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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

#731

Post by st3fan »

asdff wrote: post #713
talldayo wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For real! When I search for a term the last thing I want is some esoteric plist file but I’ll return dozens of those hits. Is there a way to exclude these I wonder? Limit it to what I have in the default home directory structure lets say and not go into my launch agents.

Look in the Spotlight settings. Not only can you include/exclude default search types. But you can also specify folders not to index.

Why is this even a question, do people not look at the settings at all?

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

#732

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

scratchyone wrote: post #425
gigel82 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course, the concern is the data being exfiltrated to begin with. Like someone else in this thread mentioned, if they upload a single pixel from my image without my consent, that is too much data being uploaded without my consent.

If they sent a completely randomly generated integer from your phone without consent, would that be okay with you? Genuine question.

> If they sent [...] without consent, would that be okay with you?

No. That would never be acceptable to me.

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

#733

Post by deivid »

necovek wrote: post #644
mvkel wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nope, collective indifference to subpar user experiences has gotten us those lousy cookie banners. Web sites could legally use cookies for non-tracking purposes without cookie banners but considering people have not stopped visiting sites despite the fugly click-through cookie banners makes them a failure. All it takes is for 50% of the internet users to stop visiting web sites with them, and web site authors will st…

I think it's significantly less than 50% -- Your comment made me think of The dictatorship of the small minority[0], which places the value at 3~4%

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

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

#734

Post by talldayo »

lapcat wrote: post #526
Aachen wrote: post #427

> I don't understand most of the technical details of Apple's blog post. I did understand the cited bits, and sorry to say but this could have been an optimistic post ("look at this cool new thing!") I dislike Apple's anti-hacker (in the HN sense of the word) practices as much as the next person and don't own any Apple device for that and other reasons, but saying "it doesn't matter how you solved the privacy problem…

> sorry to say but this could have been an optimistic post > don't own any Apple device So you don't have any skin in the game, but you're criticizing someone who does? My blog post is written from the perspective of an Apple user whose trust has been violated. It's nice that you think—from a safe distance—the technology is neat, and maybe it is, but that's irrelevant to the main issue, which is the lack of user cons…

Hacker News unfortunately does not respond to this logic unless it is a company they are trained to hate. We could run the same story reporting Google and Meta's opt-out abuses, and it would also reach the frontpage with just as many comments. Except those comments would be violent condemnation, not apologetics and hand-wringing over whitepaper quotes.

It's tragic, because computing is in a professedly imperfect place right now. Digital privacy is under fire, many payments see a 30% digital service surcharge that is wholly arbitrary, and revolutionary cross-platform standards are being supplanted with proprietary and non-portable solutions that does not benefit any user.

As an American, I am ashamed that our government's dysfunction extends to consumer protection.

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

#735

Post by [deleted] »

lapcat wrote: post #515
penguinburglar wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for posting the apple blog post. As usual, it's really interesting research, and it's fascinating to see how they solve potentially gnarly privacy issues.

> Thank you for posting the apple blog post. The very same blog post is linked in the submitted article.

[deleted]

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

#736

Post by xp84 »

GlacierFox wrote: post #717
necovek wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, collective indifference to subpar user experiences has gotten us those lousy cookie banners. Web sites could legally use cookies for non-tracking purposes without cookie banners but considering people have not stopped visiting sites despite the fugly click-through cookie banners makes them a failure. All it takes is for 50% of the internet users to stop visiting web sites with them, and web site authors will st…

"All it takes is for 50% of the internet users to stop visiting web sites with them..." You've written that like it's a plausible and likely scenario.

Yeah, this is an insane proposal. I know GP may be imagining a smart populace walking away from Big Evil Facebook and X with heads held high, but the other 99% of sites are also doing the same cookie banner stupidity because it is roughly mandatory due to useless EU law (unless you’re not engaging at all in advertising even as an advertiser). So, no more accessing your bank, power utility, doctor, college, etc. That’ll show those pesky cookie banner people!

“The Internet” to someone boycotting cookie banners would basically just be a few self-hosted blogs.

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

#737

Post by talldayo »

st3fan wrote: post #729
talldayo wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I love it that it indexes source code. It allows me to find things easily.

I have never once, in all of my years owning a Mac, used Spotlight search to find a source file based on it's text contents. By comparison, I have absolutely wasted probably close to an hour of my life cumulatively mashing the down arrow to find a relevant result that wasn't a Cmake file.

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

#738

Post by ricardobeat »

bigwordsehboy wrote: post #12
sillywalk wrote: post #2

I don't care if the device checks it, it uses homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. This is turned on by default. This angers me.

"homomorphic encryption and differential privacy" It is new. It is fancy. It is not clear where HE/DP is being used, it depends if the code is written using the Swift toolkit, but even that has paths for exfiltration if used incorrectly. They claim they are using DP in Photos as stated in the article here: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/scenes-differenti... But the fact remains they are looking at your pi…

> what if someone goofs an operation and it ends up returning the actual data

That's kind of like saying "they can take a picture of your face and transmit it, but what if someone goofs an operation and sends your actual head instead".

Any encrypted data the server has cannot 'accidentally' be decrypted, and as someone else explained in this thread they only send encrypted vectors describing features of the image (building, tree, etc) and not the actual image. It's certainly not a fact that "they are looking at your pictures" [1].

[1] "they" being Apple; the other guys could have backdoored the whole OS and Apple employee's computers for all I know

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

#739

Post by ProllyInfamous »

fmajid wrote: post #178
threeseed wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> letting the feds see every time you use the product This does not happen.

Traffic analysis by the government totally happens: https://lifehacker.com/how-cia-director-david-petraeuss-emai... Now they probably don't care about you personally, but you'd be surprised how many people are connected indirectly to a person of interest. Google "Maher Arar" for the horrific consequences of false positives.

>you'd be surprised how many people are connected indirectly to a person of interest.

I get called "paranoid," often, but I'm being honest when responding to people requesting my phone number: "you don't want my number in your phone, because it'll associate you with people you probably don't want to be associated with" [see Five Eyes' 3-Degrees of Separation].

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

#740

Post by talldayo »

st3fan wrote: post #731
asdff wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real! When I search for a term the last thing I want is some esoteric plist file but I’ll return dozens of those hits. Is there a way to exclude these I wonder? Limit it to what I have in the default home directory structure lets say and not go into my launch agents.

Look in the Spotlight settings. Not only can you include/exclude default search types. But you can also specify folders not to index. Why is this even a question, do people not look at the settings at all?

> Why is this even a question, do people not look at the settings at all?

No, I expect defaults that aren't asinine from a company that bills themselves as a premium experience for software developers. It should be common sense, for the purposes of providing software to both ordinary users and software developers, to omit source files that aren't relevant search results. It's one of the most annoying features on Windows too, you'd hope Apple would see the writing on the wall and just fix it.

Harboring hope was my mistake, though. Sold my Mac in 2018 and haven't felt a desire to daily-drive MacOS since.

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