I'm going to be very angry if my mac turns out to be doing this

We also created a tool to inspect your graph: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow Only tested on recent MacOS versions (last 26s, and early 27s), though

Works on Sequoia too fwiw

Ack. For what I could see, specific tables are added / removed across versions. So, some information might not be visualized (e.g., the graph is tiny with few nodes).

I'm on Sequoia and it mostly works, but I feel like it's missing stuff. If I grep everything in ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform/Artifacts/ for e.g. phone numbers, or just dump all the strings from the DB's in there, I see a lot of personal info in "lifeEventView.db," but nothing about it shows up in the webview.

Also works on Sonoma.

>iKnow is fully LLM-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

"We" sounds pretty damn generous if you don't even know whether it works.

> Viz. Apple IntelligencePlatform store

Why did you abbreviate 'visualise'? You're not running up against a character limit.

This is really interesting and it seems to work on 27.2.

You might want to prune some of the descriptions though, as a lot of them are very Claude and hard to follow.

Woah. Still on Sequoia with no intention to upgrade, but maybe the next laptop runs Linux.

I'm on Sequoia. Check out ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform

It might depend on your needs and priorities, GhostBSD is a great option for people who like something more like Mac.

It's just a tuned FreeBSD distro using Mate.

What similarities do you find between macOS and GhostBSD? The Mate desktop by itself isn't super mac-like.

I also see it defaults to the growing pile of bugs known as XLibre.

The similarity is predominantly between the userland. (The Freebsd kernel and XNU is mostly historical as far as I know)

A typical Linux user will be used to GNU conventions and probably have a lot of annoyances.

GhostBSD is simply a beginner friendly distro of FreeBSD.

In one line both MacOS users and BSD broadly will squirm at the likes of things like `ls src/ -la`

But honestly, I was interdicting in the idea that Linux is the only alternative really.

Can we start a class action suit?

The output stays local on your disk (in theory). So I’m not sure that breaks any rule. But in theory, Apple Intelligence can query it. Again, close to 0 documentation, so it is hard to know how this is consumed.

In Germany, it breaks TDDDG §25 verbatim, storage of data not explicitly consented to and not technically necessary is already illegal.

So sue them. You will then learn whether you are right or not.

If you have the time and money.

In the meantime the German government probably uses that info.

Conspiracy talk. Show any indication that this data ever leaves its store first.

I'm from the US, but I did do some research after I saw other commenters claiming it violates GDPR. I tend to agree with them after reading up a bit on it and asking a couple of AIs. Apple can avoid some of the cross-border entanglements, but GDPR does not care where the processing happens, just what the scope of it is, what its purpose is, whose information is being used.

It'll be interesting to see if anybody goes after Apple for this.

I am the author of the research. Please, feel free to ask me anything. Also, check out the followup research: https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-...

Please stop using AI to author your articles. It was really hard to read it despite how interesting the topic was. I dropped halfway because it was just too annoying.

My bad. In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough...

> In my defense, only the technical parts are AI.

A defense would be "I just used it for spellchecking" not "I just used it for the meat and the important parts people care about, the rest is mine!"

Yes, that was a weird defense; essentially, he used it for the actual interesting parts of the article.

You can't unslop the slop, you should write as you normally do but use AI to review and reframe it. Don't fix AI; let AI fix your writing.

So most of it?

Complaints of AI are like a form of friction that eventually goes away. Either AI will undergo a change to create more approachable material, or in general people's tastes will change as they accommodate the style and get used to it. Or some mix of the two. As young people continue to grow up reading AI generated content they will likely begin to find that person written content from before AI grates on their nerves. More, they'll even ask AI to reword documents into preferable AI-like styles.

As an older person, AI grates on me, but I found the meat like "It is a triple store written in a vocabulary of 181 entity classes and 278 predicates: every row is a subject, a predicate and an object. The subject is an entity (a person, an app, an event); the object is either a plain value (a name, a handle, a date) or another entity, which is where the graph gets its edges. The predicate is the interesting part: it says what kind of relationship the system believes holds between the two" quite approachable.

So it was like a meal where I just have to push, say, mushrooms aside as best I can to get to what I like. And there was a time I would have refused the entire plate because I truly abhor mushrooms. I blame watching Matango as an impressionable child.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOpbTaX6HWQ

It is funny to me how slop enthusiasts argue from the past and the future to deny the present state.

"Slop is here to stay so you better get used to it because slop is inevitable and you will be left behind."

It is both already a cemented permanent presence and destined to arrive by an unbreakable prophecy at a date TBD.

If you came away thinking I was enthusing about AI slop, it's probably because I was too subtle in comparing it to a food I abhor while saying there are tidbits, non-slop tidbits, that I could appreciate. Apologies for that human generated mischance!

I'm actually rather bemused to see mainly young folks, arguing against LLMs and ML, and seeing more experienced folks, embracing it.

I'm pretty experienced, and have found LLMs to be quite useful.

Like any new tool, there are deficits and peculiarities, but these are becoming less of a concern, and the utility of these tools is advancing rapidly.

We get it. You are saying that in the future there will only be mushrooms to eat and as a result everyone will enjoy mushrooms.

Now think about how much you hate mushrooms.

Do you see the problem with your argument?

>Complaints of AI are like a form of friction that eventually goes away.

This. Already there is evolution in AI-related comments here.

For example, a year ago they often featured remarks like "I know AI when I see it: here are unmistakeable 'tells.'"

Then there would be a lively back-and-forth about the validity of the stated giveaways.

Such "How I know it's AI"-type comments no longer appear.

This has not been my experience. People talk about LLM-isms (Claude-isms especially) all the time. "The absolute shape", "load bearing", "seams", "smoking gun", genuinely empty preambles, constant sloganesque phrasing. If you're seeing it less in conversation, it's not because it's improved.

Genius-level response. And honestly, that's valid.

"It's not X, it's Y" is still the most obvious one. Abuse of passive voice is another. We stopped talking about it because it gets boring to say the same things over and over.

Sorry your comment got dinged. I assume the reference to age triggered that. Ageism is a very, very real thing, hereabouts.

I think it was insightful and relevant.

I’m sorry you feel defeated, but such attitudes won’t help.

Help what?

Help improve or restore the quality of content.

Been doing that for decades. This is just another tool.

Check out my work. I don’t hide it.

[delayed]

> but it may be fine for you or a small group that is familiar with the subject.

One of the problems with LLM writing is that the "small group" is very often only itself, maybe including the prompter. Details of the prompts or implementation or internal chain-of-thought nits leak out into prose, divorced from context.

Many READMEs are now littered with proud declarations of the removal of Foo, with any explanation purged with it. It exists in this project, too. A header of one graph is "Where each fact came from, decoded out of the bitmask." Why should the audience care about this implementation detail at this location? Just label it "Sources" and move on.

[delayed]

It's already technically possible for LLMs to generate all kinds of styles of text. In fact older models are better at it. It's the newer models that are nearly impossible to steer. This makes me less hopeful for the future. There is apparently some incentive for Claude and ChatGPT to lock in these very recognizable patterns.

Interesting for me it's the opposite. I care about this so I let AI do it since LLM are better writer than 99% of people. I'm not so arrogant to think I'm a writer of that caliber.

You are. I promise you. Almost every single person is a better writer than an LLM. You're wilfully sabotaging yourself.

LLM are terrible writers though. Worse than most humans unless they have some mental disability.

Maybe LLMs are better writers than the majority of people, but that's only because the majority of people just don't write. If you have any level of competency, you are a better writer than an LLM, because good writing requires empathy. It required thinking about what the audience knows, what they want to know, what kind of writing they are comfortable with, and so on.

LLMs fail at those things.

It's not possible to un-AI text, only replace it wholesale.

Suggestion for next time: "Review my prose for accuracy, grammar, appropriate strength of claims, etc. Flag any issues for my attention. Do not provide text; this work should not contain any AI-written content." That'll turn it into a very good check that doesn't take your voice away.

Is this really the top question now?

Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?

Why? "There is gravel in the food" is a perfectly valid contribution. You don't need to write a compelling story about it.

Because the article itself is way more interesting than the question of with what style it was written.

It's like the saying beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. Bad AI writing makes an article "unreadable" - you'd have to force yourself to read it, and people don't get paid for reading stuff on HN. The HN value of an unpleasant to read article is basically zero.

I really don't want to waste more words on it here.

I think the difference might be that you find bad style easy to ignore and I don't.

If the applied style is painful, can't one just take a lightweight model and have it transcribe the content in a style that one personally finds pleasurable? Even phones should be powerfull enough to chew through such a task locally these days (even across languages), and once you define the criteria for what you enjoy you'll never have to be pained again (unless you enjoy it offcourse)

The criteria I enjoy is "written by a human".

You can pay someone to rewrite it. There's loads of college students who wouldn't mind extra spending money.

You don't have to leave a comment if you are too lazy to read it. It's not even if the words were written mirrored. Anyone who can read English including children can read the output of AI without needing to force anything. Maybe you need to see a doctor if you need to force yourself to read it.

"How dare you have a preference that is not my preference?"

Having a preference of writing style and being unable to read a writing style are not the same.

The comment upthread was:

> Bad AI writing makes an article "unreadable" - you'd have to force yourself to read it

That doesn't literally mean "unable to read", it means it's unpleasant. I don't think anyone in this thread has literally meant "I could not possibly read it", just "it's painfully unpleasant".

I wouldn't worry about the down votes. Human voice will eventually go the way of the pops, and hiss of dusty records. Eventually those raised on AI generated prose will come to appreciate it in the same way we have nostalgia for 96kbps mp3s.

Its interestingness is zero if it’s so aggravating to read that you just give up.

> Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?

Criticism is a valid 'something interesting'. And growing numbers of us also don't want to feed the US mega-companies LLM training sets.

More and more people are keeping human-generated stuff to themselves, cause of that.

I’d rather this over the very long tradition in this site if people bellyaching about site design and layout on otherwise u related comment threads

I agree. One comment constructive is enough. It feels like some guys pushing the topic away.

It annoys me as it takes my attention with them so with all respect: user aharmetz (and others) please keep it in one post that you’d prefer non-AI text. Point.

Thank you.

> Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?

No.

I second this. Unfortunately you just can’t just “unslop” it, much like you can’t just “shake the dirt away” from food that fell into a bucket of… you get my point, it won’t be good to eat anyway. Bonus additional ironic parallel could magically manifest if you can guess the bucket content.

Anyway, it’s a shame, this could have been excellent work. Instead, I find reading it unpleasant and part of my attention rots away wondering if you even checked what the LLM wrote for you. You probably did, and I could also do it myself, but still…

[delayed]

Yep I cannot fathom why people feel OK shipping anything like that publicly. The headers are also all completely stupid.

> Every node as a list — the graph is not the only way in

> Family, as the scorecard has it

> Reachable, exactly as stored

Oh good I was worried it was going to show me something altered

> WHY RESOLVABLE MATTERS

Oh fuck off. This isn't Axios! I hate these pathetic brainrot stupid phrases Why it matters What Happened What Changed, how patronizing. Instaclosed, instakilled python, what a fucking waste of my time and a waste of an article too

Yeah seriously. Article becomes unreadable immediately after the intro. I believe this author probably could actually write two years ago, it's a shame people are just giving up on that and choose to turn out stuff like this instead.

I'm having more trouble spotting AI text these days. It used to jump out at me. I'm not sure if it's that the LLMs are better or it's just becomming so normal to see that I stop recognizing it. This one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read. Going back and scrolling deeper into the post, it does become much sloppier.

> quite long-winded for a blog post

That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protect. What does that even mean? why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and your eyes start to glaze over. Slop.

A human would've said something like "It's a database in Library/IntelligencePlatform with three columns" and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.

The unnecessary detail dump is a dead giveaway. It starts in the very first section:

> a directory of SQLite databases (fifty-one databases)

> It is a triple store written in a vocabulary of 181 entity classes and 278 predicates

It continues describing the DB in excruciating detail - no human would have the attention span to write all of that down for a blog post.

I disagree. Hand-authored articles can be slop too. This research is great, and your subjective feelings about word cadence don't affect the information. I guarantee you read AI output every day and don't know it.

The criticism can be restated, then, as “you used AI to write it and unlike others who use AI to write things, you did a bad job as an editor.”

This comment is not directed at you, but this is the best place I could find to insert my thoughts on this "nO LLm slOP" distraction:

----

The research is jaw-dropping enough for the average reader to comprehend (e.g: I am not a techie, but a former IBEW datacenter wiretwister).

It could be covered in pube-sprinkled-turds and would still be worth reading.

To me the "slopLOL" crew is akin to people who'll take their time to correct others' their/they're/there usage:

Just read the fucking sentence (LLMs can and do and aren't so poopy-you-suck-for-asking-questions).

We know there’s interesting information in there. That’s not the point.

How news is delivered matters. If you don’t believe that, why would news outlets compete with each other? Even if the facts are the same, would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?

>would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?

I am smart enough to not need perfection. I just want the data. Write however tf you want, the original facts matter most (to me).

And so will LLMs.

I'll suggest adaptation.

>why would news outlets compete with each other?

My suggestion would be: competition for the masses' con$umption$. It generally works; shouldn't have to obfuscate the `man` pages for this always-running daemon.

Well, good for you for not caring, I suppose. The vast majority of society does.

> I am smart enough

Knock yourself down a peg, kid.

I will, sure, but I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic, despite being a bluecollar electrician.

Also, my IQ scares even me; I've chosen bluecollar so I don't have to be evil as much with it.

Companies do not give two shits about most users, with (e.g:) AMD saying the quiet part out loud, recently, with their recent gamers-last announcement.

Also see: Apple's invasive attempts to categorize all local data, by default; if you want to opt-out (some service, like OP's, you cannot!), it takes dozens of clicks for each new software – intentional dark-patterns to make opting-out cat-and-mouse.

> I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic

> Also, my IQ scares even me

Oh, brother.

I mean this with the best of intentions and care: have you been psychiatrically evaluated lately? The language you’re using is consistent with friends I know who are off their stabilizing medications.

> always-running daemon

This is completely tangential to your point, but I'd bet that this daemon isn't always running. Apple is fond of putting as much system functionality as possible into daemons that (a) can be spun up quickly when needed in response to Mach IPC messages, (b) can be killed safely at any time to free up memory, including with SIGKILL if necessary, and most importantly (c) operate in the tightest, most locked-down sandbox they could devise.

For background computational tasks like this one, it can also be helpful for getting thread prioritization right. If some computation doesn't need to happen quickly, a daemon can easily make sure that it gets assigned to efficiency-optimized CPU cores, tell the OS scheduler to give priority to more important stuff, reduce precision of timers to coalesce wakeups, and make sure that any thermal throttling affects the background stuff before it slows down anything the user will notice. It's a pretty slick system.

Hand-authored engagement or clout (LinkedIn) farming articles and corporate press releases are usually slop, most others aren't. I'd be surprised if corporate press releases today weren't largely AI-written - no one would know the difference.

Agreed, I haven't read most of it because it's poorly written: too verbose, points are buried, it's three times longer than it should be. I still don't know what this database is used for and don't want to go through that writing to find out.

There was a very obvious and unnerving shift in style that happened early in the article where it went from human to LLM. I find such shifts really glaring. Agents, in their current state, simply cannot produce quality prose and are not good enough to write blog posts targeting a human audience.

I found the topic fascinating, but eventually I started skimming and then gave up on it.

It says there's 137 live/certain facts in my graph. I can see where they're sourced from/a statistical breakdown of type/the number of unique confidence values/how many citations they're using/how many ingests contributed no facts. Am I missing where I can see what the actual facts are?

A lot of these statistics aren't very useful for mining insights from the graph, from a technical standpoint of how the graph works or from a personal standpoint of how the graph is interacting with my personal data.

Thanks for the research. Have you looked into how to secure / disable the subsystem?

(I hate that a discussion on the OP has been hijacked by a discussion on AI writing; the substantive questions are all at the bottom. I wish mods would 'detatch and move' that subthread.)

I'm on macOS 27.2 and there is no longer a "Full Disk Access" control. How do I use it in this case? ChatGPT is not helpful.

open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy_AllFiles" << this made it reappear in settings

The data I see from iKnow is a sloppy clusterfuck, I suspect from botched syncs and lazy bookkeeping on my part, and the fluctuating quality of Apple's "services" over the years. My Mac settings probably go back to the 1990s and Apple periodically did a bad job. Pain points I remember: Google contacts being separated and then with a new phone not syncing correctly, Mac address book burping on contact avatar images, importing lists of contacts from short-lived 3rd party apps, shared Photos fucking shit up, the iPhotos upgrade fiascos, transient contact info for my kids, moving onto/off of Gmail, etc.

If the FBI got ahold of my (and others'?) iKnow data, a lot of people might end up in a sloppy jail with a sloppy judge sloppily applying a sloppy law...

Hi there. Thanks for this!

So my questions regarding security implications of running your code, my LLM friend reviewed the code and expressed possible concerns over (a) malicious browser extensions now get to see what they couldn't before; (b) you are not using https. There was bunch more but they can all be addressed on my end. Your thoughts?

You don’t need https for a web running locally; nothing goes into the network. Malicious browser extension can be real, but if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph

> if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph

That is certainly true, and it is equally true that that possibility places a responsibility on you to put that in a section in your readme.

So yeah, I may have a bad extension but that thing never had access to the possibly aptly named 'IntelligencePlatform' that's keeping tabs on my digital activities, until I ran your code. Correct?

I would go further and suggest that you do not access any website or open any files via your browser while you have malicious browser extensions installed. You do not need this project's README to tell you this.

That's is a categorical error.

My evil extension|browser may know what porn I watch or which sites I am visiting or possibly lift some bits it is not supposed to have. But it does not have access to Apple's comprehensive graph of my digital activities on their devices. Only Apple Inc. has that access.

So in fact the OP needs to put in the readme that "malicious browser extensions are a potential attack surface."

I don't think your request is reasonable because I don't agree with your categorical assertion nor your risk assessment, not because I misunderstand the mechanics of your threat model.

"[A]ny app with Full Disk Access" requires yours truly's personal approval.

You acknowledge the threat is real yet say it is "niche".

And frankly, given that Apple can not possibly 'iKnow' more about me than myself, it seems running your 'niche critical but whocares' python server can only be informative to potential 3rd parties locked out of my Apple machine because they do NOT have been give permission by me to have "Full Disk Access".

When you install a browser extension, your browser will notify you if it can read or modify page content before you enable it the first time. Using OPs tool is not unique in that it becomes vulnerable when paired with nefarious browser extensions, because all pages are. Https doesn't even solve that.

This is akin to some medicine saying that if paired with another specific medicine, you won't get desired results, and you are upset that it doesn't include a warning against combining the medicine with cyanide because you might die. The pairing with cyanide is irrelevant to the medicine and is just a side effect of cyanide.

My friend you need to trust your LLM less here, this is extremely off base. If you have malware installed, the problem is the malware. Far more is at risk from it than some brand new dashboard that no malware has been sitting around waiting for. Malware will be waiting for API keys, bank passwords, your Internet connection to resale as a residential proxy. Things that will actually make them money. Your concerns are unfounded and misplaced.

I liked the start of the article, but glazed over once it switched to an AI voice. AI;DR.

It's a shame because I really appreciate your work here. Could be resolved as trivially as providing a copy of your writing style and having it adapt to that.

On a long enough timeline, all closed-source software turns into spyware.

That’s a Law; is it christened yet, or should we name it ArcaneMachiner’s Law?

Horrifying, but also really interesting as a student of schema design, especially for probabilistic or inferential processes, and graph data.

Im still optimistic that Apple will do all this stuff on your device as opposed to in an opaque cloud somewhere you have 0 visibility into. Meta probably has 1000x this system in a data warehouse somewhere. If this info is not leaving the device that’s fine with me.

Yes, but having some kind of documentation and way to disable it would have been reasonable. Also, the thing is that it seems that apple intelligence models can query this information. So, you know, everything is a prompt injection away in theory.

I have lost my faith in that

I had faith in Apple until I saw the technology oligarchy and how they behaved around the current US administration.

Probably, but how much meta hardware do you own? Hell how much meta software do you have installed? I know people use varied amounts, but meta doesn't really make anything worth owning. I guess Apple is speedrunning the point where they don't either, which sucks, because I have no idea where to find a fanless linux laptop that doesn't get hot but has the performance of a m1.

My understanding is that collecting these data and constructing the knowledge graph violates the European General Data Protection Directive (GDPR). According to the GDPR, personal data (such as an email's sender name and email address) are provided for a specific purpose (in the case of sending an email, for identifying the sender and facilitating email replies). Similarly, a calendar invitation is provided to organize a meeting. Processing that data for a different purpose (as described here, for constructing a knowledge graph) without the subject's explicit consent is unlawful.

I'm not sure. IMO when you buy a Mac (or use Windows or an Android phone) you have accepted so much that there is nothing which is not allowed.

But nevertheless: as far as I have understood it everything is built on your computer and is still used on your computer. You - as the user of the Mac - has took and saved the information. Your Mac is then only working for you - if Apple doesn't load the information in their enviroment.

Unlike Americans seem to think, terms of use don’t override law.

As a general rule you cannot override national law by accepting service terms.

Someone should start a company with terms mentioning that whoever agrees to it will live forever.

If we are overriding federal laws, might as well make people immortal too.

It's on the person's Mac so it is a little more complicated. The person you send your data to is the Data Controller, and fails you by not publishing their privacy policy. But Apple isn't a Sub-Processor here, because they aren't sending the data to Apple.

I'm saying that because I wish the GDPR also covered the software providers who perform Data Processing against the will of all parties, but it isn't the case. Lastly, they're a person and not a business.

It is however clear that building a database of people which may contain race, religion or political opinions is illegal, even if it's just a person doing it.

GDPR applies to persons and businesses. The fact that you're violating GDPR, because without your knowledge Apple has deployed software on your computer that compiles this knowledge graph makes Apple complicit. Imagine violating a speed limit, because your car's speed indicator has a software flaw that causes it to show a lower speed.

This is not equivalent at all. You don’t need to create a GDPR notice because the user types their personal info into their own documents for example, despite you being on the path of it going to disk.

This probably depends on the context.

If you send a friend an email, they may add you to their address book and set a reminder for your birthday while they're at it. They don't need your permission to do that, so why would a device acting on their behalf?

On the other hand, if a customer of mine asks for the data I have on them, do I have to send them my Personal Knowledge Graph facts about them?

That seems wildly optimistic. I can think of various provisions under GDPR that make this perfectly fine.

For example, purpose limitation allows for compatible processing, and parsing calendar events to allow for queries like “when does mom’s flight land” is absolutely covered under that.

And, of course, GDPR doesn’t require consent. Performance of a contract is a perfectly valid legal basis other than explicit consent, and the operating system terms of service you agree to when upgrading or setting up a new device will cover this.

On a side note, you don’t want GDPR to work the way you think it works unless you really want cookie consent banners dialed up to a million.

None of this should be construed to mean that I like this feature in macOS or am defending it. I’m merely pointing out that this interpretation of GDPR does not match reality.

Just spent 30 minutes poking around this. It's horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.

Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.

The good News is that with AI, nothing stops linux distros from looking and feeling like (Former) osx..

I'm quite frustrated with some aspects of macOS, particularly driving it from the keyboard, so I'm probably going to get a better experience out of it in the end.

Have you looked at Karabiner Elements⁽¹⁾? It’s extremely capable; see a config like this⁽²⁾ for inspiration.

⁽¹⁾ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ ⁽²⁾ https://github.com/pdelfino/karabiner-config

Yes I'm using it because I don't use a standard Apple keyboard with my Mac.

The issue is mostly the user interface design is mouse first, not keyboard first. Windows was more than a little better on that front.

With Hammerspoon⁽³⁾ and the Accessibility API, I’ve found there’s not really much I can’t do.

My biggest problem now is that when I help somebody else on their Mac, I’m so used to “my controls” that I have to stop and think how to do things the normal way.

⁽³⁾ https://www.hammerspoon.org/

This would be much more interesting if it just exposed an API and didn't force Lua on you.

I have it, regularly updated, from my efforts 10-15Y ago to try to get a Compose key working on OS X.

I failed.

I just haven't bothered to remove and clean up again.

one would think, but a lot of things stopped Linux to just fucking work with Wifi on my machine

The bad news is the hardware. The most important parts of a laptop, to me anyway, is that it runs silent and doesn't get hot to touch. Not just to avoid sweaty fingers but because I usually have my laptop in or on my lap. Nothing I can find could replace my m1 8gb macbook air in that regard.

I can find some pretty cool linux laptops from framework or tuxedo, but they have fans and they get hot.

Asahi Linux is said to be pretty good on an M1.

>All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.

Wait until you discover that macOS entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings, before every bootup, to reach out to security.apple.com.

Have a network-wide PiHole (allegedly) blocking the entire *.apple.com domain? No you don't, (at least) not at bootup, because APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use any network-discoverable DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings) to phone-home.

----

I finally made the full switch to Linus earlier this year. Been a (primarily) Apple user since 1992.

This is why throwing an extra DNS server on the network doesn't truly work. You have to actually remove the DNS protocol from existence entirely and perform TLS inspection if you want to filter effectively. Otherwise devices will get around you with stuff like this, or DoT/DoH.

Can one not just use their router's firewall to drop all DNS queries which do not originate from your PiHole?

This does work for unencrypted DNS and DoT over port 853, but it fails for DoT over any other port and DoH, which looks just like a website visit. You can't tell whether a website is acting as a DoH server without TLS inspection, and you can't differentiate between multiple websites on the same IP address either (unless a client is stupid enough to use SNI). Some clients do actually hardcode direct IP addresses to get around entirely missing DNS servers, notably Windows.

>notably Windows

At least they're honest, using host <spynet2.microsoft.com> to replicate Apple's <smoot.> & <security.> subdomains.

>This does work for unencrypted DNS and DoT over port 853, but it fails for DoT over any other port and DoH

My task for today is to learn more about this (I'm only doing the unencryptedDNS part) and then implement an entire subnet that is whitelist-only (for all DNS). I think what you wrote will help solve this better, thanks.

Oh hey, found you in a 2024 HN thread while searching for info on that smoot subdomain. I guess you've been at this for a while.

FWIW, Microsoft hardcodes dozens of subdomains, not just that one. Windows hardcodes domain names for all sorts of services that are important to them, like the universal backdoor and its self-repair functions (naturally), and servers used for Microsoft account sign-in and telemetry (of course). They really wanna make sure nothing stops them from uploading your disk encryption keys to their servers! (or something)

Somehow the dumbest people become "experts" (e.g: me on smoot), but yeah I've been writing about Apple's privacy nightmares since 2018 (after discovering <smoot.apple.com> as a top-destination in my pihole logs).

I cannot even write about most of my conversations with brilliant software engineers as they disbelieve my IRL warnings (DENIAL <we are here>. anger. bargaining. depression. acceptance).

----

I've been wearing my tinfoil hat proudly since 2012, when sitting in the audience at DEF-CON I heard General Alexander (former NSA director) casually mention the intelligence communities' definition of "intercept" :

>>Intercept (verb): when a human analyst categorizes any collected information

Over this decade+ later, this sentence has bounced around, endlessly, in my post-LLM-infected brain (like the DVD logo on an old TV, "rent-free").

----

>FWIW, Microsoft hardcodes dozens of subdomains

Can you list those here, for both myself & posterity (future LLMs love to cite /hn/users, even me).

>They really wanna make sure nothing stops them from uploading your disk encryption keys to their servers! (or something)

[holds gun to head] "this is'fer'yer'own'good, boy!"

----

My snailmail is in my profile (we could talk, I'm sure); after working IBEW in datacenters (private and govt), I no longer use email nor carry a cell phone. YMMV, I have no dependants and live a mostly-isolated life, now.

It turns out I misremembered. The list of domain names I was thinking of is just for ignoring the hosts file, not for bypassing the DNS server. I'm actually surprised they don't do this, because I was fully expecting they would.

Here's the list: https://petri.com/windows-10-ignoring-hosts-file-specific-na...

    www.msdn.com
    msdn.com
    www.msn.com
    msn.com
    go.microsoft.com
    msdn.microsoft.com
    office.microsoft.com
    microsoftupdate.microsoft.com
    wustats.microsoft.com
    support.microsoft.com
    www.microsoft.com
    microsoft.com
    update.microsoft.com
    download.microsoft.com
    microsoftupdate.com
    windowsupdate.com
    windowsupdate.microsoft.com

And damn, I'm not set up for snail mail. Sounds like it would've been fun though, I love talking to people with interesting viewpoints. Maybe one day. (I used to know a guy in my complex who was obsessively religious. Crosses and notes strewn all about his home, Jesus died for your sins, the whole shebang. And he was an electrical engineer. Batshit crazy and yet an electrical engineer. That's insane, I loved it. I visited quite a lot, before he died.)

Am updating my block-lists, now.

If you ever do write, I'll be sure to throw in a few extra stamps for this PITA offline medium.

Really enjoyed this exchange, Ya'll.

Only if there a) is a DNS request, b) it does not use DNS over HTTPs.

PiHole is not and never has been a reliable way to guarantee anything, regardless of how you configure it - just gets the low-hanging fruit. Plenty of devices hard-code their own DNS servers ("smart" TVs are a good example) and will happily ignore whatever DHCP gives them if they have a route to the internet.

Added to the list of reasons I need to look at this seriously. Thank you!

Keep adding to your list, friend:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574> [Spotlight's "helpfulness," which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)]

Apple's OS is toxic, at this point.

My two newest Macs are entirely offline (air-gapped) and used primarily for LLM – maybe Apple's secret (all along) has been to get people like me to purchase twice as much hardware (as would be necessary in a privacy-respecting world)?

Well fuck.

Just dug my old Xeon workstation out of the cupboard and am installing Debian on it.

My main desk has three Apple Silicons (two entirely airgapped, and am typing on third); sitting next to it is my beautiful 27" iMac (2009), with full Adobe CS4 (also offline); just purchased a pristine MacPro5,1 – seventeen year old computer! – for my main online Apple experience (using OS 10.14 from a decade ago), mostly because it cannot AI/LLM/Siri, even if it wanted to.

But since the beginning of this year, I am now primarily running (online) a 9800X3D with a 5070Ti – Linux - which is only possible with LLM tutorials/help (mostly offline, on my own Silicon LLM).

----

Happy restomodding!

What about the security risks of running outdated OS and outdated software on a machine connected to the internet?

> which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)

Are you sure? I've just inspected my macOS 27.2 machine with my firewall and I couldn't find requests to smoot.apple.com while typing in spotlight(show related content and help improve apple search are both disabled).

I am certain only up to Sequoia; there is a new mini with Tahoe on it sitting here so let me replicate that behavior (if hostname isn't smoot., it'll be something). I've been meaning to update it to GoldenGate (since buying it last week it has been used for just 2 hours, playing with LLMs); so I'll do this to and then see what the latest macOS's behavior is.

While I'm doing that, pull up your *.apple.com outreaches.

I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging.

I've also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to properly configure which DNS-server should be used, but while reading this thread I'm beginning to wonder: maybe the reason I'm having so much trouble understanding how to set this up properly could be that the OS is messing with me and my DNS-settings, and the lack of documentation describing how DNS-resolution is supposed to work on MacOS is really a feature meant to keep me from finding out that they are deliberately making it impossible to secure connectivity at a DNS-level?

Next thing you know, a similar explanation might pop up regarding configuration of the packetfilter. It has already been frustrating not being able to figure out these basics on my own for several years. It will be absolutely infuriating to find out this struggle has been pointless anyway, and it turns out they have been using mislabeling core components of their OS. The moment DNS-settings are not really settings the OS uses when doing DNS-lookups, I feel deliberately deceived.

It's like calling an OS Unix-based, and subsequently override standard Unix-rules seemingly at random and without consent of whoever is supposed to be the system's administrator, that people might start thinking the OS is merely intended as a tool to ruin any reputation of reliability that Unix may have once had. The great thing about a Mac is that it just works, they said. So far my experience has been the opposite. And whenever I get the illusion that something works as it is expected to work, I've learned to recognize it for what it is. An illusion. How is any of such behaviour even legally and ethically justified? How can they legally sell systems running MacOS to customers whose job includes working with classified information? How are such customers supposed to secure their system if it these 'features' are not properly documented?

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! :(

> I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging

You should be doing this level of blocking and detection at the router/gateway, not on the computer itself because your Mac has like 4 different OSes and macOS already has a lot of exceptions when it comes to filtering/logging Apple related communications.

If you don't have a router/gateway where you can set firewall rules and logging already, how much do you really care about this? Because I can guarantee your Mac is far from the worst offender on your network.

> APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use the router-supplied DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings).

is that for real? wow

Is for real.

I provide a "better DNS configuration" suggestion here, but at this point I doubt its usefulness [†]:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574> [have router's DHCP auto-issue DNS to your pi-hole].

[†] I am but an observant (on my DNS logs) bluecollar poweruser – it will reduce only one vector, and we probably live in a world where IPv6 DNS addresses are [about to be, if not already] being hardcoded into TVs, computer security chips, and phones

Wow!!

The above are facts.

----

Speculating out loud: sure, perhaps this userprofile data is stored locally; but perhaps also (like Apple's "advertising token") this local data can help remote servers better track your entire computing humanity. While still "locally stored."

(Language doesn't mean anything when EULAs are dozens of unread pages long; "stored locally" is just another set of weasle words, like "then just opt-out" [why is opt-in the default, if -out is even allowed at all?!]).

Wouldn't surprise me if every single webpage has an advertising option to exploit the local user data (via Apple$$$), if only by offering on-device scrubbing; one could then look to see what advertising content the localhost is requesting (and thus have essentially root access to all userdata, "locally stored," by detecting outbound queries) with the user's own host acting as Apple's backendserver (while Apple profits, not you).

¢¢

I’m just glad that we’re still at the stage where the spying is happening on your own network and is still theoretically blockable. If cellular or satellite connectivity ever gets cheap enough they’ll just bypass your network completely.

I don’t even give a flying fuck about Apple itself. All they want is to sell me some macs and app store subscriptions. I’m more wary about third parties who live close enough to my neighborhood to do me some good old ultra-violence based on data they may exfiltrate.

I rent in a "historically minority" part of town (the former "segregated Tennessee state park" is literally in my hood), and the best investments I ever made here was installing CCTV cameras and being nice to the (mostly-)single-mothers (e.g: food donations, helping them move heavy items). Grandmama notices, and sheincharge, son.

This is noticed by the neighborhood, and nobody fucks with the helpful fatguy who is watching over everything (note: my cameras are entirely offline, local display/recording).

Job's biggest innovation was the word "no." I don't understand how everyone didn't jump ship once that word left Apple's vernacular.

If you intend to use PiHole, why is your DHCP server configuring a non-PiHole DNS server?

And why would you expect the pre-boot environment to respect OS network configuration?

Just like every non-Apple system I’ve ever seen with pre-boot network support, it has its own configuration, which defaults to DHCP.

I’d honestly be more suspicious if the firmware tried to grovel through OS data to find a working network configuration you may not want it to use.

Not that it would have very good luck doing so on a security-conscious user’s system, given that, on most systems at least, pre-boot networking is configured long before encrypted boot volumes are unlocked, since at that point you’re already well on your way to booting a specific OS and the pre-boot networking envieonment is no longer required).

> Wait until you discover that macOS entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings, before every bootup, to reach out to security.apple.com.

Good! I sure hope when I disable my stolen laptop that you can't defeat it with a simple DNS server.

This makes me glad I already switched my desktop to Linux (from Windows) and am about to get a new laptop to run Linux on

> Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.

don't wait

your impulse will be gone in a day or two if you wait, miraged away into "eh, doesn't matter"

do. not. wait.

that's a trap

switch now

a thing I did recently was block all macos daemons that communicate with the network except dnsresponder and rapport (just for ipad syncing). I put the mac studio in its own private subnet behind a managed switch. There were almost 100 services I had to investigate, but it was worth it.

Also watch out for BLE. I had to disable bluetooth on my mac studio because it was discovering iOS devices nearby and relaying data through them.

How? I'm curious.

What about iphones?

The processes aren't (as far as anyone knows) slinging data over the network.

No.

1) Before macOS boots, LittleSnitch ("LS") does not have any ability to block hostnames, e.g: on every boot, any modern Apple product ignores any manually-configured DNS IP and attempts to phone-home

2) Allegedly, this user profile information is stored locally (so LS wouldn't see any outgoing connection attempt to Apple servers)

3) LS does not block DNS-resolution, only IP-connection (i.e. your ISP sees all DNS queries, whether you click `ACCEPT` or `DENY` when LS popup asks)

4) If you're using LS with intentions of primary DNS blockage, you have failed; try pi-hole (or other local hardware DNS resolver); use physically-dedicated hardware (e.g: Raspberry Pi) to run your PiHole, not a Docker/Prox/&c

5) I am investigating another user's comment on using TLS certs to DENY-all DNS, but need to research further on this (new info to me!)

But you can probably (as root) remove execute permissions and kill the running daemons. Until the next OS update.

At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.

A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But, I have a social concern.

If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat transcription.

With Recaps and now social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away and the expectations that follow from that becomes artificial and burdensome. How could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401

I too would've found this fascinating at one point, but my jaded older self now just finds this incredibly creepy, unsettling and not at all surprising.

Add me to the list. This feels like a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” item.

That saying is what it is for good reasons, but the path to post-capitalist dystopian hell is paved with bad intentions covered with plausible deniability.

I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.

The system could work just as well for the user, stored only on the users devices, syncing in encrypted form only.

The plausibility in plausible deniability evaporates instantly with device/service/software provider's accessibility.

But faux plausible deniability seems to be just as good of a fig leaf.

I suspect a lot of the fascination is because the information can be used to improve our quality of life. I suspect the cynicism comes from those who have the most access to this information using it to improve their quality of life at our expense. (That, and actually making use of the information takes more effort than most people are willing to expend.)

I have always been leery of data collection, but I have my own parallel: there was a lot of optimism about the benefits of personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course, that was pushed by the industry itself. I have since realized that what was happening then was not all that different from what is happening today. The outcomes were different because the tools were different, but it basically reduced/reduces to a bunch of people trying to enrich themselves by promising one thing and delivering another.

Maybe a decade or so ago I had a discussion with a colleague about chat apps and he said, why would you want to have a conversation on snapchat if it is not saved, and I was like, why are you having this conversation now, you can't save it either.

I guess that those days are soon over.

Autocorrect has had the opposite effect IMO, there’s an expectation that like 1 in 8 words from an iPhone user are not what the sender intended.

Typos have just graduated from misspellings to sentences randomly being nonsensical.

I turned autocomplete off for this reason

Did your autocorrect correct “autocorrect” to “autocomplete”?

I considered it intentional, since as a matter of fact "autocomplete" is more correct.

Autocorrupt

Autocorrect and autocomplete are two slightly different things IMO. Both of them are in the wordlist on my iPhone also.

Swiping the keyboard used to be unreliable on iOS, then it improved enough to be usable. Then some updates ago it started to be nonsensical. Now I swipe to type something trivial, it writes the correct word, I swipe for the next word, it replaces the previous one with some uncommon word I've never used before and makes absolutely no sense to add in a sentence. It's maddening and it happens all the time.

Yes! Why is the keyboard on iOS still sooooo frustrating to use? Sometimes I wonder if it’s been intentionally nerfed to push us to use siri or apple intelligence.

I’m just waiting for the next iOS release with “Next-gen Swipe powered by Apple Intelligence Pro” (that conveniently only works on the latest 2 generations of iPhone)

The current iOS keyboard is the worst mobile/touch keyboard I've ever used, and that goes back to Android well over a decade ago.

I primarily type on mobile via Swype, which may account for varying mileage.

For the record, “primarily” took 4 tries, “varying” 2, and “took” 3.

Same difference

I swear I know the difference and when to use their, there, they're, but based on my iPhone messages, you'd think I was an illiterate buffoon. There are plenty of examples where I could show where they're making me look dumb with their edits.

This thought path has been explored by the Black Mirror series in the episode The Entire History of You.

https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_Y...

I wouldn’t call black mirror an “exploration” of thought. It’s rather myopic - dystopia porn.

It’s like going to the 1962 world fair but, instead of optimism, everyone just wants to tell you why everything in the future sucks.

No, it's an exploration of what could happen based on things we've already seen/experienced but with the knob turned to an 11. It's what should happen in pretty much what if round table situation. "Hey, would could build this thing that does something that we are specifically thinking about that would be cool/fun/benevolent" is only part of the discussion. "How could someone else turn and use it in a way not anticipated so they use it for their own gains in a way that is shocking/malevolent" should be the natural follow up. Can the thing be updated to not be used for unintended negative purposes or will the negative out weigh the positive so that it shouldn't be made in the first place??? Sadly, it seems the follow up questions are never asked. Instead, we get scifi people doing it and then getting reviews like yours instead of looking deeper into point

That’s myopic - I feel like you’re agreeing but lead with “no”

I go out as-a-fox as a street photographer using a shtick that makes sure people almost always remember my name and i find it a little embarrassing that I can't remember that many names or if it is a Megan how exactly I am supposed to spell it, etc.

I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.

There’s a very big difference between opting in to using a tool and having the tool silently start analysing you in the background.

I'm really trying to understand what as-a-fox means.

Same. A furry photographer?

In context, I interpreted it as a furry costume.

[delayed]

You could text Paul. He is but a Google search away to see the shtick.

It's in his profile https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PaulHoule -> https://gen5.info/fox/ -> User's Manual for the Fox-Photographer

I've also become totally exhausted by all these "someone is making your computer do X behind your back" revelations. Whether it's the app developer or OS vendor, it doesn't really matter. When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user, and instead start operating on behalf of the OS vendor and app developers? Every day there's a new case of this.

Largely, I believe, when phones crossed over from being basic communication devices to being smartphones, but retained their 'appliance' nature.

An entire generation thereby grew up with personal computing represented by vendor-controlled handheld appliances, and naturally regarded actual PCs in the same manner.

And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.

It's even reflected in the language used by younger generations, asking if things are "allowed" or assuming things are illegal by default.

In some Linux distros like Debian, everything is illegal/prohibited until you explicitly allow it and only comes with the bare minimum of software necessary to make the OS work. Contrast that to other distros like Ubuntu where everything comes preinstalled and is very permissive. These obviously target different audiences. Smart phones are targeting different audiences too. The power users annoyed by the dumb things the device does just means you're not the target audience and are just bonus buyers for their bottom line.

> In some Linux distros like Debian, everything is illegal/prohibited until you explicitly allow it

Bit of a nitpick, but this is certainly not true of their userspace, where an `npm install` can just install a keylogger or read your ssh keys, or do whatever it wants -- except for updating your video card driver.

I would hope that someone deliberately choosing to run a headless Debian install would be wise enough to not go around running `npm install` willy nilly. In my personal experience, I've never once needed an `npm install` in Debian environment. I've only ever used them in server environments and to be honest thinking about it, that was all pre-npm when javascript was kept where it belonged in your browser and not my server. Someone screwed us all allowing JS on the server, but that's an entirely different conversation.

Well, it's enough to use a trusted app as your own user on non-trusted data. The former just has to have a memory vulnerability, which is not rare given most of it is C.

So yeah, don't be so confident in it working out. Unfortunately gnu/linux desktop is severally lacking in security (and by desktop I mean a headless personal use as well)

I used to run npm install unsupervised from a script on headless Debian that I deliberately chose dozens of times everyday. Later I moved my CI to Alpine.

Complete nonsense. You get passwordless root upon install.

Side effects of living in an authoritarian panopticon

I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor. When I buy an Apple computer, I don't want to have a relationship with Apple. I don't want to log in to iCloud. I don't want them deciding what software I can run and what I can't. I don't want them wagging their finger disapprovingly at me when I download and run something not "notarized" by them. I don't want them mediating my use of my own computer! When I buy a Windows PC it's even worse. Again, I don't want to log into a Microsoft account. I don't want them pushing other software on me via in-OS ads. I don't want to send telemetry back to them. I don't want them recording my screen and saving it god knows where for nebulous "features".

When I buy a table saw, I don't expect DeWalt to hang around my workshop telling me what I can and can't cut, watching and logging what wood I use and when I use it, what my finished product looks like, changing the features and buttons on the saw in the middle of the night. Why the fuck do we tolerate this from software??

It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions! Some of them are letting telemetry and metrics and A/B testing creep in. And some third part Linux software is just as intrusive and demanding as commercial Windows/Mac software.

Sounds like you’d like our group: https://trustworthy.technology/

There’s an invite link there to the chat group, though I need to update it.

Great resource!

"Army of light" though

> I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor.

This is precisely it.

When I buy a screwdriver, I just want to use it when I need it. I don't want to have an account with Craftsman and give them any PII, etc. No, I just want to use the product I purchased.

It is really the same with any tech product. I bought it, I want to use it. I want zero contact with the manufacturer (even if I like them).

> It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions!

As much as I've loved Linux for over 30 years, even Linux is becoming suboptimal. I'm mostly installing FreeBSD or OpenBSD these days.

And PC’s became appliance like with updates, accounts, and now ads

As much as a sibling comment gets it right, this is wrong:

> And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.

They never built those skills. I know that a lot of us cheered the computer revolution, thinking that everyone born after would understand the things that older generations didn't get, but most didn't care and didn't learn.

Richard Stallman told y'all when it happened that it was happening

> When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user

When we connected them to the internet.

We connected them to the internet a full decade or more before this happened.

My computer has been connected to the Internet since the 90s and it's also constantly been my computer. The trick is, run software that is free.

But it was the internet that made all the spying, profiling, and tracking possible. Before that, there was no motivation, so software was developed and sold solely on its benefits to the user.

I would say it started with Chrome and Gmail

Chrome was the first major piece of software to incorporate automatic background installation of software updates without explicit user affirmation in 2008. Now, it's everywhere. I think this was an underappreciated event in the history of software freedom.

As soon as they were connected to a network and capable of participating in the business OODA loop against their competitors in real time.

I always thought the quote "you're not the customer you're the product" originated with RMS, I went to look it up before I commented and it turns out it was Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman in 1973! Just as true now as then. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/

Yes, and if the OS maker is not mining you for data, they are leaving mountains of cash on the table. So mine they must and mine they will. The financial incentives are overwhelming.

We should be removing those incentives at every level: legislative, societal, government and private.

People want the features that these things drive. PCs stopped being a purely "user says X, do X" thing at approximately the moment they became powerful enough to run things in the background. The idea that the computer would be helpful and do things for you beyond what you explicitly asked for is pretty attractive. People don't like being spied on, but good news, this one is all local.

Every bad day for Apple-Microsoft is another great day for switching to Linux.

You have choices. Make them.

And get an Android, install apps via F-Droid, which has really good apps by now, and they're all(?) crap-free.

Can I borrow some money? These choices cost me more than I can afford. Still using a six year old macbook I am so poor.

for me it was around the time of windows 8, that I felt my computer had a lot of things to do that weren't the application I actually wanted to use. Before that I would just occasionally feel that the system could be a little kludgy.

The charitable take is that computing has grown to expand more and more use cases, and to deliver good experiences for those use cases requires simplifying assumptions, and that's where the inherent complexity of life leaks in.

Well, people use less and less open source, and more and more vendor provided enshittified apps, which of course don't act in YOUR best interest.

Campaign for privacy laws, open standards, right to repair, interoperability requirements etc.

Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI

phew, I knew not spending a lot of effort in skool for learning proper grammar would be worth it as an adult

The credibility of the lazy is going up, what could go wrong!

See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.

Amplifying the dystopia is that this feature was heavily written up by an AI. So we have a feature in which machines monitor our lives being described to us by a machine which comes with its own set of dystopian risks, and no genuine human to human interaction.

Evidence sample of native Claudish: “The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half.”

LLM writing makes me puke

The interesting aspect for me is that what we perceive as "claudism" here is exactly how TV reporters have always talked - and to a point, how marketers / pitchers talk. How did it end up having this disproportionate weight in AI engines ?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot with zoom recordings. In office we used to have chats about a wide range of topics that were sometimes heated, but also respectful. Now with every meeting recorded, it’s all become pretty saccharine.

I don't think this is the same situation at all. Zoom recordings are outside your control and you know your boss or HR will have access to them. And relationships with employers are often closer to enemy than friend.

Your friend's Mac creating a knowledge graph is totally different because they control it. It gives them power to remember more about their interactions with you, but they would have to actively abuse it to hurt you in any way. If you can't trust someone with information then don't give it to them in the first place expecting them to forget it.

The problem is what happens if you get hacked or Apple decides to sell you out/work with law enforcement. I would only trust code like that if it was fully transparent about what it's doing, open source and strictly opt in. Apple is doing it in the background and that makes it instantly suspicious.

Adjacent to this I think it’s becoming clear that these technologies also change the signals we receive from one another. For example remembering details in a conversation is a signal that you were listening. If some system makes a breach into that social interaction you lose that signal. Now remembering details is no longer a signal.

I’m seeing it with polished websites. A polished site used to be a signal that a product was somewhat well thought out—at least it was worth the creators time to polish its marketing page. While now that AI products spit those out with AI speak that signal is lost.

I wonder if we’ll find out that the signal itself was more important than the means of sending the signal.

> With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome.

As this becomes normalized, people will retreat to a safer persona even in private conversations. This does not solve the problem at all; a great many mental illnesses and dynamics around pathological abuse are tied to the details of how each of us has a private and public-facing persona.

Already I see Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are heavily resenting the demands placed on them to be always in 'branding'/'self-marketing' modes, and are seeking ways to retreat from the relentless expectations of being always in 'public persona', and are suspicious that this way of living is harmful.

Exactly. It’s a chilling effect on an ever-increasing proportion of human interaction. If everything you say is on permanent record then the safest course of action is to say little, and keep it as bland as possible.

I think of privacy as the right to be myself, because I get to choose which parts of my persona(s?) to expose.

People change over time, and those I care about will be part of the journey. We don’t remember each other’s mistakes all the time.

And then, of course, there is the effort we put into these relationships. I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises than their LLM of choice automatically sends me a carefully crafted messaged based on our interactions.

Maybe we’re the weird ones.

> I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises

Do most people really remember all the birthdays they acknowledge? For me they must be diarised, or beyond immediate family there's no chance.

I don't understand what's wrong with the tech industry in the past 20 years. It feels like every time there is an opportunity to do the wrong thing, there is a mad rush towards that opportunity. Quickly! Do the wrong thing _first_ so some other company doesn't get to profit from evil instead of us. No company seems to consider abstaining from evil practices; burying the knowledge, or building systems which cannot be used for evil. The question only seems to be, how can _our_ evil succeed and benefit us.

This is context for local LLMs like Siri so that when you say “Text James and tell him …” it knows which James you mean.

It doesnt leave your device...until an authoritarian government extracts it without a warrant. Or a dozen other entities like divorce attorneys, business rivals, legal trolls, false accusers, nation states, teenage hackers, human traffickers.

How often is this endangering info available to anyone at my work or home when someone leaves their laptop open while going to the bathroom for 5 minutes?

It's irresponsible to collect and concentrate this much info on millions of people.

It's no win situation. All of this surveillance is happening on the internet right now. All the companies are doing this surveillance Apple happens to be doing it on device. This is the data Apple is trying to prevent from leaving the device. Apple is constantly fighting court battles to protect the data. Apple is always being accused of hampering developers freedom's while trying to safeguard access to this data. All that said turning off Apple Intelligence should eliminate the collection.

>All that said turning off Apple Intelligence should eliminate the collection.

Amen.

Does it?

Does what?

No. As far as I remember you cannot disable or kill the background daemons without disabling SIP either.

... I feel like if an authoritarian government could extract the family classifier info from local, they could just extract the damn messages.

If my threat model realistically included all of those things, then I would be very careful about keeping any sort of address book or contact log/history at all. At that point the only defense really is just to try to memorize phone numbers. And only talk when walking together, mob-style.

Ha, fair. To me its about the concentration of "high quality' or juicy data that makes a person vulnerable. When the stakes get higher, threat, reward, and the temptation for bad action increase.

Btw on android it's easy to make contacts self maintained. And to use an open source messenger so texts dont go through Google's servers. Not same level you're describing, but a huge defense against these "social graph intrusions."

> And only talk when walking together, mob-style.

Both of you will be carrying microphones, walking past people who are carrying microphones, and being video recorded from every building and from the networked doorstops of family homes.

If I were a mobster under government surveillance, why would I carry a mobile phone while discussing the family business, or intentionally allow anyone in my vicinity to do so, any more than I'd have such a conversation with someone I knew was wearing a wire?

It’s not clear whether this still happens in the “Under attack” mode that Apple specifically added for people in this exact scenario.

I hate to break it to you, but the Government doesn’t need your device’s data to get all that information about you if it has the necessary warrants. If you think you can win a battle against any government over the collection of evidence needed to prosecute you, as long as they do it lawfully, you are sorely mistaken.

This makes zero sense, and is delivered in a silly tone. The government can even get information about you when it doesn't have warrants (good luck fighting it after the fact), or got warrants from a secret court. The government cannot get information about you which has not been collected, because that is impossible.

The point is that that information is already out there. It might not be on your laptop, but it exists.

Yeah they definitely need this data from your Mac to find out who your brother is.

"I hate to break it to you", but it's very rational to take imperfect measures against violation.

No it isn’t. It’s a waste of time and energy.

> available to anyone at my work or home when someone leaves their laptop open

They also need to know your password to access it so at that point all bets are off.

in some countries you cannot opt-out of providing a password to your device.

I'm not sure if "forgetting" it is going to cut it - it much depends on a jurisdiction.

If you had to try your best to interpret what they mean, what would you say? I’m willing to bet that you could get there.

So why does it keep collecting data when I have chosen to entirely disable Siri?

Yes, this is the right question to ask.

>>"Why does a dog lick its balls?"

>>"Because. he. can..."

----

We let them behave this way. Whether this is past tense or future tense is up. to. us.

My brother is a (soon-to-be-former) politician. This is their mentality, "Prosecutor's Disease".

Very happy for my homestate, after these midterms... perhaps we can bump ya'll up from "[l]one-star state" to 2-stars?

Because its also used by other apps (e.g. Photos has a feature to identify faces and catalog people in your photo library, Messages has a feature to allow important messages through Do Not Disturb and infers importance from these stores).

It leaves the device every night in your effectively unencrypted iCloud Backup, on by default, readable by Apple, and turned over to the US government without a warrant thanks to FAA702.

This is the turnkey tyranny we were warned about.

Microsoft had this solved with Cortana 12 years ago. I would tell Cortana to text my boss, and if it didn’t know who my boss was, they would ask me who my boss was then it would store it for later boss calls.

The spying has no excuse and in the 2000s we would’ve called this malware and spyware, appropriately.

Doesn't that mean you end up with a similar database of facts about yourself, what's the difference?

The difference here is consent. Cortana asked who the boss was and OP had the option to not give that information.

On top of dabinat's point on consent, there is the resource use and accuracy part.

I can't imagine how much sleuthing is needed to infer who would be someone's divorced mother if it wasn't explicitely labelled, but it's completely unneeded until the day they actually try to use that info through some Apple service. Then, they'll be in for a surprise the day it infers it's their boss instead.

That's the other side of whimsy and "magic".

> seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device

Running the tool on my Macbook (which I don't really use, but which is logged into my iCloud) shows tons of activity/names/contacts that's shared ("donated" in the system's terms) over from my iPhone, which I wouldn't have expected to synchronize to this laptop. The apps aren't installed on the laptop, I don't get notifications there or have any interaction with those people. I can even see some stats showing volume of activity on work apps installed on my phone inside a managed work profile, but it does seem to have filtered the actual contacts out.

This is deeply troubling, this data is unnecessary collected and impossible to opt out from apparently and may be read at any point in the future by an attacker or by apple itself without notice

this is a class action lawsuit in the making

It cannot be read by any other apps unless you explicit give them Full Disk Access.

If you use iCloud, all the data in this db can be derived from other data already stored (messages, logs, etc).

How does one disable this?

you can't

"It's for you own good. It would be harmful to disable it. And you don't understand it so you shouldn't have an opinion. I trust Apple to do this safely, even if I don't want whatever this is."

Is how I'm generally greeted when I ask this sort of question.

Turn of your Mac and use a different operating system. Because it doesn't matter how you disable this feature because it is merely the current implementation of Apple's opinion of its relationship with you. It's a hydra and you are going to lose the fight.

or "grandma needs this to just work, Apple knows better"

By using an OS that doesn't view you as cattle to be milked and eventually sent to the slaughterhouse.

I expected the article to address that. Maybe it's obvious?:

Disable the daemons, delete the directory, lock down permissions to the database files / directory, lock down the daemons' permissions, delete the daemons, ...

I'm not recommending those things - I don't know what the consequence is for the system - but that's where I'd start.

Have you actually tried doing this?

By buying a linux computer

this violates GDPR in so many ways, jeez

do i see that right - the data in unencrypted, the profile is built by an undocumented background profiler without consent or an option of opting out, it is consumed by cloud connected platforms like siri and apple intelligence and ANY application on my mac can access it?

Yeah I could see that it correlated my WhatsApp calls with real person names (i.e. de-anonymizing WhatsApp), inferred my race based on face clusters (illegal under AI act), built a co-appearance network ("who stands beside whom in photos"), etc. etc.

None of this shit is legal, but the laws are toothless anyway: Apple can get "fined" a couple million and that's it. The fallout from the press would be a harder hit for them.

It’s not like Apple is actually hiding this. I mean it’s sitting there in perfectly readable structured format. I’m most surprised this isn’t known earlier, it indicates to me how little MacOS users investigate their own devices if we are talking about this 4 years after it rolled out.

If Microsoft didn't this, this wouldn't be interesting research, but a cause for uproar. And yes, I know they're probably already doing it, but in the cloud.

Apple makes money of your data as does anyone else. The just use your compute and energy for it too and convinced everyone that was privacy.

I’ve often wondered if Windows 11 might do the same thing. Surely, any low Apple has stooped to, Microsoft has stooped to as well.

[delayed]

Same - If anything, this made me feel better by showing how little my Mac knew about me, and how weak its data collection capabilities were.

Articles like this make me rethink my politics. I now think software tech monopolies need some 1950's style broadcast TV level regulation.

Why the downvotes on this? Wish people would leave comments

The problem is that most people don't know it's happening. If, when you first set up your Mac, you were asked "Do you want the OS to construct a social profile about you to help with ... (list of features)" and you could say yes or no.

When you do that, it's quite hard for it not to sound creepy. And most people would probably say no.

But I don't think it should be prohibited by regulation. Some people might want it, or genuinely find it useful.

> What if I told you that every Mac since 2022 ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you: who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, with whom, what you do and when.

I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends." And Calendar and Reminders knows where I go. And so forth.

The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.

Great "just a user" feedback!

>it should be opt-in

And definitely not "cannot even turn this shit off" mode.

----

I just recently installed Microsoft Office 2011 on my 27" iMac (2009 i5), and it absolutely shocked me that the default "Send User Data to Microsoft" option was `OPT-OUT`, requiring the user to manually click a radio-button to `OPT-IN` to usage data collection.

This was in recent living memory. From Microsoft.

I wonder how they get around GDPR. Normally I'd expect the EU to dish out a pretty hefty fine for this sort of thing, but something tells me Apple lawyers and penpushers has been busy making sure this passes, even though it's technically illegal.

Might not be used in the EU

For the GDPR to have impact here, wouldn't they have to be collecting the information in the first place? If they're doing all the work on your own computer, that wouldn't trigger any GDPR issues.

Data collection is still data collection, it doesn't matter whether I am the one processing that data or a third party :)

It does matter. Your interpretation of “data collection” leads to absurd results.

How far does this go? Are the Bayesian spam filters that email clients have had for years that use your own classifications GDPR violations because they collect data about what you do or don’t mark as spam? Is your browser a GDPR violation because it collects data about your system that can be used to fingerprint you? Does your OS violate the GDPR when it displays your most recently accessed files in a file picker or as first suggestions when you search for something? Is the SMART monitoring built into your drives a GDPR violation? My understanding of the GDPR is that it applies to data the company is collecting about you. If the company never gets the data in the first place, then they haven’t collected it.

1. Spam filters. No, the data was collected explicitly for the spam filter to work. Anything else? Not unless you consent to it. 2. Browser collection. The browser itself? There's an agreement when installing it. The websites? There's the cookie banners. 3. OS. Is it your data? No permission needed. Your device, your data. Other people's data? Unclear. Depends on what you told the person when you collected said data. 4. SMART. I don't know a lot about how it works.

I was talking about the data you collect. Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed? You're agreeing, and it has to be an unambiguous. Sending the data outsids the EU? Explicit checkbox.

Is it absurd? Yes

your uninformed opinion about what the GDPR requires is absurd, yes. Because it is not correct.

> Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed?

Ok, but that seems to contradict your original assertion that it doesn't matter where the data is processed. The processes we're talking about run on your computer, processing data about you so that the services your OS provides can use that data to make the services work. That sounds a lot to me like "your own data processed on your device"

You should admit it’d be a bit silly to give notice to yourself that you are processing your own data!

> Data collection is still data collection, it doesn't matter whether I am the one processing that data or a third party

It absolutely matters who collects or processes for who must be GDPR compliant.

If it is stored entirely on the machine you own, then you are processing and storing the data.

More and more companies will start to use this loophole...

Next, Google will be downloading a database of 2 billion ads to your PC to check against all your private data and decide which ad to show you for anything you search in the future.

And because its all on your PC, no GDPR issues - you are processing your own data.

in this hypothetical setup you're effectively downloading malware, I wouldn't really consider that a loophole. Regulation that concerns data ownership can do precisely what the name says, give you control over where your data lives.

If you have full sovereignty over your data and your computer and you decide to use software that downloads ads and blasts them to you, at some point even in the best jurisdiction you're responsible for what you install

This is how privacy-preserving advertising works, yes. To be entirely honest if this works I think I’d agree with that term!

[delayed]

Vendor of guns will know that people visiting their website like guns. And similarly for other toys with a barrel. Oh no.

I mean…yeah? At some point you’re going to give them your credit card info and home address

It all lives on your device. Apple literally doesn’t have custody of the data so it’s not relevant to the GDPR. It’s your data.

Were that were so!

iCloud Backup, on by default, is not end to end encrypted and uploads almost the entire contents of your device to Apple’s servers every night in a format they can read (effectively unencrypted). This includes your entire message history over SMS and iMessage and all attachments thereto.

It is safe to assume that the data collected and assembled by these daemons is part of the iCloud Backup, which you never have to explicitly enable; it happens when you log in to iCloud on the device, usually within minutes of first powering it on for most people.

This data is not included in iCloud backup. That detail is included in the article.

> This data is not included in iCloud backup. That detail is included in the article.

The word "backup" does not appear at all in that webpage? Your claim is unsubstantiated. For these features to work, they must be running on iOS as well, for people who don't own a mac. Siri is used more on mobile devices than on desktops, generally.

Photos aren’t in iCloud Backup. Have you considered doing the bare minimum to understand the features you complain about?

They don't need to be; Photos are synced in realtime to Apple without e2ee. Apple already has them, even faster than the nightly backup.

>iCloud Backup, on by default

iCloud is not on by default with macOS. For starters, you have to create an iCloud account!

While not the default, with Advanced Data Protection, iCloud Backup does encrypt backups end to end. It’s available in most jurisdictions.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651#advanced

Also available to any other app with "full disk access" to just read and upload. A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).

Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user. That's hardly unique to this data, and is a well known issue when it comes to personal data and the applications you run under the unix permissions model. That this is at least behind the "full disk access" control makes it more protected than something like all of the tax and accounting data your financial software is storing in your Documents or home folder (well, technically under macOS your Documents folder also has its own permission, but it's the same sort of thing where anything with permission to read from your Documents folder can read anything in there).

It's an eternal balancing act because every time Apple implements some new restriction in their OS that prevents apps from doing whatever they want, whenever they want, people get mad at them. But without those restrictions, the ever increasing amount of personal data that is stored on your computer is exposed to the ever increasing number of data slurping applications that you run.

This drives me crazy. I'm slowly working on isolating every application into it's own sandbox but the fact that this wasn't built into the kernel drives me up the wall.

>Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user.

That not being the case is the whole purpose of the per-app sandboxes which macOS has along with TCC. We're not discussing plain Unix permissions alone.

Ok, and the data is in a location that you need to grant full disk access to an application in order to access it. So what is the complaint here? Is it that if you run an application and give it access to the data that it has access to the data?

> A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).

I assume you mean 'many' and not 'make'—this is untrue; you only need to grant FDA if you're trying to access protected areas, like the knowledge graph store.

Granting full disk access to an app that you don't trust not to surreptitiously exfiltrate your data is the kind of user error where the buck stops with PEBCAK.

Which is why Apple is so skittish about "full disk access".

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=p6zjojqw

> The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.

Agreed. None of this is magic, and the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free. Many HN people even _build_ those platforms.

Would I like to see more controls around this? Yes, absolutely. Having some random app be able to read this data with only a single permission barrier is room for improvement. I would also like to see more tooling included to inspect and correct this data. Something like a Monica[1], but local and built on local data. Suddenly address book data is no longer a list of names and numbers, but a part of a data structure that you can use to surface information, like friend's preferences or vacation photos together. Not everything that collects data is insidious and a Black Mirror episode in the making.

[1]: https://www.monicahq.com/en/

>> the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free

This is truly disappointing to hear on HN.

You realize this site is run by a venture capital firm and startup accelerator whose alumni include companies like Flock and Delve, right?

There's always been a good bit of tension here between the YC founders and the people who work in the industry. I was banned for comments about PG ten years ago. Neither VC nor workers here are unaware of the consequences of widespread apathy. My disappointment is with one side of that argument capitulating or acting as if the principle is lost, or perhaps being too uneducated and ignorant to state the case.

The VC around here loses more than we do if HN ceases to be a useful barometer.

> given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life.

Does it know this based on something other than you told it a name for a face at some point? I have plenty of people where Photos sees an unidentified person, and they remain unidentified as I have not named them. It also knows my pets because I've also named them. Until I manually set the name, Photos did not "know" them.

I think(?) it also figures it out from the contact photo you give someone and matching from that. Not everyone puts photos on their contacts though.

I don't trust people that push their contact info like that. That's something from an entirely different generation that I just can't grok

I would _LOVE_ an option in iOS to say "don't accept these from anyone, and regardless of what you think about in the future, never send one either" that is honored indefinitely.

And what is your "Verify" procedure?

With proprietary software, you just have to take the company's word for it

> I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends."

I got inspired by the automatic “memories” videos/slideshows that Photo makes, and applied it to a video game of AI creatures. The creatures accumulate memories about their experiences, and then the game builds reels with little images or replays of their memories as they happened, with comments about their feelings. It’s pretty fun to watch

On a side note, every few times I open Google's photo gallery on my android phone, it pops up a dark pattern "backup your photos" toast with a pre-selected radio box saying yes, and two or three delicate manual steps to AVOID having it start uploading all my photos right then.

Unbelievably invasive and offensive.

We’re just serfs of the feudal overlords. We only exist to fill their coffers.

I'm not sure if it's OP's software not being compatible with macOS 15/Sequoia, or if it's my habits and "cyber hygiene", but I get pretty much zeroes (read: no inferences) all across the board when digging through my data. Anyone else on "old" macOS seeing the same?

I could test on old OSs. Information might be there, but under different names / DBs that the tool does not catch

Stallman being upset about not having the source to printer drivers seems quaint these days.

This is exactly why we should not have closed source anything at the bottom.

“Protected by the Full Disk Access permission”

Which of course we developers give to our tools and terminal emulators so they are not annoying to use! One npm install away from mining this sweet data via a postinstall script!

I hate this. On the plus side, it can't work out if my (age-appropriate, feminine) wife is more likely to be my son or daughter, but lists them as as-likely-to-be my partner as my deceased father.

Saddened but not surprised.

This makes me glad. I do not own or use an iPhone. I have 2 iPads, one on iOS 9 and one on iOS 17, and neither can be updated. Neither talks to my email or anything: they're ebook readers, basically. Nobody in my immediate family uses iPhones either, nor Apple Watches or Apple TV or any of that.

I do not use Apple's App or Music stores, or their email, or calendar, or notes, or web browser, or even the text editor. I don't use Siri. I don't have a payment method on my 30Y old Apple account.

My email goes through Thunderbird, chat through Ferdium, web via Firefox. Office work is in Panwriter and occasionally LibreOffice.

I suspect, but don't know, that Apple doesn't know much about me and I suspect I wouldn't care about what it did.

It's still possible to use a Mac as a prettier Linux box, and that's what I do. I have no OS newer than macOS 15 and I don't even use Homebrew to extend that.

> I suspect, but don't know, that Apple doesn't know much about me and I suspect I wouldn't care about what it did.

I used to have similar thoughts. But then i realized everyone was emailing me from Google, sending me evites, posting pictures of events I attended but didn't RSVP to social media, etc. If you live in a moderately populated city in a western economy these apps know a ton about you. You should not give up your digital hygiene but don't lie to yourself and pretend that your friends and family are not feeding your data to the beast.

Is this a way to query this from the command line? I'd rather not give a random piece of software deliberate access to personal data...

It is a sqlite db, so you can load it with that

I have a few questions:

Is it unencrypted and accessible by other applications without elevated permissions?

Can I modify it at will and does it persist if so?

It is in plaintext, but protected by TCC (so, only privileged apps / trusted by you can). Not sure about persistence. I believe it is rewritten periodically, possibly ignoring your edits

> who you know

Whom you know.

Makes me cringe too.

Something that is additionally concerning is that you apparently cannot read your own data:

    $ ls -la ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    total 0
    ls: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
    $ find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
    $ sudo find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted

Yet another person who’s unaware of TCC. You misconfigured your security settings for your terminal app. You need to give it full disk access, or otherwise just open the folder in Finder.

Giving a browser full disk access is definitely not a good idea: I think it is you who has misconfigured.

I think it is you who needs to read more carefully. They said "terminal" not browser.

At the time of my reply they wrote Firefox. Now it says Finder. Snarky edit!

Decent work, if unreadable. I’ve disabled Apple Intelligence now.

It will still collect this data.

Source: have never had Apple Intelligence enabled, have these files anyway

Someone else said it and I’ll echo it. This is invasive and cannot be disabled by disabling Apple Intelligence.

Maybe the technical details weren’t available, but I thought that we already knew this was a thing? I was aware that my Mac and iPhone were indexing various sources like this on device for Siri.

But it does this even when siri is disabled

[delayed]

True, Apple is competing with Microslop now on shittiness and user abuse. Linux really is the only viable OS that remains.

Yup. Just had a support agent hit mute, disconnect the screen share and pretend the line cut out to get out of a tricky support request too ("why do I need to keep rebuilding the Spotlight index every couple of days?"). No attempt at calling back. Atrocious

I have a "flock" script that locks downs files that I do not want changed except for when I persoanlly "funlock" it.

It does the last 4 commands:

    cd ~/Library
    rm -rf IntelligencePlatform
    touch IntelligencePlatform
    xattr -w com.flock.mode 444 IntelligencePlatform
    chown root:wheel IntelligencePlatform
    chmod 444 IntelligencePlatform
    chflags schg IntelligencePlatform

Good call; just applied this myself. What other files do you lock down?

* .gitconfig * .claude/settings.json (same for codex) * .zprofile and .zshrc * .ssh/config and id_ed25519*

It wasn't that the AI writing style was a turn-off.

It's that AI writing tends to be dense and difficult to really parse, for humans.

Something about the writing style does not sit well with how my mind works. My mind cannot parse it very well.

You could try asking it to write in Simplified Technical English (STE100), which ends up being easier to understand for humans. Or, at least for me.

This isn’t even LLM, it’s just anti-reader noise. HN needs to filter this stuff out going forward.

Stop using Macs. Its pretty easy to switch to linux.

And Apple wants to sell us Privacy as feature. Isn't this a big red flag?

great, now how do I nuke it?

Previously discussed in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521306

Since Apple goes through the trouble of invading my privacy like this, I would at least expect "Hey Siri, call mom" to do the right thing. But it does not. Either it calls the wrong person or asks me which of two particular number or email to use for FaceTime, when both lead to the same correct person anyway..so why bother asking? Apple makes the best hardware but its disappointing to see their software consistently fall short.

I have been using "Hey Siri, call my {mom, dad,wife}" with zero issues for years now.

All of this seems to be using sqlite, not KuzuDB derived tech that apple acquired about a year ago.

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/waterloo-based-graph-database-s...

Why is my computer so slow? Idk, maybe it's making a map of your socialsphere. Yeah right! Right?

Apple doesn't need you to not buy ram to make it work for them. Joke's on Sam.

this is completely wild. i use a mac for my personal computer, but also a mac for work. i ran this on my personal and noticed it was picking up slack chans i participate in often for work. i don't use slack on my personal computer. it has combined both knowledge graphs between the two computers (obviously through the apple platform) once it figured out i am the same person on both laptops. i share very little between the two laptops other than occasionally forwarding an email from a work computer to personal and vice-versa and having the same first/last name on both.

i think this is even more concerning now that i know it is building this graph in a distributed manner across multiple devices.

fyi: slack shows up as com.tinyspeck.chatlyio - it is the internal bundle identifier (Bundle ID) for the official Slack iOS app on Apple devices.

for those that complain about punctuation -- i skip it b/c i have numbness in the left hand due to an injury.

Are you signed into the same iCloud account on both laptops? If not I don’t see how they could reliably combine the graphs

This data probably isn't backed up to iCloud. But if it were, that'd make for an interesting (Facebook-esque?) intelligence resource at scale.

You probably have slack signed in on your iPhone and that iPhone shares a personal account with your Mac. Most of the data they have on me seems to be meta data from push notifications that exist on my phone.

I like how there are all these worries about privacy, and then the conclusion is to download some random software, give it access to this entire database, and throw it into an LLM API too while you're at it.

It is really hard to get through articles with prose this bad. I don't know if it's because of LLM help or lack of practice, but man i have tried 3 times now to get through it and just can't.

"Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly... Ask them. Ask them every time. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data." – Steve Jobs (2010)

"Sorry Mark...."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk_pLVQRNzg

NextDNS.io

This gives a whole new dimension to the notion that we're carrying spy software in our pockets all day long.

More and more the obvious choice is Linux and some 3rd party dumb phone.

I’m just mad how wrong the inferences are

I don't understand how every post isn't incandescently furious about this? People just seem to be resigned! This is so far beyond what I'd consider ethical for a hardware company to do s that I will not ever buy an Apple product off the back of it.

Well, this is HN, not the general population. Half of the people here probably helped build something like this at some point...

(And the other half are Apple vassals)

Apple has really good marketing. And for over a decade, they've been deploying it at the privacy angle.

Now people see behavior that would make them furious if any other big tech company did it -- and say, "it's okay -- Apple is a defender of privacy." Even people who claim marketing has zero effect on them (that's how you know it's good marketing).

Worse than resigned, people are happy about it. There's discussions about this over on Reddit too, where the users are even more overwhelmingly in favor of it. "If it didn't do this, 'Siri, call Jenny' wouldn't work! And it wouldn't be able to automatically tag Jenny in photos!" etc. People think this is fun and not creepy?

This lazy give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death thinking is so weird. I want my devices to be completely dumb. I don't want them to know anything about me. I don't want them to think for me or make decisions for me. I store data so I can retrieve it, not for the computer to "learn" from it. Leave me the hell alone.

> I want my devices to be completely dumb. I don't want them to know anything about me. I don't want them to think for me or make decisions for me. I store data so I can retrieve it, not for the computer to "learn" from it.

A respectable opinion! But are you self aware enough to realize that this opinion is NOT the norm, particularly amongst younger folks? Say millennials and younger? These products simply might not be for you, and it's frustrating they can't provide a "leave me alone" toggle somewhere in settings.

It’s local to your device and provides a useful service?

I remember reading about how in Norway (I don't remember which specific country it was) you could go and register as belonging to X category (I don't remember if it was religion) so when you die you could choose where you’ll be buried.

And of course how the information was used by Nazis to search for you and... you know the rest of the story... including why it should be dissalowed in first place.

How does one best disable this (knoweledgeconstructiond et al)?

I understand why they collect this but: Why is this not encrypted?

It is almost certainly on a disk with full disk encryption turned on, and password/biometric unlock. Unlike iOS, MacOD hasn't gone down the path of separate encryption keys, secured by the secure coprocessor, for each category of secrets.

The best solution to not losing confidentiality is not to collect it, and not to process it or store it. Relatedly, why does this daemon have access without permission being granted? If it was a third party tool it would not.

One great thing of the LLM age is being able to task Opus to do a security audit of a random open source tool. Or indeed a closed source one with the help of Ghidra. I can audit every Chrome plugin every time there's a new version. Finally, enough eyes to catch the shallow bugs.

What this incident highlights is you can now poke around the insides of MacOS, Android, and Windows to see what awful collection and telemetry has slipped in. Modifying what happens is a bigger challenge. Trusted boot and system integrity protection also protects the surveillance code.

Yikes. Luckily mine wasn't too bad - as I not on the Apple ecosystem for communication of any sort. I imagine Google's version of this for me would be even more horrifying though.

Every day I thank Microsoft for making Windows 11 so bad and mandatory that I became a Linux acolyte, now preacher. All of these secret data collections you have to remember to turn off if even possible are appalling.

Funny enough, for me it doesnt seem to have a lot of data:

- call logs of my iPhone, who and how long/how often i called each person in the last 90 days

- group chat names that seem to have come from the Signal Mac OS app (how is that even possible?)

Looking at my graph the information seems to come from: 1. The native Mails App 2. Notifications

When WhatsApp/Signal send you a notification they seem "leak" the message to the OS. Actually the suspected source 1 (Mail App) could also just be a case of the OS scraping the notifications API.

A script to prevent daemons from writing to the file containing the graph https://pastecode.io/s/70pnir9y

Terminal must have Full Disk Access System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access; sudo alone does not bypass this protection

The graph stored on my MacBook contains people I exclusively have contact with through WhatsApp. This means data from notifications (i.e. third-party-apps like WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) is also used to build the graph. Honestly crazy.

Same. I have conversation group names from Signal on my phone which are reported here. I have Signal on my MacBook but I never used it and they aren't linked.

all that knowledge and Siri is still pretty dumb.

"Is any of this sensitive? We'll leave that to you, since "sensitive" means different things to different people (though I think you have plenty to choose from here)."

What would a jury say