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A comment on Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15. Parent comment

Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by matthewdgreen on Saturday December 28, 2024 @09:52PM (#42537017)
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.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by makeitdouble on Saturday December 28, 2024 @10:04PM (#42537088)
To play Apple's advocate, this system will probably never be perfect, and stand up to full scrutinity from everyone on the planet. And they also need the most people possible activated as it's an adverserial feature.

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.
Wether B works is up to debate, but that was probably their only chance to have it ship from their POV.
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Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by walterbell on Saturday December 28, 2024 @10:25PM (#42537221)
Did a variation of A already happen in 2022, with "client-side scanning of photos"?
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Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by makeitdouble on Saturday December 28, 2024 @10:30PM (#42537255)
Yes. That also was a thoroughly botched version of A, but I think even a good version of A won't see them ship anything within this century.

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.

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Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by chikere232 on Sunday December 29, 2024 @04:40AM (#42538868)
To give you feedback in your role as Apple's advocate:

"we had to sneak it out because people wouldn't consent if we told them" isn't the best of arguments

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Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by makeitdouble on Sunday December 29, 2024 @06:23AM (#42539275)
Agreed. This two/three years in particular, there has been more instances where what's best for Apple hasn't been what's best for their users.
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Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by calf on Sunday December 29, 2024 @07:11AM (#42539455)
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.
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Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by matthewdgreen on Sunday December 29, 2024 @08:37PM (#42545514)
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.
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Re:Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15 by saagarjha on Monday December 30, 2024 @04:14AM (#42547784)
Apple of course thinks their internal team of experts is enough to validate this.
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