Worth noting that you need iCloud active in the first place to opt-out of this feature, so it is still opt-in, since it is only ever defaulted to being on for users who proactively signed into iCloud.
Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
891–900 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#892The big question for me is what data contributes to the global index. I would definitely be unhappy if my own photos (pixels + GPS location) were being added to this global index. For example, if someone takes a picture of my house, could they find the location (reverse image to location lookup) using this service? Does anyone know what comprises this global index?
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#893Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It only has hashes for the worst of the worst stuff out there." [citation needed] I know someone whose MS account was permabanned because they had photos of their own kid in the bathtub. I mean, I guess the person could have been lying, but I doubt they would even have been talking about it if the truth was less innocuous.
Sure, and they do that because Microsoft's CSAM detection product (which other providers like Google supposedly use) operates by having unencrypted data access to your files in the cloud. What Apple wanted to do is do those operations using homomorphic encryption and threshold key release so that the data was checked while still encrypted, and only after having a certain number of high likelihood matches would the po…
I'm just refuting what the person I responded to said, because apparently these services have hashes for more than just "the worst of the worst stuff" or whatever.
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#894Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (se…
I read that. It doesn't actually explain how the server can tell me the Eiffel Tower is in my photo without knowing it's telling me that. It glosses over the mechanism by which it can tell me what's in my photo without the service itself knowing. Yeah, cool, never-decrypted. So how do they match up? An ultra-abstract "A[encrypted] + B[encrypted] = A+B[encrypted]" doesn't tell me anything.
As an aside, your unfounded derision about "RTFA" is unwarranted and unnecessary. That was an unusually-hostile response for like, just talking about things.
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#895Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not impressed. I'd be much more impressed if we could run software like Little Snitch on iOS, or install Firefox. Or even just side load apps without pay $100/year. (Note: a Safari webview with a Firefox logo on it does not count.)
> I'd be much more impressed if we could run software like Little Snitch on iOS You can; or, at least, the APIs are available for this, and have been for some time. > or install Firefox https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/i... Inb4 "you cannot replace the built-in browser engine" https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit > Or even just side load apps without pay $100/year Then…
> You can; or, at least, the APIs are available for this, and have been for some time.
Why is there no citation on this one? iOS has a (fairly limited) VPN API but it is woefully insufficient to make an application-level firewall and I don't think any exist.
> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/i...
That's Safari in a trenchcoat.
> Inb4 "you cannot replace the built-in browser engine"
> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit
That requires an entitlement that A.) is only available in the EU for apps distributed in the EU and B.) as far as I know, has never been granted to anyone. Mozilla for example does not have it.
If it weren't for EU regulations we would probably still not even be able to change the default browser in iOS, so realistically it appears regulating Apple works great. It's hard to argue against regulating Apple while also defending it by showing the fruit bore from regulating them.
> Then use an Android.
I own both iOS and Android devices for what it's worth. Anyway...
> Apple has taken a stance on this since it was formed.
Since... it was formed? Really? I don't remember the Apple II requiring a $100/year developer license to "side load" software.
> If you don't know by now that Apple is actively hostile toward hobbyists with their approach to computing, I can't help you.
This is a frankly insane thing to say to someone who is in middle of criticizing Apple for this exact hostility. Of course framing it as a developer problem is a convenient way to ignore that developers are users and users are developers, and that these restrictions also have negative impacts on even users who aren't developers.
> That is why there are alternatives from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and so many others.
Apple is the same company that ran a tirade about how Android was a stolen product, so I find it amusing that in just ten years it has become the crutch to defend any and all bad practices Apple holds dear. Don't like it? Just use something else!
Of course, I do use other devices, but I can't magically not be impacted by Apple's persistent brain-death. For years I have had to deal with the utter stupidity that is the fact that Apple refused to support patent-unencumbered video formats like WebM, and devices that can't play WebM natively and in Safari are still plentiful in the wild. So I can't just pretend Apple doesn't exist.
Not that it matters: I am free to criticize Apple however I want, even if Apple fans do not like it. Even just because I feel like it, but even moreso as a paying customer of Apple, and a developer who has dealt with the impact of Apple being involved in the ecosystem. (Thank you Apple, for refusing to support SPIR-V in WebGPU, we love having an additional standard for something for basically no reason.)
> To others (me), this is a feature. I would rather the $100/yr fee exist for several reasons.
I know. I don't think highly of this position, but I am well aware of it.
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#896Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, this is their way of injecting the "phone home" element via an innocuous rationale, "location matching". The global index will of course also match against other markers they deem worthy of matching, even if they don't return that to the user.
Honestly, why the hell would Apple bother with such a contrived and machiavellian strategy to spy on their users? They literally own the code to iOS. If they wanted to covertly track their customers, they could just have their devices phone home with whatever data they wanted to collect. Realistically there would be no way to know if this was actually happening, because modern devices emit so much encrypted data anyw…
Yeah, that sorta already exists. If you've ever done remote customer support, they can send a query to remotely-view your screen -- a query which you have to accept or deny. There's really zero reason there couldn't be a similar feature, but without asking you, and without putting a big red bar a the top of your screen that says "Apple Support is viewing your screen". Wish I had a screenshot or photo of that, can't seem to find a screenshot online unfortunately.
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#897Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phone has intelligence to detect things that look like landmarks, and does cropping/normalization and converts to a mathematical form. Apple has a database trained on multiple photos of each landmark (or part of a landmark), to give a likelihood of a match. Homomorphic encryption means that the encrypted mathematical form of a potential landmark from the phone can be applied to the encrypted set of landmark data,…
> get an encrypted result set. seems to me at that point, the server knows what segment of the overall dataset is being returned.
I don't completely understand the maths of how this works, but no, they don't.
Here's a theoretical way I wrote in another comment:
> I think they have more efficient ways, but theoretically what you could do is apply each row in your database to this encrypted value, in such a way that the encrypted value becomes the name of the POI of the best match, or otherwise junk is appended (completely changing the encrypted value) Again, the server has not read the encrypted value, it does not know which row won out. Only the client will know when it decrypts the new value.
They do something like this, using homomorphic encryption. Whatever they do, there is no doubt they incur serious performance hits.
You may also be interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06761
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#898Earlier quoted context omitted.
The server must know what it's matching at some point, to be able to generate a response: > The server identifies the relevant shard based on the index in the client query and uses HE to compute the embedding similarity in this encrypted space. The encrypted scores and set of corresponding metadata (such as landmark names) for candidate landmarks are then returned to the client. Even with the server supposedly not kn…
> 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
(btw thanks for the links!) :)
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#899Worth noting that you need iCloud active in the first place to opt-out of this feature, so it is still opt-in, since it is only ever defaulted to being on for users who proactively signed into iCloud.
This is not true.
Re: Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15
#900Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how, pray tell, do geotagged images magically get into your Photos library? I actually couldn't get Photos address search to work right in my testing before writing my previous comment, even with a geotagged photo that I just took. So I'm not sure whether I have some setting disabled that prevents it. The only match was via character recognition of a printed form that I had photographed. To be clear, I meant that…
> And how, pray tell, do geotagged images magically get into your Photos library? By saving them from any source other than the camera app you’ve configured to not use geo-tagging.
Yeah, I have geo-tagged images from people having AirDropped photos to me. Occasionally I've noticed a photo somehow says the city it was taken in, much to my surprise -- only to remember this was actually AirDropped to me from someone who was there with me, or whatever. Maybe even iMessaged and then manually saved, not sure.