Consider these points:
1. Users don't need a PhD to understand "This feature will send data about your photos to Apple's servers to enable better search."
2. The complexity of the privacy protections doesn't justify removing user choice. By that logic, we should never ask users about any technical feature.
3. Many privacy-conscious users follow a simple principle: they want control over what leaves their device, regardless of how it's protected.
The "it's too complex to explain" argument could justify any privacy-invasive default. Would you apply the same logic to, say, enabling location services by default because explaining GPS technology is too complex?
The real solution is simple: explain the feature in plain language, highlight the benefits, outline the privacy protections, and let users make their own choice. Apple already does this for many other features. "Default off with opt-in" is a core principle of privacy-respecting design, regardless of how robust the underlying protections are.
Closest I come to presenting an opinion on the right way UX was "I'm not sure what the right call is here.". The thing I disagreed with was a technical statement "the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device.".
Privacy respecting design and tech is a passion of mine. I'm pointing out "user choice" gets hard as the techniques used for privacy exceed the understanding of users. Users can intuitively understand "send my location to Google [once/always]" without understanding GPS satellites. User's can't understand the difference between "send my photo" and "send homomorphicly encrypted locally differentially private vector of e=0.8" and "send differentially private vector of e=50". Your prompt "send data about your photos..." would allow for much less private designs than this. If we want to move beyond "ask the user then do it", we need to get into the nitty gritty details here. I'd love to see more tech like this in consumer products, where it's private when used, even when opted-in.
Apple can try to explain as best it can how user data is protected when they use the online service, and then the user makes a choice to either use the service or not.
In my case, I have don't even have a practical use for the new feature, so it's irrelevant how private the online service is. As it is, though, Apple silently forced me to use an online service that I never wanted.
1. The technical excellence of Apple's privacy protections (which you've explained well and seem robust)
2. The ethical question of enabling data transmission by default
Even with best-in-class privacy protections, the principle of user agency matters. A simplified prompt like "This feature will analyze your photos locally and send secure, anonymized data to Apple's servers to enable better search" would give users the basic choice while being technically accurate. The technical sophistication of the privacy measures, while commendable, doesn't override the need for informed consent.
The problem with this feature is that we cannot verify that Apple’s implementation of the math is correct and without security flaws. Everyone knows there is security flaws in all software, and this implementation is not open (I.e. we cannot review the code, and even if we could review code we cannot verify that the provided code was the code used in the iOS build). So, we have to trust Apple did not make any mistakes in their implementation.
They could just have the OS batch uploads until a later point e.g. when the phone checks for updates.
The point is that this is all about risk mitigation not elimination.
Hey! That’s wrong.
But I promise I won’t do anything wrong with it.
Well ok then.
Other than their entire reputation
https://www.csoonline.com/article/571797/the-apache-log4j-vu...
What was the other package that had the mysterious .?
You say this as if being shamed into patching the occasional vuln is equivalent to security best practices.
Open code which can be independently audited is only a baseline for trustworthy code. A baseline none of those three meet. And one which by itself is insufficient to counter a reflections on trusting trust style attack. For that you need open code, diverse open build toolchains, and reproducible builds. None of which is being done by those three.
Are you getting your ideas about security from the marketing department?
1: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract... 2: https://www.wired.com/story/google-android-pixel-showcase-vu... 3: https://blog.morphisec.com/5-ntlm-vulnerabilities-unpatched-...
OSS is not the panacea that everyone touts it to be.
I'm not aware of any major open source projects that haven't experienced some level of auditing. Coverity alone scans everything you're likely to find in a distribution like Debian or Fedora: https://scan.coverity.com/o/oss_success_stories
> How many packages have you audited?
Several on which I depend. And I'm just one pair of eyeballs.
> Personally, I don't have the skillz to do that.
Then why are you commenting about it?
> OSS is not the panacea that everyone touts it to be.
I don't know who's touting is as a panacea, seems like a strawman you've erected. It's a necessary pre-requisite without which best practices aren't possible or verifiable.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410164/linux-kernel-uni...
A non-advertized feature, which is not independently verified, which about image contents? I would be prefer independent verification of their claims.
And at that point all the opt-in dialogs in the world don't matter and you should not be running iOS but building some custom Android ROM from scratch.
>Let’s say you wanted to count how many of your online friends were dogs, while respecting the maxim that, on the Internet, nobody should know you’re a dog. To do this, you could ask each friend to answer the question “Are you a dog?” in the following way. Each friend should flip a coin in secret, and answer the question truthfully if the coin came up heads; but, if the coin came up tails, that friend should always say “Yes” regardless. Then you could get a good estimate of the true count from the greater-than-half fraction of your friends that answered “Yes”. However, you still wouldn’t know which of your friends was a dog: each answer “Yes” would most likely be due to that friend’s coin flip coming up tails.
Quantum computers will make breaking RSA and Diff-Hellman public key encryption easier. They will not effect things like AES, nor things like hashing:
> Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash).
And for RSA and DH, there are algorithms being deployed to deal with that:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_Post-Quantum_Cryptography...
Anyway, back to the subject at hand; here's Apple on that subject:
> We use BFV parameters that achieve post-quantum 128-bit security, meaning they provide strong security against both classical and potential future quantum attacks
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...
Where are the boundaries in this scenario?
I'm asking: what does an opt in for that really look like? You're not going to be able to give the user enough info to make an educated decision. There's ton of risk of "privacy washing" ("we use DP" but at very poor epsilon, or "we use E2E encryption" with side channel data gathering).
There's no easy answer. "ask the user", when the question requires a phd level understanding of stats to evaluate the risk isn't a great answer. But I don't have another one.
Don't do things without my consent!!! How hard is it for Silicon Valley to understand this very simple concept?
Every NTP session leaks time desync information, which reveals—on modern hardware—relativistic travel, including long airplane trips.
Every software update leaks a fortune about what you run and when you connect.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask that people consent to these; I don’t think they can. I absolutely agree that photo metadata is different and at a way higher level of the stack.
Should Apple insist that every end user consents to the user agent string sent on every HTTP request?
You've succinctly identified a (maybe the) huge problem in the computing world today. Computers should not do anything without the user's command/consent. This seems like a hopeless and unachievable ideal only because of how far we've already strayed from the light.
Even Linux, supposedly the last bastion of user control... it's a mess. Do a fresh install and type ps ax at a shell. You'll see dozens of processes in the background doing god knows what. I didn't consent to any of this! The distribution's maintainer simply decided on my behalf that I want the computer to be running all these processes. This is totally normalized!
I don't expect my computer to ask for consent again and again for every byte sent over the network, but I do expect it to obtain my consent before generally accessing the network and sending bytes over the network.
To me, there's never been a case, except maybe in the first decade or so of the hobby/tinkering PC movement, where most users had this ability.
Should we just not use computers?
I don't think "should we just give up?" is a reasonable question to anything.
And getting downvoted for saying it, which is a fascinating incongruity.
Or signal of non-named stakeholders.
If the world was a nightclub, “Silicon Valley” would be a creepy guy who walks up to every woman and says “You’re now dating me. To stop, you need to opt out using a form that I will do my best to make sure you can’t read.”
Choosing an Apple product is consent to trusting Apple. Continued use their products represents ongoing consent. This is an objective fact about all complex connected devices and it cannot possibly be otherwise.
Yes you did. You purchased a computer, put this software on it and executed it. If you didn't want it to do whatever it's doing you should have determined what it would do beforehand and chose not to do it.
Even assuming that running the software implies my consent (which I would dispute), how do I make the decision about whether I should execute the software if I don't know what it is doing?
This all-or-nothing approach is also problematic. I should not have to allow the developer free rein to do whatever he wants, as a condition of using the software. This is why operating systems are slowly building granular permissions and consent checks.
I agree that all-or-nothing is problematic but even with a flexible permission system the best you can hope for is for all the things apps do to be itemized and set to sane defaults. But even then sanity is subjective. For every person like you (and me fwiw) who values privacy there are 1000 people who will never find the settings, don't care about privacy, and will wonder why stuff isn't working.
Ultimately privacy is similar to security in that it comes down to trust. If you don't trust your OS you're screwed. Your choices are try to exert as much control over it as possible, or don't use it.
How would that make any difference in this case? Presumably, you'll have long-ago checked the "allow general access to the network" setting, so you've given consent to the "send my photo data" action. Heck, surely connecting to the internet in the first place is implicit consent that you want to send stuff over the network?
Sure, you can ask users "do you want to use this". But why do we ask that? Historically it's user consent (knowingly opting in), and legal requirements around privacy. We don't have that pop up on any random new feature, it's gated to ones with some risk. There are questions to ask: does this technical method have any privacy risk? Can the user make informed consent? Again: I'm not pitching we ditch opt-in (I really don't have a fix in mind), but I feel like we're defaulting too quickly to "old tools for new problems". The old way is services=collection=consent. These are new privacy technologies which use a service, but the privacy is applied locally before leaving your device, and you don't need to trust the service (if you trust the DP/HE research).
End of the day: I'd really like to see more systems like this. I think there were technically flawed statements in the original blog article under discussion. I think new design methods might be needed when new technologies come into play. I don't have any magic answers.
Such as?
You're an Apple employee?
You're presenting it as if you have to explain elliptic curve cryptography in order to toggle a "show password" dialogue but that's disingenuous framing, all you have to say is "Allow Apple to process your images", simple as that. Otherwise you can argue many things can't possibly be made into options. Should location data always be sent, because satellites are complicated and hard to explain? Should we let them choose whether they can turn wifi on or off, because you have to explain IEEE 802.11 to them?
Then don’t run someone else’s software on your device. It’s not your software, you are merely a licensee. Don’t delude yourself that you are morally entitled to absolute control over it.
The only way to have absolute control over software is with an RMS style obsession with Free software.
Want a phone that doesn’t spy on you? Make it yourself. If you can’t, find some like-minded people and incentivise them (with money or otherwise) to make it for you. If they can’t (or won’t) perhaps contemplate the possibility that large capitalist enterprises might be the only practical way to develop some products.
To suggest that customers are "morally entitled" to a Samsung phone with zero tracking and zero telemetry is similarly absurd. If you don't like Samsung's product, don't buy it.
Why not? What gives McD the right to make such a decision unilaterally, other than might?
In fact, this is how disability legislation (for example) already tends to work. You don't get to tell disabled people to just go somewhere else, you have to make reasonable accomodations for them.
This cannot be a serious question.
Restaurant have a legal obligation to warn the customers. AKA "opt-in" which is NOT what Apple is doing. And it's the whole issue with their behavior.
All consumers can engage in is Info Wars style paranoia, and grandstanding about the aforementioned paranoia.
We can regulate these problems.
If the EU can regulate away the lightning connector they can regulate away this kind of stuff.
No EU regulation could regulate away all "moral" concerns over software. More specifically, they EU could regulate, but the overwhelming majority of software companies would either strip significant features out for EU customers, or exit the market altogether.
This isn't rocket surgery.
I mostly agree. I'm just annoyed "this new privacy tech is too hard to explain" leads to "you shouldn't do it". This new privacy tech is a huge net positive for users.
Also: from other comments sounds like it might have been opt-in the whole time. Someone said a fresh install has it off.
It's a positive compared to doing the same "feature" without the privacy tech. It's not necessarily a positive compared to not forcing the "feature" on the user at all.
The privacy tech isn't necessarily a positive as a whole if it leads companies to take more liberties in the name of "hey you don't need to be able to turn it off because we have this magical privacy tech (that nobody understands and may or may not actually work please don't look into it too hard)".
This would be easily solvable: On first run show a window with:
> Hey, we have this new cool feature that does X and is totally private because of Y [link to Learn More]
> Do you want to turn it on? You can change your mind later in Settings
> [Yes] [No]
You don’t use iCloud for anything? When you change phones do you start fresh or use your computer for backups? Do sync bookmarks? Browsing history?
Do you use iMessage?
edit: I will just add, even if we accept the argument that it's extremely secure and impossible to leak information, then where do we draw the line between "extremely secure" and "somewhat secure" and "not secure at all"? Should we trust Apple to make this decision for us?
Apple IS just another cloud provider / centralized backup service. It's not fundamentally different than others, and if you're not in select group of whatever the respectful term is for those who stay strictly inside apple ecosystem, you will have multiple clouds and multiple data sets and multiple backups that all interact with each other and your heterogeneous devices in unpredictable ways. Icloud will not help you with that any more than google cloud or Samsung cloud etc. They all want to own all of your stuff, neither is simply a hyper helpful neutral director.
Even if you use Microsoft Office or GSuite and save using the standard file picker, you can save to iCloud. iCloud has a native app for Windows and plug ins on Windows to sync browser bookmarks for Chrome, Edge and Firefox
And the alternative people are proposing are four or five self hosted solutions?
Iphone is "just another device". I don't feel Icloud is any better integrated with my Samsung note, than google is integrated with my iPhone - in fact, the opposite. Google, for example, CAN sync my photos across iphone and Android and windows devices. Whereas my wife knows the primeval scream from the home office every 6 months I try to claw photos out of apple's greedy selfish hands :-)
For people who JUST use iphone, sure, Icloud is the boss just like for people who JUST use e.g. Samsung galaxy the Samsung cloud is awesome. But that's not a high bar. I feel we are still lacking empathy here for people like original poster who may have more than one device in their lives.
And I wouldn’t have the same arguments if they weee using Google cloud. But they are concerned about “privacy” and trust Google?
But my argument is about people thinking that Apple or Google should care about the minuscule number of people who are hosting their own syncing services
Or as the GP suggested, forego the cloud entirely. iCloud and Apple’s built in iOS backup is not a magic bullet unfortunately.
No, if you enable Advanced Data Protection for iCloud[1], the photos stored in Apple Photos are end to end encrypted.
Yes, I always start with clean installs, both on iOS and on macOS. Sometimes I even restart fresh on the same device, as I make sure my hardware lasts. I don’t sync bookmarks, I keep them in Pinboard and none of them has any private or remotely identifiable information anyway. I don’t care about saving browser history either, in fact I have it set to periodically auto-clear, which is a feature in Safari.
To a first approximation, everyone in 2024 expects their data and settings to be transferred across devices.
People aren’t working as if it is 2010 when you had to backup and restore devices via iTunes. If I’m out of town somewhere and my phone gets lost, damaged or stolen, I can buy another iPhone, log into my account and everything gets restored as it was.
Just as I expect my watch progress to work when I use Netflix between my phone, iPad, Roku devices etc.
How many people are going to say in 2024 that they don’t want continuous cloud backup? You want Windows Vista style pop ups and permissions?
I don’t have Netflix but neither is that relevant to the point, you’re obviously and embarrassingly grasping at straws.
No one is arguing against continuous cloud backups, they’re arguing about sending data without consent. Which, by the way, is something Apple used to understand not to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo
Apple’s OS are already filled with Windows Vista style popups and permissions for inconsequential crap, people have been making fun of them for that for years.
Isn’t it bad enough that I have a popup every time I copy and paste between apps?
For me, not really no. It reminds me I am copying information and not from some phishing app, I find it informative.
And I'm probably one of the few who actually click "Reject" to the cookie pop ups having to click no on 3742 legitimate consents.
The simple answer is everything should be opt-out. I'll opt-in if I require it because frankly, regardless to how Fort-Knox my data is $CORP still cannot be trusted.
Video conferencing instead of FaceTime are made via self-hosted Jitsi and if I am to brag all running on FreeBSD.
Out of Apple or Google I trust neither however will align with Apple more than Google. It's as close as I can get from not having data collected from mongrels.
Computers should not be sneakily doing things in the background without my commanding them to do so. But if they insist that the only way they can work is by doing things in the background, then I expect the computer to at the very least obtain my consent before doing those things. And computers should definitely not be exfiltrating anything over to the network without my explicit command to do so. This shit world we are living in where your computer just does whatever the application developer wants it to do rather than what the user wants it to do has to come to an end!
With PIR, an Apple phone recieving a phone call queries Apple's database with that phone number, but because it's using homomorphic encryption, Apple doesn't know the number that called despite looking it up in their database to provide caller id info, so they can't tie your phone number and the callers phone number together.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...
"Ah, I see you care about privacy, but you own a phone! How hypocritical of you!"
I also don’t run a private chat server that people log into - I’m like most of the iPhone and Android using world
We need less sarcasm, not more.
I bet most of those made up numbers of yours will have no idea that the feature exists.
A simple screen like they usually do with "Whats new in iOS" could easily have let you enabled it on the get go, with the additional benefit that you would have been made aware of it existing.
This iOS 18.2 update had no such screen, I just updated.
You're not making any sense.
The question I asked was
> How exactly is a new feature that is not advertised harder for you, or for anyone for that matter?
However, "my data is being sent off my device" is incorrect, as GP explained. Metadata, derived from your data, with noise added to make it irreversible, is being sent off your device. It's the equivalent of sending an MD5 of your password somewhere; you may still object, but it is not factually correct to say your password was transmitted.
Sounds like my data is being sent off my device.
> It's the equivalent of sending an MD5 of your password somewhere
Sounds even worse lol
narrator: his data is being sent off his device
There is plenty of data on your device that isn’t “your data” simply due to existing on your device.
Hackers love to have MD5 checksums of passwords. They make it way easier to find the passwords in a brute force attack.
> Hackers love to have MD5 checksums of passwords.
Hackers love not understanding analogies. :)
a) MD5 is reversible, it just cost GPU time to brute force
b) It is unproven that their implementation is irreversible
Owning a phone is a privacy failure by default in the United States.
Care to provide a pointer to what device they are using? I would absolutely get my real estate license for this.
Unfortunately, the knee-jerk reaction of many defense industry pundits (and VCs, for that matter) is that US intelligence is an unparalleled moral good, and the virtues of privacy aren't worth hamstringing our government's work. Many of these people will try to suppress comments like yours because it embarrasses Americans and American business by association. And I sympathize completely - I'm dumbfounded by the response from my government now that we know China is hacking our telecom records.
It's apparent it has been kept in place because of all of the value it provides to the 5 eyes.
Maybe they should lump its default state into something that already exists? E.g. assume that if you already have location access enabled for Photos (it does ask!), you've already indicated that you're okay with something about this identifying being sent to Apple whenever you take a picture.
My understanding is that Location Services will, among other things, send a hash of local WiFi network SSIDs and signal strengths to a database Apple maintains, and use that to triangulate a possible position for you. This seems loosely analogous to what's going on here with the compute-a-vector thing.
It could be tied to iCloud Photos, perhaps, because then you already know that your photos are getting uploaded to Apple.
(We could argue about it, but personally I think some kind of hash doesn't qualify.)
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 storage. :P
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...
Well, I'll take back what I said about the majority. I do still think that the remaining 1/3 of users who don't have enough storage to turn on iCloud Photos qualify as what lapcat was asking for, though.
I know users who would prefer not to trust Apple for anything, and only pay for and use iCloud to backup the Desktop [and similar locations]. If they were to hear that their opt-in for iCloud means that Apple starts copying random things, they would not be happy.
[OT, I use Arq. But admit that iCloud is simpler, and it is not apples to apples.]
IMO, the fact that Apple backs up your keychain to the Mothership; and that this is a "default" behavior that will re-enable itself when shut off, reflects an attitude that makes me very distrustful of Apple.
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...
No, I didn't ask for a hypothetical set. I wanted the actual set of people.
I can try to turn down my natural inclination towards cautious phrasing, if you'd like? Get us on the same level. :D
Then why lie and mislead customers that your data stays local?
Apple patting itself on the back.
1)sending my personal data to them in any way is not a "feature." It's especially not a feature because what it sets out to do is rather unnecessary because every photo has geotagging, time-based grouping, and AI/ML/whatever on-device keyword assignments and OCR. I can open up my phone right now and search for every picture that has grass in it. I can search for "washington" and if I took a picture of a statue of george washington that shows the plaque, my iPhone already OCR'd that and will show the photo.
2)"minor" is not how I would ever describe sending data based off my photos to them, regardless of how much it's been stuffed through a mathematical meat grinder.
3)Apple is usually very upfront about this sort of thing, and also loves to mention the most minor, insignificant, who-gives-a-fuck feature addition in the changenotes for "point" system updates. We're talking things like "Numbers now supports setting font size in chart legends" (I'm making that up but you get the point.)
This was very clearly an "ask for forgiveness because the data we want is absolutely priceless and we'll get lots of it by the time people notice / word gets out." It's along the lines of Niantic using the massive trove of photos from the pokemon games to create 3d maps of everywhere.
I specifically use iOS because I value my privacy (and don't want my cell phone data plan, battery power, etc to be a data collection device for Google.) Sending data based off my photos is a hard, do-not-pass-go-fuck-off-and-die line in the sand for me.
It's especially shitty because they've gated a huge amount of their AI shit behind owning the current iPhone model....but apparently my several generation old iPhone is more than good enough to do some AI analysis on all my photos, to upload data for them?
Fuck everyone Apple who was involved in this.
It's very clearly not, since they've gone to huge lengths to make sure they can't actually see the data themselves see the grandparent post.
Hear hear. As if they can do this but not Visual Intelligence, which is just sending a photo to their servers for analysis. Apple has always had artificial limitations but they've been getting more egregious of late.
Then perhaps the system is of poor design and needs further work before being unleashed on users…
Anything that leaves my devices should do so with my opt-IN permission.
This is not how you launch a privacy-preserving product if your intentions are good, this is how you slip something under the radar while everyone is distracted.
The choice probably looks to them like:
A - play the game, give everyone a heads up, respond to all feedback, and never ship the feature
B - YOLO it, weather the storm, have people forget about it after the holiday, and go on with their life.
IMO giving up on having it widely used and just ship it turned off would be the best choice. But it's so obvious, there must be other ceitical reasons (good or bad) that's not an option.
"we had to sneak it out because people wouldn't consent if we told them" isn't the best of arguments
Or is it better to just trust that mathematics works and thus encryption is a viable way to preserve privacy and skip the dialog?
This is a much greater level of security than what you would expect from a bank, for example, who needs to fully decrypt the data you send it. When using your banking apps over HTTPS (TLS), you are trusting the CA infrastructure, you are trusting all sorts of things. You have fewer points of failure when a key for homomorphic encryption resides only on your device.
"Opting-in by default" is therefore not unsafe.
They’re not. Jeff Johnson develops apps (specifically Safari extensions) for Apple platforms and frequently blogs about their annoyances with Apple, but they’re not a security researcher.
I would be surprised if doing noisy vector comparisons is actually the most effective way to tell if someone is in front of the Eiffel tower. A small large language model could caption it just as well on device, my spider sense tells me someone saw an opportunity to apply bleeding edge, very cool tech so that they can gain experience and do it bigger and better in the future, but they're fumbling their reputation by doing this kind of user data scanning.
Not really, it's been around for a bit now. From 2021:
> The other major reason we’re talking about HE and FL now is who is using them. According to a recent repository of PETs, there are 19 publicly announced pilots, products, and proofs of concept for homomorphic encryption and federated analytics (another term for federated learning) combined. That doesn’t seem like a lot … but the companies offering them include Apple,7 Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, IBM, and the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, and users and investors include DARPA, Intel, Oracle, Mastercard, and Scotiabank. Also, the industries involved in these early projects are among the largest. Use cases are led by health and social care and finance, with their use in digital and crime and justice also nontrivial (figure 1).
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology...
I do wonder why we don't hear about it more often though. "Homomorphic encryption" as a buzzword has a lot of headline potential, so I'm surprised companies don't brag about it more.
As far as why it's not more of a buzzword, it's far too in the weeds and ultimately consumers either trust you or they don't. And even if they don't trust you, many of them are still going to use Apple/Google/Facebook system anyway.
homomorphobia ?
Which 3rd party is that?
b) If we follow your tortured logic then every hop along the path from your phone to Apple will have one more data point on you. That's thousands of companies a day.
I'm also griping that "the data is encrypted !" is not a good enough excuse seeing as how we've known for years that the metadata is a bigger pot of gold for intelligence agencies. That my mac address is taking a photo and hitting a particular cell tower is pretty detailed information, even without knowing the content of the photo.
If someone wanted to get a hold of your cloud hosted data at that point, they would use their capacity to simply extract enough key material to impersonate a Secure Enclave. That that point, you "are" the device and as such you "are" the user. No need to make it more complicated than that.
In theory, Apple and other manufacturers would already use PQC to prevent such scenarios. Then again, QC has been "coming soon" for so long, it's doubtful that any information that is currently protected by encryption will still be valuable by the time it can be cracked. Most real-world process implementations don't rely on some "infinite insurance", but assume it will be breached at some point and just try to make it difficult or costly enough to run out the clock on confidentiality, which is all that really matters. Nothing that exists really needs to be confidential forever. Things either get lost/destroyed or become irrelevant.
People won't trust homomorphic encryption, entropy seeding or relaying when none of it is transparent and all of it is enabled in an OTA update.
> This is what a good privacy story looks like.
This is what a coverup looks like. Good privacy stories never force third-party services on a user, period. When you see that many puppets on stage in one security theater, it's only natural for things to feel off.
That’s starting to veer into unreasonable levels of conspiracy theory. There’s nothing to “cover up”, the feature has an off switch right in the Settings and a public document explaining how it works. It should not be on by default but that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith. Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.
Since they cannot convince users to enable this feature in good-faith, they are resorting to subterfuge. We know that Apple is vehement about pushing client-side scanning on users that do not want it, I do not believe for a second that this was a mistake or unintended behavior. If this was a bug then it would have been hotfixed immediately to prevent the unintended behavior from reaching any more phones than it already had.
This is illogical. If Apple wanted to engage in subterfuge they would simply compromise the OS.
When a company controls the entire stack either you trust everything they do. Or nothing.
If anything, the lesson Apple might take from this could be "adding the settings toggle was a bad idea, because nobody would have cared about this at all otherwise".
They worked very hard on security these past few months, so it should be all good, right?
I am not claiming for one moment that enabling this by default is OK. In fact, I have explicitly said it is not.
What I am saying is that it is ignorant to call this a cover up, because a cover up requires subterfuge. This feature has a freaking settings toggle and public documentation. Calling it a cover up is the type of uneducated rhetoric that makes these issues being brushed off by those in power as “it’s just a bunch of loonies conspiracy theorists complaining”.
Clearly you have not. If you did, you wouldn’t continue to give an example which is not equivalent.
No, it would not be “perfectly fine”, I just said it wouldn’t. You can do something wrong without it being a cover up.
Irrelevant.
This is Apple's proprietary software, running on Apple's computers, devices which use cryptography to prevent you from inspecting it or running software they don't control. Very few people have any idea how it actually works or what it actually does.
That there's some "public document" describing it is not evidence of anything.
> that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith
The mere existence of this setting is evidence of bad faith. The client side scanning nonsense proved controversial despite their use of children as political weapons. That they went ahead and did this despite the controversy removes any possible innocence. It tells you straight up that they cannot be trusted.
> Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.
We'll draw our own conclusions.
What is happening, is that people make tradeoffs, and decide to what degree they trust who and what they interact with. Plenty of people might just 'go with the flow', but putting what Apple did here in the same bucket as what for example Microsoft or Google does is a gross misrepresentation. Present it all as equals just kills the discussion, and doesn't inform anyone to a better degree.
When you want to take part in an interconnected network, you cannot do that on your own, and you will have to trust other parties to some degree. This includes things that might 'feel' like you can judge them (like your browser used to access HN right here), but you actually can't unless you understand the entire codebase of your OS and Browser, all the firmware on the I/O paths, and the silicon it all runs on. So you make a choice, which as you are reading this, is apparently that you trust this entire chain enough to take part in it.
It would be reasonable to make this optional (as in, opt-in), but the problem is that you end up asking a user for a ton of "do you want this" question, almost ever upgrade and install cycle, which is not what they want (we have had this since Mavericks and Vista, people were not happy). So if you can engineer a feature to be as privacy-centric yet automated as possible, it's a win for everyone.
I did read the article, yes :) Maybe our photos are not sent bit-by-bit but enough data from the photos is being sent to be able to infer a location (and possibly other details) so it is the same thing: my personal data is being sent to Apple's servers (directly or indirectly, partially or fully) without my explicit consent.
At least the last time they tried to scan everyone's photos (in the name of the children) they pinky promised they'd only do it before uploading to iCloud, now they're doing it for everyone's photos all the time - it's disgusting.
You can imagine it as hashes (created locally), some characters of that hash from some random positions being used to find out if those can be turned into a query (which is compute intensive so they use PCC for that). So there is no 'data' about what it is, where it is or who it is. There isn't even enough data to create a picture with.
Technically, everything could of course be changed, heck, Apple could probably hire someone with binoculars and spy on you 24/7. But this is not that. Just like baseband firmware is not that, and activation is not that, yet using them requires communication with Apple all the same.
So it does it multiple ways:
- Finite sets and added noise, doesn't hurt performance too much but does make it nearly impossible to ID/locate a photo
- Encryption at rest and in transit
- Transit over hops they don't own
- Homomorphic Encryption during remote compute
The data it finds was available in two ways: the "result" and the vector embedding. Not sure which one you end up consuming since it also has to work on older models that might not be able to load the embeddings and perform adequately, but it doesn't matter since the data itself will be unique so you can't do parallel reconstruction, but it is also uniquely meaningless to anyone without a key. They are essentially computing on needles that aren't in a haystack, but in a needle stack.
The primitives all this is built on have been around for quite a while, including their HBONE implementation, the cryptographically hidden data distribution and the SEP. So far, it has been the only one of its kind outside of disjointed options like buying and operating your own HSM, a large TOR network and a yet to-be-invented self-hosted PCC solution (AMD was supposed to release something but they failed at that, just not as bad as Intel messed up with SGX).
Technically, even with everything else removed, just some good TLS 1.2+ and homomorphic encryption would have been more than any other mass market manufacturer has ever done in an effective way. But by adding the additional factors such as degrees of separation so they couldn't get in themselves (without breaking it for everyone in the process) is what makes this so much more robust.
I would be ok with this being a local feature, where I can download the signature database to my device and run the search locally (as you say), but as it stands some information about my photos (enough to detect places at least, possibly more in the future) is being sent out of my device. I want zero information about my photos to leave my device.
I mean, this is just wrong. Baseband firmware and carrier activation can be managed entirely independently of Apple, they just choose to manage it themselves. The number of places where Apple chooses to insert their own services as arbitrary middlemen has been a perennially worrying topic among Apple enthusiasts. It's not just disrespectful to people that pay a premium for fewer service advertisements, it's downright unsafe and does not reflect the sort of forward-thinking security that people in the industry respect.
There was a time when Apple focused on real and innovative product differentiation, but I'll be damned if you can give me a post-Wozniak example that isn't under antitrust scrutiny. Apple relies on marketing and branding to make people feel unsafe in a fundamentally insecure system - I don't respect that as a proponent of innovation and competitive digital markets.
Perhaps you are thinking about subscription activation (be it GSM or CDMA) and parameters for cell networks (which can indeed be consumed by the baseband, which will be running firmware supplied by the manufacturer, sometimes re-packaged in system images as done in OEM feature phones and many android phones).
Either way, macOS devices do the same thing (activation) as do iPads without cell networking. Same goes for radio firmware loading and updates. You'll find most wintel laptops doing the same for things like WiFi (regardless of softmac/halfmac/hardmac chips).
People aren't making tradeoffs - that's the problem. Apple is making the tradeoffs for them, and then retroactively asking their users "is this okay?"
Users shouldn't need to buy a new phone to circumevent arbitrary restrictions on the hardware that is their legal property. If America had functional consumer protections, Apple would have been reprimanded harder than their smackdowns in the EU.
As for vectorised and noise-protected PCC, sure, they might have an opinion about that, but people rarely are informed enough to think about it, let alone gain the insight to make a judgment about it at all.
This is a dumb take. They literally own the entire stack Photos runs on.
If they really wanted to do a coverup we would never know about it.
This is a useful, harmless feature that does not comprise security or privacy in any way.
Users are smart enough to decide for themselves. Let them.
I don’t think that that’s what the author is saying at all, I think he’s saying that Apple should let the user decide for themself if they want to send all this shit to Apple, freedom for the individual. They’re not saying “I dunno”
And the claims that this is good privacy/security are not at all obvious either. And who are those third-parties anyway? Did you verify each one of them?
Well I want them to fuck off.
Hidden in your commentary here is the fact that the vector representation of the image is _the contents of the image_. It very well may be that they cannot reverse the exact image. But it’s still a representation of the image that has to be good for something. Without being too familiar I would be willing to hazard a guess that this could include textual labels and classifications of what is in the image.
I don’t give a shit how good your internal controls are. I don’t have anything particularly interesting to hide. I still do not want you taking my pictures.
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.
Furthermore, Apples privacy stance is generally a sham as their definition of “human rights” doesn’t extend to China. Which either means Apple doesn’t respect human rights, or they don’t view Chinese people as human.
The Chinese government are debatably inhuman. They've literally censored the word "censorship." (Then they censored what people used euphemistically for censorship--"harmonious.") It's funny from the outside but also a miserable state of affairs in 2024.
Apples version of “human right” includes suicide nets as an alternative to treating people humanely. That’s why their stance is pure marketing - they have blood on their hands.
And guess what? You can’t use Google in China, and while Google isn’t by any means perfect, they aren’t Apple.
Now, that happened under a different type of Google (I’m sure they’ll go back now that they torched the culture), but Apple employees who walk around SV like they are better than everybody else - which people on their privacy teams very much do - are pathetically deluded.
All the megacorps are evil, and while Apple likes to put on a holier-than-thou act, it’s just as much bullshit for them to claim they value human rights as it is for Google to say they value privacy.
They value money, that’s it.
It's no longer a conspiracy. I think we are all over past that time(i.e with Snowden and Wikileaks). We live in a surveillance world and "They're guarding all the doors and holding all the keys".
It is simple for any user to evaluate risk the risk of their data being breached on 3rd party servers when their data isn't being sent off the device - there is none. It is only when corporations insist that they are going to send the data off your device whether you like it or not that evaluating risk becomes necessary.
A good privacy story actually looks like not sending any info to anyone else anywhere at any time.
Of course it's fine to not desire privacy, or to desire a privacy level that is less than private. That's up to you. I liked the privacy of my old Canon digicam that had no internet. A photo app on a phone that sends stuff over the network might bring some useful functionality in return, but it can only be considered a regression in terms of privacy.
What Apple has implemented is a LOT closer to "private" than "not private"
There are way more egregious privacy concerns than sending non-reversibly encrypted noisy photos to Apple. Why draw the line here and not the far worse things happening on your phone and computer right now?
Almost every single app today interacts with the network in some way.
You would be constantly annoying the user with prompt after prompt if you wanted to get consent for sending any relatively harmless data off the device.
My Calculator app does not need to call home.
A good portion of the apps I use fall into this category, and a straightforward mechanism to opt them out of access would be welcome.
They have option to disble if they care.
"Computer, I command thee to send this and only this information over the channel of my choosing, using following encryption scheme, for here be my seal of approval for anyone who might want to verify, and here be the key"
"Sicut Vult"
On Apple's scale, most people care about the things they can do, not about how it happens. For that reason, default matters when the option is only about the internal process pipeline and privacy.
As a result, it is enough to showcase that in case some expert investigates the matter, they show that privacy is considered in a reasonable level.
Maybe some day in the future these things are common knowledge, but I fear that the knowledge gap just increases.
Debian has popcon, which must be enabled explicitly and that is it. It sends the list of the installed packages.
Between the quote you pointed out and:
"One thing I do know, however, is that Apple computers are constantly full of privacy and security vulnerabilities, as proved by Apple's own security release notes" which just reeks of survivorship bias.
I think the final call of what is right here _shouldn't_ be informed by the linked article.
IMO, enabled by default without opt-in is absolutely the right call when judging between 1: Feature value 2: Security risk 3: Consent Fatigue.
If you're data-conscious enough to disagree with my prior statement, you should consider having lockdown mode enabled.
If you disagree with my prior statement because of how Apple locks you into Photos, :shake_hands:.
If Enhanced Visual Search is still enabled by default in lockdown mode, then I think that's worth a conversation.
Why in the world am I supposed to be an expert on homomorphic encryption? How many people in the world are experts on homomorphic encryption?
> which just reeks of survivorship bias.
What does that even mean in this context?
> 1: Feature value
What is the value of the feature? As the article notes, this new feature is flying so low under the radar that Apple hasn't bothered to advertise it, and the Apple media haven't bothered to mention it either. You have to wonder how many people even wanted it.
> If you're data-conscious enough to disagree with my prior statement, you should consider having lockdown mode enabled.
That's ridiculous. Apple itself has said, "Lockdown Mode is an optional, extreme protection that’s designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats. Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature." https://support.apple.com/105120
Lockdown mode is basically for famous people and nobody else.
No one, at any point, implied you had to be an expert on homomorphic encryption. But if you're going to evaluate the security risk of a feature, and then end up on the front page of HN for said security risk, I think it's fair to criticize your lack of objectivity (or attempt at objectivity) by way of not even trying to understand the technical details of the blog.
I will say I think my word choice was unnecessarily harsh, I'm sorry. I think I meant more indifference/inattention.
> What does that even mean in this context?
Apple's list of Security releases is long and storied. By comparison, the Solana Saga Web3 phone's list of security releases is short and succinct. Therefore, the Solana Saga must be more secure and has better security than an Apple device!
> What is the value of the feature? As the article notes, this new feature is flying so low under the radar that Apple hasn't bothered to advertise it, and the Apple media haven't bothered to mention it either. You have to wonder how many people even wanted it.
The marketability of a feature is not necessarily correlated with its value. Some features are simply expected and would be silly to advertise, i.e. the ability to check email or text friends. Other features are difficult to evaluate efficacy, so you release and collect feedback instead of advertising and setting false expectations.
> Lockdown mode is basically for famous people and nobody else.
Similar to Feature value, that audience of that statement is your average person (read: does not read/post on hacker news). Based off the your pedigree, I feel as though you probably know better, and given your "no tolerance for risk" for such a feature, it's something worth at least considering, and definitely isn't ridiculous.
I think it's great you started this conversation. I disagree with your opinion, and that's okay!! But I don't think it's particularly beneficial to any discourse to 1. Imply that you are evaluating security risk 2. Be given a well written technical article so that you are able to make an informed decision (and then share that informed decision) 3. Ignore relevant information from said article, make an uninformed decision 4. Be surprised when someone says you made an uninformed decision 5. Imply the only way to make an informed decision would be to be an expert in the relevant fields from the technical article
Anyway - thanks for writing and replying. Creating and putting yourself out there is hard (as evidenced by my empty blog that I promised I'd add to for the past 2 years). And my criticism was too harsh.
I wouldn't characterize that as the point of my blog post. It's primarily about user consent, or lack thereof.
> and then end up on the front page of HN for said security risk
I have no control over that. I didn't even submit the article to HN.
> Apple's list of Security releases is long and storied. By comparison, the Solana Saga Web3 phone's list of security releases is short and succinct. Therefore, the Solana Saga must be more secure and has better security than an Apple device!
This is a red herring. I wasn't comparing Apple security to any other company's security. I was merely pointing out the possibility of bugs and vulnerabilities in Apple's new feature.
> Other features are difficult to evaluate efficacy, so you release and collect feedback instead of advertising and setting false expectations.
Well, I've now given my feedback on the new feature.
> Similar to Feature value, that audience of that statement is your average person (read: does not read/post on hacker news). Based off the your pedigree, I feel as though you probably know better
I'm not sure I understand. Are you claiming that Apple, in its support document, is deliberately mischaracterizing Lockdown Mode?
> But I don't think it's particularly beneficial to any discourse to 1. Imply that you are evaluating security risk
As I've said above, I wasn't.
> 3. Ignore relevant information from said article
I didn't ignore the relevant information from said article. I read the article, but some of the technical details are beyond my current knowledge.
> make an uninformed decision
What uninformed decision are you talking about?
> 4. Be surprised when someone says you made an uninformed decision
I'm surprised because I have no idea what "uninformed decision" you mean.
> 5. Imply the only way to make an informed decision would be to be an expert in the relevant fields from the technical article
I didn't imply that at all. To the contrary, I insisted that the decision to enable the feature should be up to the user, not up to Apple.
I don't think I need to specify that by uninformed decision I mean evaluating the security risk of the feature. I think I criticized too harshly, and you're (understandably) not engaging with me fairly in retaliation. If you actually want to engage with me and discuss this further, feel free to shoot me an email (in my about section). Otherwise, obligatory https://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html.
I'm trying, but obviously I'm failing.
> I don't think I need to specify that by uninformed decision I mean evaluating the security risk of the feature.
For the third time, that wasn't what I was trying to do with the blog post.
> you're (understandably) not engaging with me fairly in retaliation
I don't think you're understanding me either. I'm not retaliating. I was trying to clarify.
A good privacy story starts with "Do you consent" and not transmitting a byte if you answer "no"
It sounds like it only needs a few extra lines of code to get exactly what they wanted before, they just packaged it differently and we all fell for it like frogs getting boiled in water.
The CSAM filtering was a best of class implementation. I'm pretty sure I'm one of maybe a dozen people who actually read the spec before throwing a hissy-fit about "muh privacy!"
The only actual "flaw" was that maybe a state-level actor could make it scan for bad stuff on your device.
BUT they can do it to your cloud data _today_. And if you disabled cloud uploads, the local scanning was disabled too.
No, they can't if you enable ADP[1].
Not at all. A good privacy story is not sending this data anywhere.
how about they don't send anything about my photos to their servers and i get to keep my shit on my own device
i suppose we're past that to the point where techbros like you will defend personal data exfiltration because.. uhh idk? trillion dollar corporation knows best?
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
Irrelevant. It was never about privacy to begin with. It was always about power, who owns the keys to the machine, who commands it.
Vectorization, differential privacy, relays, homomorphic encryption, none of it matters. What matters is the device is going behind the user's back, doing somebody else's bidding, protecting somebody else's interests. That they were careful about it offers little comfort to users who are now aware of the fact "their" devices are doing things they weren't supposed to be doing.
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 want with far less user control unless you're a deep Android nerd and know how to install root-level restriction software.
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.
What a good privacy story looks like is that my photos aren’t sent anywhere in any way shape or form without explicit opt in permission.
If only you and three other people have a unique file, Apple knows you are a group.
Most people broadcast their lives on social media, happily opt in to all sorts of schemes that track them just for minor conveniences. For people like that, the idea that the privacy protection outlined by the OP isn't enough rings really hollow.
Or to put it bluntly, at some point this really stops feeling like a practical debate, and more of an ideological one.
I have an idea: send an encrypted, relayed, non-reversible, noised vector representation of your daily phone habits and interactions. That way you can be bucketed, completely anonymously of course, with other user cohorts for tracking, advertising, and other yet-to-be discovered purposes.
It's a great privacy story! Why would you have a problem with that?
I don't know, I'm sure we'll figure something out once we have your data!
Restating the layers above, in reverse:
- They don't see either your data or the results of the query (it's fully encrypted even from them where they compute the query -- this is what homomorphic encryption means)
- Even if they broke the encryption and had your query data / the query result, they don't know who "you" are (the relay part)
- Even if they had your query hash and your identity, they couldn't reverse the hash to identify which specific photos you have in your library (the client-side vectorization + differential privacy part), though by the this point they could know what records in the places database were hits. So they could know that you took a photo of a landmark, but only if the encryption and relay were both broken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
> Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without first having to decrypt it. The resulting computations are left in an encrypted form which, when decrypted, result in an output that is identical to that produced had the operations been performed on the unencrypted data. Homomorphic encryption can be used for privacy-preserving outsourced storage and computation. This allows data to be encrypted and outsourced to commercial cloud environments for processing, all while encrypted
And the way the data comes back to you is via the third-party relay which knows your IP but nothing else
So, while Apple doesn't know the ID of the person sending the data, they have a 'room number' that links back to an ID.
If Apple were to decide to scan photos for pictures of 'lines of white powder' they couldn't tell the police your name but they could say that the 3rd party knows who you are.
> Then somehow magically, the pictures on your phone are updated with tags based on Apple's processing....but Apple doesn't know who you are.....
Yes, this is the whole point.
If apple were to add additional clusters that match "sensitive" content and endeavour to put them in their own shards distinct from landmarks, they defeat the homomorphic encryption part while still technically doing it.
The DP part can be defeated with just statistics over time; someone with any volume of sensitive content will hit these sensitive clusters with a higher likelihood than someone generateing noise injected fake searches.
The OHTTP part can be defeated in several ways, the simplest of which is just having a clause in a non-public contract allowing apple to request logs for some purpose. They're paying them and they can make up the rules as they go.
I do:
- Client side vectorization: the photo is processed locally, preparing a non-reversible vector representation before sending (think semantic hash).
- Differential privacy: a decent amount of noise is added the the vector before sending it. Enough to make it impossible to reverse lookup the vector. The noise level here is ε = 0.8, which is quite good privacy.
- OHTTP relay: it's sent through a 3rd party so Apple never knows your IP address. The contents are encrypted so the 3rd party never doesn't learn anything either (some risk of exposing "IP X is an apple photos user", but nothing about the content of the library).
- Homomorphic encryption: The lookup work is performed on server with encrypted data. Apple can't decrypt the vector contents, or response contents. Only the client can decrypt the result of the lookup.
This is what a good privacy story looks like. Multiple levels of privacy security, when any one of the latter 3 should be enough alone to protect privacy.
"It ought to be up to the individual user to decide their own tolerance for the risk of privacy violations." -> The author themselves looks to be an Apple security researcher, and are saying they can't make an informed choice here.
I'm not sure what the right call is here. But the conclusion "Thus, the only way to guarantee computing privacy is to not send data off the device." isn't true. There are other tools to provide privacy (DP, homomorphic encryption), while also using services. They are immensely complicated, and user's can't realistically evaluate risk. But if you want features that require larger-than-disk datasets, or frequently changing content, you need tools like this.