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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

#951

Post by nullc »

EagnaIonat wrote: post #932
mrshadowgoose wrote: post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your understanding is correct, as was/is the understanding of people critical of the feature. People simply don't want their device's default state to be "silently working against you, unless you are hyperaware of everything that needs to be disabled". Attacks on this desire were felt particularly strongly due to Apple having no legal requirement to implement that functionality. One also can't make the moral argument…

> People simply don't want their device's default state to be "silently working against you That was the misconception of what was happening though. Nothing happens on your device. Only when it gets to the cloud. It just puts a flag on the picture in question to have the cloud scan it. Which is exactly what happens before Apple suggested it and happens now. Except it does it for all your files. > One also can't make…

The scanning and matching is performed on your own device, against a copy of the databases which is encrypted to protect apple and their data providers against accountability for its content. The result of that match is itself encrypted, owing to the fact that the database is encrypted. On upload the query is decrypted and if there are above a threshold matches the decryption keys to all your content are revealed to apple.

Your phone is your most trusted agent-- it's a mandatory part of your life that mediates your interactions with friends, family, lovers, the government, your doctors, your lawyers, and your priest. You share with it secrets you would tell no other person. It's always with you, tracking your location and recording your activities. And in many cases its use is practically mandated. I think it's inappropriate for such a device to serve any interest except your own.

While it is true that the original proposal operated only on images that you would upload to icloud many people assumed the functionality would be applied more widely over time. This article seems to have proved that point: Apple is now applying essentially the same scanning technology (this time they claim the databases is of "landmarks") to otherwise entirely local photos.

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

#952

Post by withinboredom »

mgraczyk wrote: post #757
withinboredom wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time, I worked for a pretty big company (fortune 500ish) and had access to production data. When a colleague didn't show up at work as they were expected, I looked up their location in our tracking database. They were in the wrong country -- but I can't finish this story here. Needless to say, if an Apple employee wanted to stalk someone (say an abusive partner, creep, whatever), the fact that this stuff…

Your first story sounds like a good outcome. I doubt Apple employees could deduce location from the uploaded data. Having worked at FB I know that doing something like that would very quickly get you fired post 2016

network topologies don't lie (usually). What I mean is, there are many ways to locate someone if you have enough visibility.

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

#953

Post by jamesmotherway »

m463 wrote: post #928
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…

On macos (maybe tiger or leopard era), apple used to pop up a crash dialog, with a "send to apple?" prompt. And you could say no. they did away with that.

Is your system configured to share analytics and diagnostics? I disable both, and when a crash occurs, I receive a dialog with an "ignore" option.

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

#954

Post by Thorrez »

isodev wrote: post #507
Thorrez wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it's more than a promise that they won't look. Apple currently believes it's impossible to look.

Apple is not a person, they don’t “believe” anything. As a corporation, they “calculate” what they can say without getting into more trouble than they’re willing to entertain.

Apple is a group of people. It's not run by AI. I was specifically talking about the people in Apple who work on the feature and wrote the documentation for the feature.

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

#955

Post by jiveturkey »

amatecha wrote: post #894
lloeki wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The server doesn't tell you (and doesn't know) that it's the eiffel tower. Only when the result comes back to your device, is your device able to identify it as such.

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

#956

Post by consteval »

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…

I think society has collectively "decided" in the same way they "decided" smoking in a restaurant is great.

There's little to no conscious choice in this. But there is a lot of money in this. Like... a LOT of money. If I were to try to influence society to be okay with it, it would be a no brainer.

So, to me, it's obvious that society has been brainwashed and propagandized to accept it. But doing so generates hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars. How, exactly, such manipulation is done is unknown to me. Probably meticulously, over the course of decades if not centuries. I know that the concept of privacy during the writing of the constitution was much, much more stringent than it was in the 70s, which is much more stringent than it is today.

But, I am very confident it is happening.

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

#957

Post by consteval »

tshaddox wrote: post #903
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.…

[flagged]

Those are the same goals, at least in a capitalistic free market. The theory is that consumers will go towards products which are better (meaning, less obnoxious), and therefore the obnoxious websites will either die off or give up the banners to conform to the market.

Naturally, as you can see, free markets are purely theoretical. In practice, up and leaving a website you're using is almost never easy, and isn't even a choice you can make often.

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

#958

Post by consteval »

doublebind wrote: post #491
mikae1 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you accept Android as an option, then GrapheneOS probably check a lot of your boxes on an OS level. GrapheneOS developers sit between you and Google and make sure that shit like this isn't introduced without the user's knowledge. They actively strip out crap that goes against users interests and add features that empower us. I find that the popular apps for basic operation from F-Droid do a very good job of not sc…

That's great... for the HN reader. However, how is that supposed to work for your significant other, or your mother, or your indifferent-to-technology friend? Don't get me wrong, I also strive to keep my device's information private but, at the same time, I realize this has no practical use for most users.

The solution is the general populace becoming more tech literate, much like I became more literate in the yellow pages 20 years ago.

The reality is these are no longer mere tools, they are instruments for conducting life. They are a prerequisite to just about any activity, much like driving in the US.

We expect each and every citizen to have an intimate understanding of driving, including nuances, and an understanding of any and all traffic laws. And we expect them to do it in fractions of a second. Because that is the cost of utilizing those instruments to conduct life.

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

#959

Post by consteval »

fragmede wrote: post #580
sneak wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once it is running on a computer you don't own, it is no longer your software. To put it in the language of someone who mistakenly thinks you can own information: data about crashes on computers that aren't yours simply doesn't belong to you.

If you don't feel a responsibility for inflicting pain on other people, that's on you. I'm not a sociopath.

It's just a matter of ownership and entitlement. You believe you are entitled to things other people own, that is on their property, because you have provided a service to them that's somehow related.

Outside of specifically silicon valley, that level of entitlement is unheard of. Once you put it in human terms what you're asking for, it sounds absolutely outrageous. Because it is - you and I just exist in a bubble.

This can all be avoided and you can have you cake, too. Run the software on your metal. That's what my company does and it's great in many ways. We have a level of introspection into our application execution that other developers can only dream of. Forget logging, we can just debug it.

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

#960

Post by consteval »

mschuster91 wrote: post #545
pmlnr wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, with magisk.

That's a cat and mouse game, and some banking apps still manage to detect rooting, and so does Netflix and Google Pay.

Banking is something seldom enough that you can just run it in a browser, like God intended
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