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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

#991

Post by xp84 »

necovek wrote: post #753
xp84 wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am happy to learn what I may have been imagining: thanks for that! The law has turned out to be useless, agreed — or at least, it has driven hard-to-navigate UX that we live through today. The intent could have taken us in a different direction with some care (i.e. mandating a clear, no-dark-pattern opt-out/opt-in ahead-of-time option a la DoNotTrack header that similarly failed): if web clients (browsers) were req…

'Do not track' was stupid. 'Cannot Be Tracked' would have worked fine. The difference is that the browser is literally the user's agent, so it should work for the user. It is the thing which identifies you today, and could easily NOT identify you without your permission if that was what was mandated -- and "big bad ad tech" could do nothing about it.

Simply select the sites whose first party cookies you want preserved, triggered only by user actively toggling it on, or prompted for on a user-triggered POST that occurs on a page with a user-filled password field (similar to how popups were killed off, no prompting on a POST done without user interaction). "Do you want to let this site 'ycombinator.com' remember you (stay logged in, etc.)?" [YES] [NO]

Otherwise delete the cookies in X minutes/hours/etc.

Or another way, keep the cookies while a tab is on the site, then once no tabs are visiting it, put them in an 'archive.' Upon visiting the site again, show a prompt "Allow ycombinator.com to recognize you from your previous visit(s)?" If yes, restore them, otherwise, delete them.

It is so simple to have browsers be responsible for the user's safety, yet since we left it to politicians to decide, we got all this silliness putting it on the users -- and where the technical implementations are by necessity INSIDE the JS sandbox where it's difficult for users to verify that it's being done correctly.

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

#992

Post by xp84 »

Pooge wrote: post #829
xp84 wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

- Nearly all commercial websites advertise their site in some way

- Nearly all websites people use day-to-day are commercial

- To run ads in a post-1997 world, you must have a conversion pixel because ads aren't sold by impression, they're sold by clicks and they need to know someone made it to your site

- Therefore, some form of tracking cookies (oooh evil) are required

- Big Tech (Google/Meta/X) controls 99% of the real estate where ads can be run, so... they will know about visitors

Unless browsers simply had a setting by default to only save cookies past one session when users allow it. That would be a wildly more effective and efficient solution than forcing every single random website to implement some byzantine javascript monstrosity which attempts to somehow inhibit other JS it doesn't actually control from dropping cookies -- something that the JS API in a browser doesn't even support.

I work on a product that doesn't even have any ad traffic land on it or want to do any tracking, and setting up a cookie management platform was insane. You have to dive into the docs of every SDK to try to figure out how this particular SDK can be signaled to do the GDPR compliance things.

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

#993

Post by concinds »

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.

Still does it. I see it regularly. Default settings.

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

#994

Post by scratchyone »

jncfhnb wrote: post #654
scratchyone wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the research you'd know that they don't have access to the vector either. They never decrypt the data. All operations on their server are done directly on the encrypted data. They get 0 information about your photos. They cannot even see which landmark your vector was closest to.

I don’t care! I do not want them helping themselves to representations of my data. I don’t care if it’s encrypted or run through a one way hash. I don’t care if they only interact with it via homomorphic methods. They can, again, fuck the hell off. A private corporation has no business reading my files for its own benefit.

> A private corporation has no business reading my files for its own benefit.

that's what i'm saying!! because of all these special privacy measures it's genuinely impossible for them to get any benefit from this. it is only used for your benefit to improve photo search on your local device.

they don't see any of the data, they simply perform computations blindly over the encrypted data that are then returned to your device to then decrypt the results locally and use them to improve local photo indexing for you.

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

#995

Post by user_7832 »

kureikain wrote: post #537

Just ged rid if icloud and apple photos. slow as f*ck, crash all the time once the library get big enough on my mac. damn slow to scoll in the photos app with lot of picture. I switched to https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface and import all of my photo into it. 1.3TB and it's damn fast with all the face detection and ml features.

Is it possible to search immich images via spotlight like one can from iCloud photos? I’d love to jump ship away from iCloud but spotlight search is legitimately helpful and I use it many times a week. It’s saved my bacon quite a few times too (didn’t realize I had eg a document as a photo or pdf instead of email).

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

#996

Post by spectre3d »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #839
necovek wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> All it takes is for 50% of the internet users to stop visiting web sites with them, and web site authors will stop tracking users with external cookies. How would the content creators or news sites earn then? Web is built on ads, and ads are built on tracking as untargeted ads pays significantly lower than targeted.

>How would the content creators or news sites earn then?

“Creators” seem to do just fine with the patronage model.

> ads are built on tracking as untargeted ads pays [sic] significantly lower than targeted.

Not my problem. I am not required to prop up your failed business model.

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

#997

Post by spectre3d »

spectre3d wrote: post #996
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All it takes is for 50% of the internet users to stop visiting web sites with them, and web site authors will stop tracking users with external cookies. How would the content creators or news sites earn then? Web is built on ads, and ads are built on tracking as untargeted ads pays significantly lower than targeted.

>How would the content creators or news sites earn then? “Creators” seem to do just fine with the patronage model. > ads are built on tracking as untargeted ads pays [sic] significantly lower than targeted. Not my problem. I am not required to prop up your failed business model.

My opinion is, of course, in the minority. I understand that Google will do their best to keep the status quo in the advertising industry.

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

#999

Post by adrianN »

xp84 wrote: post #992
Pooge wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

- Nearly all commercial websites advertise their site in some way - Nearly all websites people use day-to-day are commercial - To run ads in a post-1997 world, you must have a conversion pixel because ads aren't sold by impression, they're sold by clicks and they need to know someone made it to your site - Therefore, some form of tracking cookies (oooh evil) are required - Big Tech (Google/Meta/X) controls 99% of the…

I’m not a web developer, but it seems to me that the referrer that you get after a click on a link should be sufficient to count clicks vs impressions.

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

#1000

Post by GlacierFox »

lovich wrote: post #964
GlacierFox wrote: post #940

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies, I read your comment like you'd written it, not like you've retro-actively decided you'd written it.

Everyone knows that sarcasm doesn’t transmit well through text. His phrasing isn’t uncommon for something someone would say out loud with a sarcastic tone of voice

I use /s at the end of comments I intend to be sarcastic rather than expecting the population to psychically read my mind. /s
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