631–640 of 735 posts
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A popup that's like "do you want to give app XY access to this data?" is really not that hard to build... It's a lazy excuse, nothing more.
And then most users soon have given permissions to a ton of apps with sketchy records of protecting user data, so what was the point of even trying to protect privacy?
You gotta let people make their own choices.
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Ah yes the well known EU equivalent of the CIA, NSA The one that’s so secret it’s not in any of the treaties that the sovereign nations that comprise the EU signed up for and implemented in line with their own democratic processes That agency Meanwhile they struggle to put together a border patrol, but advanced pan European surveillance apparatus that isn’t run by the US. Yeah bro
I don't think they were necessarily thinking of one EU-wide agency, but the recent attacks on encryption including Chat Control which almost passed, a lot of EU countries voting for far-right governments. I do believe we still have it better than in the US wrt privacy (e.g. we don't have Flock cameras), but we need to be careful considering what EU governments have been doing.
“European” governments. Non-european governments too.
By definition “not” the EU
Good. EU has the right to privacy. Apple also has the right to not conduct business in EU. If EU doesn’t like it, they can build their own sovereign software.
EU does not want privacy. They actually want to get rid of privacy every so often (adding backdoors in encrypted conversations). So far it has not worked out, but I’m afraid they will succeed at one point. To follow along that line of thoughts, the requirements they are actually asking for proper DMA compliance would probably go right in that direction tbh. I, for one, am happy Apple is taking a stance, and, as an Eu…
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It might be that we have a say, but there are a lot of decisions happening in Brussels that it "feels like" we, EU voters, don't have a say in. Such as: - Chat Control - Vehicle regulations (mandates on "eCall", disturbing audio visuals and other "safety measuers) in Regulation (EU) 2018/858 - Eventual upcoming ethanol restrictions - Ban on plastic drinking straws - Drink caps that are stuck to the bottles - Ban on p…
> It might be that we have a say, but there are a lot of decisions happening in Brussels that it "feels like" we, EU voters, don't have a say in. Well... your government certainly has a say in Brussels. Often enough, national politicians use "Brussels" as a scapegoat... nothing can happen in Brussels if national governments (or the Commission) don't propose it first, the Parliament has no right to initiative. If peop…
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> It's not as if Apple doesn't have the money to dedicate a team to matching the EU's requirements on a deadline. They just choose not to. Exactly, that's actually why I LIKE this decision so much. I'm not on Apple's side, but I REALLY like the idea that a company just says, "Fine, we'll comply by not even offering this product." It's a perfectly legitimate choice, and it FORCED Apple to evaluate the pros and cons. I…
Yes, exactly! Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services, and whether the regulations are worth it not to have them, or to have watered down versions of them. I say this without judgment - I see it as a legitimate area of consideration. I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or n…
I only use Apple hardware that is project assigned to me, my household is Apple free.
In fact, this applies to every single company that thinks they should control governments and not the other way around.
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Thats what Apple wants you to think. In reality it has nothing to do with privacy. Apple could let 3rd parties tap into these APIs but only after the user clicks away a big scary message telling the user they are leaving the comfort of the apple curated garden. This allows competition, but also allows privacy for those who want it. See? Simple really, but Apple being Apple dont want to let 3rd parties use its AI APIs…
Big scary warnings aren’t a solution either. I watch the way my son interacts with consent screens and warnings, and it’s barely believable- the average person is very well trained to click through the warnings. Someone might believe that people who ignore the warnings deserve everything they get, but I respectfully disagree. I remember helping my grandma uninstall and remove all the hostile browser extensions that h…
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Them making the only phones anyone uses makes them the gatekeepers on what people do on their phones -> Apple and Google are gatekeepers under the DMA. It doesn't matter how they became gatekeepers.
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But how many users are legitimately capable of evaluating how privacy preserving a random Cloud AI provider is? Let's remember that a tiny company called Meta had a "VPN" they provided for users that just happened to spy on them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39881962 And that went on for a long while before it was noticed. Now imagine the same situation but an infinite whack-a-mole of alternative AI providers…
> But how many users are legitimately capable of evaluating how privacy preserving a random Cloud AI provider is? Probably the same number of customers that are legitimately capable of evaluating the privacy of Apple's PCC? Let's not forget a tiny company called Apple that once proposed Client Side Scanning to "save the kids" by hashing your entire iCloud. Apple loves demanding the moral high ground to promote asinin…
Let's go through the process in detail:
- IF you had iCloud syncing on (which meant your photos were on Apple's servers anyway) they would download a pre-generated set of perceptual hashes of KNOWN CSAM. Like actual child porn, vetted and verified by humans. Perceptual hashing is a fun tech, look it up, super useful outside of this context too.
- Then IF your phone, independently, with zero connections to the outside matched MULTIPLE (they didn't specify the exact count) known child pornography image phashes those would be uploaded to Apple's servers. There was some cryptographic boogaloo at this point too that mathematically prevented Apple from decrypting the photos without enough matches.
- Then an actual human would look at "reduced quality" (can't remember the exact term) versions of the matched photos and determine whether it's some dipshit / bad actor forcing fake matches with kitten pictures or actual CSAM material.
- If the human verifier confirms that the person's phone has actual confirmed child porn, the authorities would be contacted.
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And the basic arguments:
"but muh privacy!" - You needed to have iCloud syncing enabled for this feature to be enabled at all. Your data is already on Apple's servers, they could just scan them there. But to do that they'd have to be able to decrypt them, which means the authorites can force them to do it too. Apple didn't want this. Thus: local scanning. You don't want your photos scanned, turn of iCloud sync. Done. Bad Tim Apple can't look at any of your photos.
"But what if I get multiple fake phash match files sent to me and I save all of them to my photos!" - then you'll inconvenience a human verifier for maybe 30 seconds. You won't get swatted or put on a list anywhere.
Oh and Apple already "hashes your entire iCloud" - also fully on device. That's why your iOS device runs hot for a week or so after installing a new major iOS revision. They run the fully local ML models on your pictures in the background and store them - also locally - to a database where you can go and search for "dog" or "receipt". Adding a phash to match to a local CSAM database is a non-issue at this point.
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If they're not "hand-selected", what would be the way to select the auditors? Just have an open house for anyone interested to come poke the hardware and software?
Have a set of clearly-defined requirements that doesn't randomly reject valid candidates? Nobody wants another opaque system like the App Store review process. By the sound of it, Apple's offered audit doesn't include insight into the most dangerous parts of a system like this. This could easily lead to a situation where real security experts are denied access to promote influencer-adjacent Yes Men who rubberstamp th…
How I understood it that they want _actual_ security researchers, not some random dude who once installed Kali Linux and ran nmap.
It's state of the art private compute according to actual experts and everyone will be wasting their time if the "researchers" need to be coached through the process and explained the basics of the system's operation.
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It was probably really relevant and life-changing. Well I guess I’ll just get on the way I did before.
The same with Siri, I don’t need it and don’t care about some hyped up AI that Apple wants to push down my throat.
Similar to your comments, I don’t need it and if you (and Apple) don’t want to share or comply with the rules, well why should that make me unhappy? Or make me get angry at the EU?
FOMO? Pffft Joy of not caring!