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.