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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

#821

Post by jchw »

halfcat wrote: post #800
jchw wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that there are not absolutely zero instances of telemetry or "phoning home" in Linux, but Desktop Linux is not a similar experience to Windows or macOS in this regard, and it isn't approaching that point, either. You can tcpdump a clean install of Debian or what-have-you and figure out all of what's going on with network traffic. Making it whisper quiet typically isn't a huge endeavor either, usually just…

Are there any tools that enable capturing traffic from outside the OS you’re monitoring, that still allow for process-level monitoring? Meaning, between the big vendors making the OS, and state-level actors making hardware, I wouldn’t necessarily trust Wireshark on machine A to provide the full picture of traffic from machine A. We might see this already with servers running out-of-band management like iDRAC (which i…

Curiosity has led me to check on and off if the local traffic monitoring is missing anything that can be seen externally a few times, but so far I've never observed this happening. Though obviously, captures at different layers can still yield some differences.

Still, if you were extra paranoid, it wouldn't be unreasonable or even difficult to check from an external vantage point.

> Are there any tools that enable capturing traffic from outside the OS you’re monitoring, that still allow for process-level monitoring?

Doing both of these things at once would be hard, though. You can't really trust the per-process tagging because that processing has to be done on the machine itself. I think it isn't entirely implausible (at the very least, you could probably devise a scheme to split the traffic for specific apps into different VLANs. For Linux I would try to do this using netns.)

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

#822

Post by pjmlp »

j45 wrote: post #816
pjmlp wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people nowadays use Web based apps, which don't even need to ask anything, who knows what server side is doing. Which is kind of ironic in places like HN, where so many advocate for Chromebooks.

Your location data, encoded in photo you take with the phone's camera, being extracted by Apple is what this article is about. How many people use a web based camera or web based photo album app?

GeoIP in every Web request, unless a VPN is being used, alongside scrambling Mac addresses.

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

#823

Post by diggan »

xp84 wrote: post #743
diggan wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This mindset is how we got those awful cookie banners. The only thing I've found awful is the mindset of the people implementing the banners. That you feel frustration over that every company has a cookie banner, is exactly the goal. The companies could decide that it isn't worth frustrating the user over something trivial like website analytics, as they could get that without having to show a cookie banner at all.…

It’s odd that you think the people implementing the banners want them so they can get more data. They want them because they provide a shield from litigation. I don’t know about you, but in the past year, most of my ads on Facebook are from law firms with headlines like “have you browsed (insert random minor e-commerce site) in the past two years? Your data may have been shared. You may be entitled to compensation.”…

> If I’m a random mom and pop e-commerce site and I do not add a cookie banner, and I use any form of advertising at all, then I am opening myself up to a very expensive lawsuit

Nope, that's not how it works. But your whole comment is a great showcase about how these myths continue to persist, even though the whole internet is out there filled with knowledge you could slurp up at a moments notice.

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

#824

Post by swores »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #673
gojomo wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly: "we've got this crafty image fingerprinting, the CSAM detection use proved too controversial to roll out, but let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users, so the code atays alive, improving, & ready for future expansion." Whether such fingerprinting can reliably be limited to public "landmarks" is an interesting question, dependent on unclear implementation details. Even…

> let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users is it even that? I don't see the benefit of this whatsoever

The search feature is useful at times, and while local processing is good enough to find (some of the) photos I've taken that match a search term like "table", it can't currently find a photo from a search term of "specific neighbourhood in my city" or "name of specific mountain I climbed years ago" - so if by processing on their servers allows them to do that then it would be genuinely beneficial.

But not beneficial enough to make up for the loss of privacy, so I've disabled it without finding out how useful or not the functionality is.

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

#825

Post by gameman144 »

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…

With cookie banners, legislation said that every website needed to ask for consent -- a thousand sites, a thousand banners.

Operating system level controls, though, provide a single control plane. One can very easily imagine OS-level toggles per application of:

[No Internet, No Internet outside your own app-sandbox, Ask me every time, Everything is allowed].

No opt in from apps required -- they might break if the network is disabled, but the user is still in control of their data.

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

#827

Post by grahamj »

ryandrake wrote: post #750
grahamj wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't consent to any of this! Yes you did. You purchased a computer, put this software on it and executed it. If you didn't want it to do whatever it's doing you should have determined what it would do beforehand and chose not to do it.

> whatever it's doing Even assuming that running the software implies my consent (which I would dispute), how do I make the decision about whether I should execute the software if I don't know what it is doing? This all-or-nothing approach is also problematic. I should not have to allow the developer free rein to do whatever he wants, as a condition of using the software. This is why operating systems are slowly buil…

Installing and booting Linux absolutely implies consent to let it do what it does. It's open source, you can evaluate what it does before booting it. You know it's comprised of many processes, you know it has a networking stack, you connected it to a network. You can't then ask OMG why didn't it ask before sending something?

I agree that all-or-nothing is problematic but even with a flexible permission system the best you can hope for is for all the things apps do to be itemized and set to sane defaults. But even then sanity is subjective. For every person like you (and me fwiw) who values privacy there are 1000 people who will never find the settings, don't care about privacy, and will wonder why stuff isn't working.

Ultimately privacy is similar to security in that it comes down to trust. If you don't trust your OS you're screwed. Your choices are try to exert as much control over it as possible, or don't use it.

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

#828

Post by khana »

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…

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

#829

Post by Pooge »

xp84 wrote: post #736
GlacierFox wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

You do not need to show a banner and ask for consent if every cookie is to make the website work (e.g. for authentication and settings). GDPR didn't create this banner; websites that use useless cookies and phone home to Big Tech are.

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

#830

Post by khana »

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…

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