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.