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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

#881

Post by CodeWriter23 »

dwaite wrote: post #478
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The phone has intelligence to detect things that look like landmarks, and does cropping/normalization and converts to a mathematical form. Apple has a database trained on multiple photos of each landmark (or part of a landmark), to give a likelihood of a match. Homomorphic encryption means that the encrypted mathematical form of a potential landmark from the phone can be applied to the encrypted set of landmark data,…

> get an encrypted result set.

seems to me at that point, the server knows what segment of the overall dataset is being returned.

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

#882

Post by aquaticsunset »

thomascountz wrote: post #871
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 the Datadog Flare works like this?

The first time I used a flare with their support agents, it truly felt like magic. It's such a clever way to perform data collection for a specific, imperative need without doing a dragnet of constant use telemetry (as far as I'm aware)

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

#883

Post by jchw »

sgammon wrote: post #802
jchw wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is frankly nothing short of amazing that Apple ships things like homomorphic encryption, and differential privacy, and client-side vectorization, and encrypted vectors, at the scale that they inhabit... and they still get a bad report card back from consumers about privacy. Personally, I don't shy away from criticizing Google, but that's not the point. Apple makes big claims about their privacy practices that ne…

“Ask App Not To Track” would like a word

Not impressed. I'd be much more impressed if we could run software like Little Snitch on iOS, or install Firefox. Or even just side load apps without pay $100/year.

(Note: a Safari webview with a Firefox logo on it does not count.)

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

#884

Post by jchw »

hn3er1q wrote: post #868
jchw wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, if my mindset were leading, we wouldn't have cookie consent banners because we would've just banned non-essential tracking altogether.

Now we just have to define what’s “essential” and how to identify it, across states, countries and jurisdictions. Should be easy. ;)

We already did this for cookie consent so apparently it's possible.

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

#885

Post by sgammon »

aleden wrote: post #862
sgammon wrote: post #552

It is frankly nothing short of amazing that Apple ships things like homomorphic encryption, and differential privacy, and client-side vectorization, and encrypted vectors, at the scale that they inhabit... and they still get a bad report card back from consumers about privacy. Comparing Apple and Google, or Apple and Microsoft, it seems to me that Apple's track record on these issues is actually not as bad as public…

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...

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

#886

Post by matthewdgreen »

calf wrote: post #585
matthewdgreen wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a cryptographer and I just learned about this feature today while I’m on a holiday vacation with my family. I would have loved the chance to read about the architecture, think hard about how much leakage there is in this scheme, but I only learned about it in time to see that it had already been activated on my device. Coincidentally on a vacation where I’ve just taken about 400 photos of recognizable locations.…

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 this.

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

#887

Post by sgammon »

jchw wrote: post #883
sgammon wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Ask App Not To Track” would like a word

Not impressed. I'd be much more impressed if we could run software like Little Snitch on iOS, or install Firefox. Or even just side load apps without pay $100/year. (Note: a Safari webview with a Firefox logo on it does not count.)

> I'd be much more impressed if we could run software like Little Snitch on iOS

You can; or, at least, the APIs are available for this, and have been for some time.

> or install Firefox

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/i...

Inb4 "you cannot replace the built-in browser engine"

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit

> Or even just side load apps without pay $100/year

Then use an Android. Apple has taken a stance on this since it was formed. If you don't know by now that Apple is actively hostile toward hobbyists with their approach to computing, I can't help you. That is why there are alternatives from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and so many others.

To others (me), this is a feature. I would rather the $100/yr fee exist for several reasons.

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

#888

Post by sgammon »

ghjfrdghibt wrote: post #846
sgammon wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not, that is what makes it secure and why you should read the manual.

So no third party, including law enforcement can access data held by apple? Including apple? At any point? I'm asking these questions because I'm definitely not going to read the manual, for the reason I've already said, you seem to have read the manual, and I find it hard to believe. I'm only aware that apple offers advanced protection on your uploaded data, which you have to opt into, which might be what you're tal…

> So no third party, including law enforcement can access data held by apple? Including apple? At any point?

Correct. iMessage already delivered the features you are describing. The features described here are even stronger, since there is no centralized key escrow.

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

#889

Post by sgammon »

ghjfrdghibt wrote: post #846
sgammon wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not, that is what makes it secure and why you should read the manual.

So no third party, including law enforcement can access data held by apple? Including apple? At any point? I'm asking these questions because I'm definitely not going to read the manual, for the reason I've already said, you seem to have read the manual, and I find it hard to believe. I'm only aware that apple offers advanced protection on your uploaded data, which you have to opt into, which might be what you're tal…

> I'm only aware that apple offers advanced protection on your uploaded data, which you have to opt into, which might be what you're talking about...?

This is to store your data within iCloud. You can turn it off or on at your convenience, but end-to-end encryption prevents other features, which is why they leave the decision up to users.

In contrast, the article linked here does not involve your actual data leaving your device in any way. Even the metadata is encrypted and hashed and then compared in obfuscated form. Homomorphic encryption allows these computations to take place _on the encrypted form of the data_, _without_ revealing the results. Only you can make sense of the result.

Thus, data can be exchanged with a foreign computer while provably keeping your _actual_ data safe, since the computation was performed on an obfuscated form of it. Apple can't even track you down to gain your device's cooperation in decoding it, since you are hidden behind a proxy.

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

#890

Post by sgammon »

ghjfrdghibt wrote: post #846
sgammon wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not, that is what makes it secure and why you should read the manual.

So no third party, including law enforcement can access data held by apple? Including apple? At any point? I'm asking these questions because I'm definitely not going to read the manual, for the reason I've already said, you seem to have read the manual, and I find it hard to believe. I'm only aware that apple offers advanced protection on your uploaded data, which you have to opt into, which might be what you're tal…

Ultimately, here is a user-level guide to this feature:

(1) Do you trust iCloud? iMessage?

If so, then you already trust weaker technologies than the ones in use here. In my opinion, trusting iMessage is sensible, and it has been tested (see: FBI and San Bernardino shooter's phone).

(2) Do you trust TLS (i.e. HTTPS)?

If so, then you already trust weaker encryption architectures than the ones in use here. Your counterparty over TLS necessarily needs to _decrypt_ the data you send it. That is not the case here; homomorphic encryption means Apple processes the data in _encrypted form_.

(3) Do you consider opaque derived data as risky as plaintext metadata?

If so (i.e. if you feel an MD5 hash of your phone number is just as risky as your actual phone number), then you may take issue with this feature. If not (you are OK with hashes of your data because you understand how encryption works, and that it must be transmitted either way, so a salted hash is obviously a strictly better choice), then you already trust weaker protections than the ones in use here.

(4) Do you trust Face ID/Touch ID?

Hardware-secured keys are a necessary root of trust which underpins all these features. If you don't trust these, you won't like this feature, and, in fact, all bets are off.

Thus, the feature is secure enough to be defaulted to an active state.

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