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How can this: > [Federighi] said it would do the image-matching on a user's iPhone or iPad (...) be reconciled with this: > Mr Federighi said the "soundbyte"

How can this: > [Federighi] said it would do the image-matching on a user's iPhone or iPad (...) be reconciled with this: > Mr Federighi said the "soundbyte" that spread after the announcement was that Apple was scanning iPhones for images. > "That is not what is happening," he told the Wall Street Journal. without at least one of them be a blatant lie? Is it the tense of "was" in "Apple was scanning (...)" as opposed to "will start to scan"?

notquitehuman 5y ago
He was lying. That’s the face Craig makes when he’s lying.
karaterobot 5y ago
I assumed the hair they're splitting is it's your own device that's doing the scanning, and not "Apple". Meaning, their iCloud servers won't scan your photos. They want people to read that as "oh, I thought my pictures were going to get scanned without my say so, I guess that was just wrong and this is a false alarm", but what is actually going to happen is that you are going to scan your pictures, then send Apple a hash. To be clear, this is a distinction without a meaningful difference. Or, if there is a difference, it's that it's actually worse than the alternative (cf. the Stratechery article that's been making the rounds). If that's right, then this isn't a lie, but it's incredibly mealy-mouthed, misleading, and disrespectful of their customers' intelligence.
latexr 5y ago
“Scanning iPhones for images” can be understood as “without prompting, all images on your iPhone will be scanned and the information sent to Apple”. But from what they claim, photos are scanned as they are uploaded to iCloud Photo Library—only those photos and only at that time. The former is absolute, while the latter is contained to specific photographs on a specific trigger (which you can disable). Perhaps the nuance is irrelevant or disingenuous, but there is a valid interpretation of his words where he isn’t “blatantly lying”.

notquitehuman 5y ago

He was lying. That’s the face Craig makes when he’s lying.

karaterobot 5y ago

I assumed the hair they're splitting is it's your own device that's doing the scanning, and not "Apple". Meaning, their iCloud servers won't scan your photos. They want people to read that as "oh, I thought my pictures were going to get scanned without my say so, I guess that was just wrong and this is a false alarm", but what is actually going to happen is that you are going to scan your pictures, then send Apple a hash. To be clear, this is a distinction without a meaningful difference. Or, if there is a difference, it's that it's actually worse than the alternative (cf. the Stratechery article that's been making the rounds). If that's right, then this isn't a lie, but it's incredibly mealy-mouthed, misleading, and disrespectful of their customers' intelligence.

latexr 5y ago

“Scanning iPhones for images” can be understood as “without prompting, all images on your iPhone will be scanned and the information sent to Apple”. But from what they claim, photos are scanned as they are uploaded to iCloud Photo Library—only those photos and only at that time. The former is absolute, while the latter is contained to specific photographs on a specific trigger (which you can disable). Perhaps the nuance is irrelevant or disingenuous, but there is a valid interpretation of his words where he isn’t “blatantly lying”.