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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

#911

Post by antoniojtorres »

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…

This string of unprovable assumptions is not how you do things.

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

#912

Post by aleden »

sgammon wrote: post #885
aleden wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-homomorphic-encr... https://github.com/apple/swift-homomorphic-encryption https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry... https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Apple_PSI_System_Secu...

Fantastic links. They should be at the top of this thread. This stuff looks really impressive to me. I'm not an expert.

I take it that it is implicitly assumed that code running on the server (which I cannot spot the source for) doesn't need to be available, to be trusted? (That there's no way you could come up with an attack through cryptanalysis, involving what the server does, since the security of the data coming from the client is all that matters?)

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

#913

Post by dwaite »

internetter wrote: post #897
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They do something like this, using homomorphic encryption. Whatever they do, there is no doubt they incur serious performance hits.

Right, I've seen similar engineering efforts to target this sort of functionality fail because of the computational cost and resulting latency. I'm curious to read the paper for the tradeoffs they made toward practicality at Apple's scale of users.

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

#914

Post by Thorrez »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #679
Thorrez wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wouldn't the homomorphic encryption prevent Apple's servers from knowing if there was a match or not?

not if you need to access from multiple devices (otherwise, what's the point of this feature?) in that case it's the source of common key of "the same account" becomes the threat and now you have to trust... megacorporation with closed-garden ecosystem... to not access its own servers in your place?

>not if you need to access from multiple devices (otherwise, what's the point of this feature?)

I don't think the feature works perfectly fine on single device. You take a ton of pictures on your iPhone. You search your photos for "Eiffel tower" and it shows you the photos you took of the Eiffel tower. I don't see why you need multiple devices.

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

#915

Post by fulafel »

walterbell wrote: post #16

> On macOS, I can usually prevent Apple software from phoning home by using Little Snitch. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't allow anything like Little Snitch on iOS. On Android, NetGuard uses a "local VPN" to firewall outgoing traffic. Could the same be done on iOS, or does Apple network traffic bypass VPNs? Lockdown mentions ads, but not Apple servers, https://lockdownprivacy.com/ . Apple does publish IP ranges for diff…

Apple probably wouldn't allow such an app in their walled garden?

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

#916

Post by saagarjha »

astrange wrote: post #280
emchammer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetical scenario: Theo de Raadt and Bruce Schneier are hired to bring Apple products up to their security standards. They are given a public blog, and they are not required to sign an NDA. They fix every last vulnerability in the architecture. Vladimir Putin can buy MacBooks for himself and his generals in Moscow, enable Advanced Data Protection, and collaborate on war plans in total confidence. Where are the bo…

Theo de Raadt is less competent than Apple's security team (and its external researchers). The main thing OpenBSD is known for among security people is adding random mitigations that don't do anything because they thought them up without talking to anyone in the industry.

I mean half the reason the mitigations don't do anything is that nobody actually cares to target OpenBSD

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

#917

Post by saagarjha »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #886
calf wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In engineering we distinguish the "how" of verification from the "why" of validation; it looks like much comments disagreement in this post is about the premise of whether ANY outgoing data counts as a privacy consent issue. It's not a technical issue, it's a premises disagreement issue and that can be hard to explain to the other side.

The premise of my disagreement is that privacy-preserving schemes should get some outside validation by experts before being turned on as a default. Those experts don’t have to be me , there are plenty of people I trust to check Apple’s work. But as far as I can tell, most of the expert community is learning about this the same way that everyone else is. I just think that’s a bad way to approach a deployment like thi…

Apple of course thinks their internal team of experts is enough to validate this.

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

#918

Post by withinboredom »

catgirlinspace wrote: post #877
withinboredom wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember where I saw this before. However, there was a site that collected analytics data client side in a circular buffer (or something), and there was a menu in the settings to send it back one-time or always, or download it yourself. If you experienced an error, they would pop up in a toast to share the analytics data with them so they could help fix the problem. You could, of course, decline. That was pro…

maybe it was offen? i remember seeing it a while ago but i don’t know of any sites using it. https://www.offen.dev/

This is it! I didn't realize it was actually a thing you could just install.

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

#919

Post by saagarjha »

grahamj wrote: post #369
ryandrake wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The average smartphone is probably doing a hundred things you didn’t knowingly consent to every second. You've succinctly identified a (maybe the ) huge problem in the computing world today. Computers should not do anything without the user's command/consent. This seems like a hopeless and unachievable ideal only because of how far we've already strayed from the light. Even Linux, supposedly the last bastion of use…

> 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.

That's not how informed consent works.

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

#920

Post by things »

diggan wrote: post #643
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…

> 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.…

The non-use of collected data is the most ridiculous part of all this. I work with many companies that collect tons of data and only use a small percentage of it. All they're doing is building a bigger haystack.

This is partially due to the fact that Google Analytics is free and the default for most website/app builders. But, still, it's ridiculous.

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