apple does some processing on it. Then somehow magically, the pictures on your phone are updated with tags based on Apple's processing....but Apple doesn't know who you are.....

There is a way to perform processing on encrypted data so the result is also encrypted and the person doing the processing never knows anything about the data that was processed on or the result (which can only be decrypted by the user with the original encryption keys) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption > Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computations to be performed on enc…

Ok, that's the step that was missing. I couldn't figure out how there was a benefit to the users without data being fed back and data can't be fed back without knowing some ID.

So, while Apple doesn't know the ID of the person sending the data, they have a 'room number' that links back to an ID.

If Apple were to decide to scan photos for pictures of 'lines of white powder' they couldn't tell the police your name but they could say that the 3rd party knows who you are.

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

#710

Post by dishsoap »

You can't even turn on and use a new apple product unless you phone home and ask apple for permission. I'm not sure why this is newsworthy. Apple products are known to phone home more than just about anything else. It would be more surprising if apple photos didn't phone home.
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