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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

#341

Post by gojomo »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #306

Is this just a smokescreen around slowly sneaking CSAM scanning back in after the pushback last time? The "default on" behavior is suspect. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-commun...

My thoughts exactly: "we've got this crafty image fingerprinting, the CSAM detection use proved too controversial to roll out, but let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users, so the code atays alive, improving, & ready for future expansion."

Whether such fingerprinting can reliably be limited to public "landmarks" is an interesting question, dependent on unclear implementation details.

Even if the user-visible search is limited to 'landmarks', does the process pre-create (even if only on-device) fingerprints of many other things as well? If so, it suddenly becomes possible for briefly-active non-persistent malware to instantly find images of interest without the wider access & additional processing it'd otherwise take.

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

#342

Post by CodeWriter23 »

ls612 wrote: post #314
goodluckchuck wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How cannot tell the picture contains the Eiffel Tower if the image is not decrypted?

Because it turns out that mathematicians and computer scientists have devised schemes that allow for certain computational operations to be performed on encrypted data without revealing the data itself. You can do a+b=c and it doesn’t reveal anything about what a and b are is the intuition here. This has been mostly confined to the realm of theory and mathematics until very recently but Apple has operationalized it f…

And then when the system does the computation to determine your location (wait.what?)

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

#343

Post by sinuhe69 »

paxys wrote: post #183

So basically - You take a picture. Apple encrypts it and uploads it to their server. The server matches the (still encrypted) picture to a database and tells your device "this picture contains the Eiffel Tower". Later when you search for Eiffel Tower on your device the photo pops up. Is the complexity and security risk really worth it for such a niche feature? It's also funny that Apple is simultaneously saying "don'…

They don’t send the photos. Nobody sent your photos anywhere but only certain meta data and its similarity vectors for matching purpose.

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

#344

Post by matheusmoreira »

parasubvert wrote: post #331
matheusmoreira wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure what the right call is here. I am sure. The right call is to never send any data from the device to anyone unless the user explicitly tells the device to do it. The only thing the device should do is whatever its user tells it to do. The user didn't tell it to do this. Apple did. > But the conclusion "Thus, the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device." isn't true Irre…

Complete nonsense. *All networked devices do things behind their users back* at this point, and have for years, and do not ask for consent for most of it. And users would REJECT granular opt-in as a terrible UX. Let's look at the primary alternative, Android. It generally does not provide you this level of granular control on network access either without rooted hacks. Apps and the phone vendor can do whatever they w…

Yes, apps going behind people's back and exfiltrating personal information has become normal. That's not an argument, it's merely a statement of fact. This shouldn't be happening at all. The fact it got to this point doesn't imply it shouldn't be stopped.

No one's advocating for granular opt in either. There are much better ways. We have to make it so that data is toxic to corporations. Turn data into expensive legal liabilities they don't want to deal with. These corporations should not even be thinking about it. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we are done with them, not covertly collecting all the data they possibly can for "legitimate" purposes. People should be able to use their computers without ever worrying that corporations are exploiting them in any way whatsoever.

The Android situation is just as bad, by the way. Rooting is completely irrelevant. You may think you can hack it but if you actually do it the phone fails remote attestation and the corporations discriminate against you based on that, usually by straight up denying you service. On a very small number of devices, Google's phones ironically, you can access those keys and even set your own. And it doesn't matter, because the corporations don't trust your keys, they only trust the keys of other corporations. They don't care to know your device is secure, they want to know it's fully owned by Google so that you can't do things the corporations don't like.

It's not something that can be solved with technology. Computer freedom needs to become law.

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

#345

Post by lapcat »

kemayo wrote: post #336
lapcat wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's probably a pretty large set of people, perhaps even the majority As the article notes, this new feature is so "popular" that neither Apple nor the Apple media have bothered to mention it. AFAICT it's not even in Apple's document listing all the new features of iOS 18: https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-18/pdf/iOS_18_All_New_Features...

True, but I don't see how that relates to anything? You asked for a hypothetical set of people who'd have iCloud Photos disabled but would accept metadata being sent to Apple for better search. I can't help you if you want to move the goalposts after I give you that.

> You asked for a hypothetical set of people who'd have iCloud Photos disabled but would accept metadata being sent to Apple for better search.

No, I didn't ask for a hypothetical set. I wanted the actual set of people.

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

#346

Post by callc »

sneak wrote: post #324
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…

Developers of software want, and feel entitled to, the data on your computer, both about your usage within the app, as well as things you do outside of the app (such as where you go and what you buy). Software will continue to spy on people so long as it is not technically prohibited or banned.

I don’t.

I highly suggest everyone else does their darnedest not too either. Don’t do it in your own software. Refuse and push back against it at $dayJob.

I realize that my small contribution as a privacy and data-respecting SWE is extremely small, but if we all push back against the MBAs telling us to do these things, the world will be better off.

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

#347

Post by gigel82 »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #306

Is this just a smokescreen around slowly sneaking CSAM scanning back in after the pushback last time? The "default on" behavior is suspect. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-commun...

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 purposes (such as notifying the CCP about people's Winnie-the-Pooh memes), or a lot more ominous things.

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

#348

Post by abctx »

kemayo wrote: post #308
lapcat wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the Venn diagram of people who both (1) deliberately refrain from enabling iCloud Photos but nonetheless (2) want the Photos app to phone home to Apple in order to identify landmarks in locally stored photos?

It's probably a pretty large set of people, perhaps even the majority, since I'd suspect that most people don't pay for additional iCloud storage and can't fit their photo library into 5GB. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if they'd added this feature and gated it behind iCloud Photos being enabled, we'd have different articles complaining about Apple making a cash grab by trying to get people to pay for premium stor…

> It's probably a pretty large set of people, perhaps even the majority, since I'd suspect that most people don't pay for additional iCloud storage and can't fit their photo library into 5GB.

Large set? Yes. Majority? No. CIRP says 2/3 of US Apple users pay for iCloud storage[0]. It's this popular for the exact reason you mentioned. Almost no one can fit their photo library into 5GB so they opt in to the cheap 50GB for $0.99/month. 50GB is enough for a lot of people.

[0] https://wccftech.com/paid-icloud-subscription-is-apples-most...

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

#349

Post by tigershark »

dmix wrote: post #268
amatecha wrote: post #123

Completely, 100% agreed: > the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device. > It ought to be up to the individual user to decide their own tolerance for the risk of privacy violations. [...] By enabling the "feature" without asking, Apple disrespects users and their preferences. I never wanted my iPhone to phone home to Apple. Regardless of how obfuscated or "secure" or otherwise "priva…

How much size would it take to store a model of every known location in the world and common things? For ex: I sent a friend a photo of my puppy in the bathtub and her Airpods (via iphone) announced "(name) sent you a photo of a dog in a bathtub". She thought it was really cool and so do I personally. That's a useful feature. IDK how much that requires going off-device though.

I’m not an expert, but I would say extremely small.

For comparison Hunyuan video encodes a shit-ton of videos and rudimentary real world physics understanding, at very high quality in only 13B parameters. LLAMA 3.3 encodes a good chunk of all the knowledge available to humanity in only 70B parameters. And this is only considering open source models, the closed source one may be even more efficient.

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