Where's the "Apple is the only tech giant that respects your privacy" crowd? Just because your data isn't being publicly auctioned doesn't mean they aren't harvesting it and infringing on your privacy.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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I switched to iPhone from Android because I was tired of Google making changes to their security and APIs that were killing my macros I'd write for my phone. I was also tired of Google sending everything good to the graveyard. Finally, I hated that Google would promise features or support for x number of years and then pull the rug out from under me (although, lack of support was usually caused by the manufacturer)
Before spending $1000 on my iPhone, I told my wife that it was a good investment because of Apple's proven history of supporting devices with 5 years of updates; so we agreed that I'd keep this iPhone as my daily driver for 5 years because of the exuberant cost.
Well, my wish came true and here we are. I've got a phone that doesn't respect my privacy, doesn't respect my settings, has a frustrating UI/UX, and has low compatibility with most of my existing infrastructure. I gotta admit, though, my experience is far more consistent now, but not in a good way.
I cannot imagine spending $1000 on a phone in general. And even more so, I cannot imagine spending $1000 on a phone I cannot even sideload something like Newpipe on.
Since you are seemingly wealthy enough for this - maybe Pixel with GrapheneOS would be a right fit for you? Pixels also have longer support now (although I still think it's very short, so I'd likely have to switch to Lineage afterwards).
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I have used both iOS and Android for more than a decade. After every update on both systems I have to go through and delete/disable junk I don't need/privacy issues.
The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.
iOS's UI is terrible to use with everything taking twice as long as it should. So many illogical hidden commands.
Everything has gotten randomly harder to get basic things done.
My win 10 business computer with classic shell will stop being supported the end of the year... Oh joy....
While I'm still struggling to find an appropriate replacement for my photo editing apps, I'm happy to report that support and usability for most popular Linux distros have improved to the point that I now find Linux not only more stable, but easier to navigate than Win 10 was even at its best.
The amount of noise associated with Windows, generally due to people answering questions about the wrong version of windows or the wrong application, searching for any help topics is like trying to run through mud. It's literally quicker now to learn a totally new skill on Linux than to try to update your knowledge base on Windows.
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Between this and Tim Cook's generous personal donation to the Trump inauguration, those folks seem strangely silent.
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Lemmy isn't promoted by Apple
It's not data harvesting if it works as claimed. The data is sent encrypted and not decrypted by the remote system performing the analysis.
From the link:
Put simply: You take a photo; your Mac or iThing locally outlines what it thinks is a landmark or place of interest in the snap; it homomorphically encrypts a representation of that portion of the image in a way that can be analyzed without being decrypted; it sends the encrypted data to a remote server to do that analysis, so that the landmark can be identified from a big database of places; and it receives the suggested location again in encrypted form that it alone can decipher.
If it all works as claimed, and there are no side-channels or other leaks, Apple can't see what's in your photos, neither the image data nor the looked-up label.
It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed. The data is sent encrypted and not decrypted by the remote system performing the analysis.
What if I don't want Apple looking at my photos in any way, shape or form?'
I don't want Apple exflitrating my photos.
I don't want Apple planting their robotic minion on my device to process my photos.
I don't want my OS doing stuff I didn't tell it to do. Apple has no business analyzing any of my data.
sdklf;gjkl;dsgjkl;dsgjkl;dsgsjkl;g
TLDR edit: I'm supporting the above comment - ie. i do not support apple's actions in this case.
It's definitely good for people to learn a bit about homomorphic computing, and let's give some credit to apple for investing in this area of technology.
That said:
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Encryption in the majority of cases doesn't actually buy absolute privacy or security, it buys time - see NIST's criteria of ≥30 years for AES. It will almost certainly be crackable either by weakening or other advances.. How many people are truly able to give genuine informed consent in that context?
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Encrypting something doesn't always work out as planned, see example:
"DON'T WORRY BRO, ITS TOTALLY SAFE, IT'S ENCRYPTED!!"
Yes Apple is surely capable enough to avoid simple, documented, mistakes such as above, but it's also quite likely some mistake will be made. And we note, apple are also extremely likely capable of engineering leaks and concealing it or making it appear accidental (or even if truly accidental, leveraging it later on).
Whether they'd take the risk, whether their (un)official internal policy would support or reject that is ofc for the realm of speculation.
That they'd have the technical capability to do so isn't at all unlikely. Same goes for a capable entity with access to apple infrastructure.
- The fact they've chosen to act questionably regarding user's ability to meaningfully consent, or even consent at all(!), suggests there may be some issues with assuming good faith on their part.
How hard is it to grasp that I don't want Apple doing anything in my cellphone I didn't explicitely consent to?
I don't care what technology they develop, or whether they're capable of applying it correctly: the point is, I don't want it on my phone in the first place, anymore than I want them to setup camp in my living room to take notes on what I'm doing in my house.
My phone, my property, and Apple - or anybody else - is not welcome on my property.
Sorry for my poor phrasing, perhaps re-read my post? i'm entirely supporting your argument. Perhaps your main point aligns most with my #3? It could be argued they've already begun from a position of probable bad faith by taking this data from users in the first place.
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It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed.
Narrator: It doesn't.
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In case anyone came to the comments looking for directions on how to opt out:
- Go to Settings. 2) Scroll down and select "Photos." 3) Locate the "Enhanced Visual Search" option. Turn off the toggle.
In case that you be aware that it is activated by default, 90% of the users are not. No advice by Apple
sorry, i think you had typo or two. what did you mean to say?
aware*
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"Apple is being thoughtful about doing this in a (theoretically) privacy-preserving way, but I don’t think the company is living up to its ideals here," observed software developer Michael Tsai in an analysis shared Wednesday. "Not only is it not opt-in, but you can’t effectively opt out if it starts uploading metadata about your photos before you even use the search feature. It does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud."
Reading the article, the service itself is interesting and it sounds like Apple might have found a way to process the data while preserving user privacy, but the fact that they unilaterally opted everyone in without giving them a choice is the biggest problem.
That's Apple though. "We know what you want better than you do" is almost a company mantra.
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An opt-out that you can't opt out of because Apple already opted you in and took your photos?
This seems like it is going to be a huge lawsuit. Since a class action won't deter them or help us, let's all sue Apple individually in small claims court and kill them by death from a billion cuts.
Not saying that it shouldn't be illegal and it's shady as fuck, but GDPR opt-outs are usually retroactive, meaning you can remove consent from data they've already processed, and they have to retroactively scrub your personal data out.
How do they retroactively remove the knowledge the AI has gained from analyzing all of our personal information?
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For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.
In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing "AI" to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.
As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.
And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.
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Apple opted customers in, got sued, and will now prompt customers if they want to be opted in or out.
And if there's a class action lawsuit then it'll be $95 million settlement spread out over 1.46 billion customers (this just happened over Siri spying).
To what end? They claim they can't read the data, nor the output, nor where it originated from. So... what's the point? If their claims are true then what is the point of all that data transfer, processing, and the massive engineering efforts they've put into it? If it's just so they can tag a location, then they could have just used geo location on the device without sharing anything. If it's to be able to search for " Eiffel Tower" and see pictures you have of it, well, haven't they already been able to do this before this feature with on-board AI processing that doesn't require the data to be shipped to Apple? Something seems off to me, but maybe because I'm not clear on the purpose.
Remember, when you buy an apple product, you're directly supporting Trump.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/03/tim-cook-apple-donate-1-million-trump-inauguration
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Nothing but depressing news for common people all around.
It's a cool idea: certain approaches to encryption still allow math to be performed. Here's one example: say you encrypt data X with algorithm Z. then you could multiply Z by four, which would also multiply X by four. So you can run computations on the encrypted data without decrypting it.
It would be quite complex, but I suppose you could run a machine learning model this way to tag images without ever seeing the image, or knowing the resulting tag. Only the decryption key can be used read the results (which is on the user's iphone, I suppose).
However... I don't know how much compute cost this adds to an already expensive computation. The encryption used might not be the strongest out there. But the idea is pretty cool!
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Ease of use vs all the rest, as usual
Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides [your] IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos. You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.
Apple did explain the technology in a technical paper published on October 24, 2024, around the time that Enhanced Visual Search is believed to have debuted. A local machine-learning model analyzes photos to look for a "region of interest" that may depict a landmark. If the AI model finds a likely match, it calculates a vector embedding – an array of numbers – representing that portion of the image.
So it's local. And encrypted. How is this really news? Am I missing something?
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Never accept the technology just because it is optional. Eventually it will become default and eventually maditory.
Although this is terrible, once again a headline on lemmy made me paranoid only to find out that my phone probably doesn’t even support this.
Going through the settings and turning things off is second nature to me by now, it’s not unique to Apple (looking at your Microsoft).
What we need is an opt out mode on every device. Similar to the accept necessary cookies only, we need every device to let you fully opt out from everything it can when you boot it up for the first time.
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"does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud." damn that's a bit much!
Edit; in this thread, people who miss the point of homomorphic encryption to dunk (sadly often rightfully so) on Apple.
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