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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

#861

Post by [deleted] »

RedComet wrote: post #843
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…

The cookie banners are an example of malicious compliance.

[deleted]

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

#862

Post by aleden »

sgammon wrote: post #552

It is frankly nothing short of amazing that Apple ships things like homomorphic encryption, and differential privacy, and client-side vectorization, and encrypted vectors, at the scale that they inhabit... and they still get a bad report card back from consumers about privacy. Comparing Apple and Google, or Apple and Microsoft, it seems to me that Apple's track record on these issues is actually not as bad as public…

How did they do it? The idea for homomorphic encryption has been around a long time, but as far as I am aware the time+space requirements have found to be tremendous, thus rendering any serious implementation of it impractible.

If they managed to do it, they should open-source the code. If they made a research breakthrough, they should publish. Doing either of those things would give me the peace of mind that I need.

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

#863

Post by gigel82 »

avianlyric wrote: post #594
gigel82 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very likely yes. Why else would they add a feature that incurs costs for them as an update, at no cost to the users (and not even make a fuss about it)? It is obvious they are monetizing this feature somehow. Could be as innocuous as them training their AI dataset, or feeding into their growing ad business (locations and other things identified in the photos), or collaboration with law enforcement for various purpose…

> Very likely yes. Why else would they add a feature that incurs costs for them as an update, at no cost to the users (and not even make a fuss about it)? Erm, you’re aware of the whole Apple intelligence thing right? An entire product that costs Apple money, provided at “no cost” to the user (if you had an iPhone 15). Also every feature in an OS update has a costs associated with it, and iOS updates have cost money…

Of course, but those would be features in the product code deployed on users' devices (one time investment), not a service that has ongoing costs of operation associated with each call. They wouldn't just give this out for free (especially to older iPhones), it makes no business sense. If you're not paying for a product, you are the product!

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

#864

Post by have_faith »

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…

This is worse than the OP. What alternative universe is Apple living in where it thinks that defaulting to collecting people’s search histories without consent is OK?

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

#865

Post by slashdave »

chikere232 wrote: post #798
slashdave wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why make it extremely hard to disable? Photos is hardly a system level app

A clearly marked option in the settings menu is "extremely hard"?

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

#866

Post by lurking_swe »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #14

I'm moving my family out of apple photos, self hosted options have come a long way. I landed on immich [0] and a caddy plugin that allows for PKI certificate for account access while still allowing public shared URLs [1]* There's also LibrePhotos which is packed with features but doesn't have as much polish as immich. They do however have a list of python libraries that can be used for offline/local inference for thi…

i like to self host but i’d never do it for something critical like photos. what if you’re hit by a bus next month? Then your family (probably not tech savvy) need to figure out how to migrate all their stuff to a commercial offering - while dealing with all the emotional stuff after death. it’s just added stress for your loved ones.

100% private is nice but not practical for something like photos in my opinion. unless you have someone in the family that can take over after you’re gone and is very technical.

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

#867

Post by TheMode »

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…

And the result is https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/i-still-dont-care-a...

Personally I do not believe these popups serve any purpose, because I ultimately cannot (at least in a reasonable way) prove that the website is acting in good faith. Asking me whether the app should phone home doesn't really guarantee me pressing "no" will actually prevent the tracking.

I am continuously surprised at how we convince ourselves privacy at scale will work with a varying amount of yes/no buttons. There are 2 ways to trust software 1. be naive and check whether "privacy first" is written somewhere 2. understand the software you are running, down to the instructions it is able to execute.

The permission popups also lack granularity. When giving access to my contact list, which contacts does it actually access? Can I only give access to contacts name and not phone numbers? Is it for offline or online processing? If online, should we have another popup for internet access? But then, can I filter what kind of internet stuff it does? You go down the rabbit hole and eventually end up with a turing-complete permission system, and if you don't, your "privacy" will have some hole to it.

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

#868

Post by hn3er1q »

jchw wrote: post #766
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…

Actually, if my mindset were leading, we wouldn't have cookie consent banners because we would've just banned non-essential tracking altogether.

Now we just have to define what’s “essential” and how to identify it, across states, countries and jurisdictions. Should be easy. ;)

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

#869

Post by rzimmerman »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #853
rzimmerman wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe how uninformed, angry, and still willing to argue about it people were over this. The whole point was a very reasonable compromise between a legal requirement to scan photos and keeping photos end-to-end encrypted for the user. You can say the scanning requirement is wrong, there's plenty of arguments for that. But Apple went so above and beyond to try to keep photo content private and provide E2E enc…

> a legal requirement to scan photos Can you provide documentation demonstrating this requirement in the United States? It is widely understood that no such requirement exists. There's no need to compromise with any requirement, this was entirely voluntary on Apple's part. That's why people were upset. > I can't believe how uninformed Oh the irony.

Should have said "potential legal requirement". There was a persistent threat of blocking the use of E2E encryption for this exact reason.

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

#870

Post by Lammy »

dangus wrote: post #857
dangus wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Mac connected to your trusted home network when it want turned off? Wow, scandalous. You can randomize your MAC address. Built in OS feature.

“wasn’t turned off” is what I meant to say. What I mean is, an M3 MacBook has essentially the same processor as a cell phone. Of course it’s able to perform activities when the system is “asleep.” It even has specific online behavior labeled as a feature that can be turned on/off (Power Nap). https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-power-nap-on-o... This is behavior that is desired by Apple’s users. I sometimes…

> I sometimes wish that more Apple users who aren’t satisfied would stop complaining while continuing to throw money at Apple and buy themselves a Linux laptop.

My work machine — not my choice. Don't let reality get in the way of your smug assumptions about me though.

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