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> The new iPhone operating system, iOS 15, can digitise text in photos, enabling users to copy and paste text from an image, or call a phone number that appears

> The new iPhone operating system, iOS 15, can digitise text in photos, enabling users to copy and paste text from an image, or call a phone number that appears in a picture. Scanning nearby buildings with an iPhone will make Maps recognise them and generate walking directions. Algorithms will identify objects in real-time video, and it will be possible to turn photos into 3D models for augmented reality. And users will now be able to carry their IDs in their phone. All of these features increase the amount of data collected. The basic premise of the article is that : more data -> more surveillance. Certainly, this could be possible. However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance? > Apple created the Bluetooth beacons tracking people in shops, gyms, hotels, airports and more by connecting to their phones. I think, this is where the author lost me. The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance. This is what happens when you buy into simplistic narratives.

version_five 5y ago
I don't understand how people can doublethink so easily about contact tracing. Of course it's surveillance, and it's extremely invasive. You can argue that it's worth it, but to pretend surveillance that you like isn't surveillance is intellectually dishonest.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  > how people can doublethink so easily It is really fascinating. It is nothing but surveillance of course. This time it actually may increase security in contrast to most programs government implemented. The difference is that the user has to consent to it, it is transparent and there is the possibility to just shut it off again. That will never happen with hidden data collection by third parties of any kind.
nixpulvis 5y ago
I think contact tracing is by definition more surveillence (even when reasonably private). It's just a question of how much value it actually adds during times of crisis like COVID. Then it's a matter of precedence.
- dx034 5y ago
  How is that more surveillance? Just observing identifiers you can't use to identify individuals (which is the case with contact tracing as implemented) is no surveillance. It's like counting the number of cars on a busy highway, you can use that data in many ways but not for surveillance.
  - nixpulvis 5y ago
    Because there is an element of Trust involved in the statement: "Just observing identifiers you can't use to identify individuals", which unless you completely understand the protocols and math (does anyone?) inflict at least a small amount burden on the mind. EDIT: Just to add a little bit to this reply. Using your example, counting the number of cars on a highway is clearly surveilling the group of highway goers. This could perhaps allow you to note that one demographic travels more on Sunday than another, or that a remote farmer himself was out for groceries last Tuesday.
    - Someone 5y ago
      So, you bought a device that runs software you cannot inspect on a zillion different CPUs (the one you think your phone runs on, the one running below it, the phone modem’s ones, the one in your flash disk, etc), one of which has to tell the phone network where your phone is all the time, so that the network can find your phone when you get a call. For most users, another one regularly tells the manufacturer of your phone where your phone is, so that, if you lose it, you can use it to locate your phone. With neither, you can check whether that data is deleted in a timely manner or whether extra data, such as IDs of phones near you, is being sent out and collected. Now, the seller of said phone adds a feature, documenting that it collects hashes of phones near you on your device. Again, there’s no way for you to check that, but why would that require more trust?
NorwegianDude 5y ago
Pretty sure the author is referencing iBeacon.
- masswerk 5y ago
  But this requires either a dedicated device or a dedicated app with according permissions running. Also, as I understand it, it's actually the device, which locates the beacon.
masswerk 5y ago
Also, I'm not aware that the image to text scan (Vision framework) in iOS 15 and macOS (user-accessible in macOS 12, but requiring some third party frontend in Big Sur) connects to a remote service. As for end-to-end encryption breaking image search, as I understood it, it was meant to locally match images to a set of encrypted hashes of known offending images before sending them to the iCloud and would warn the user of any conflicting images (also locally). (Personally, I think this may be just a step too far, but it's not implemented as represented in the article.) Finally, any biometric hashes are stored in a secure enclave and are not accessible by the "normal" machine.
- CubsFan1060 5y ago
  FWIW, I just checked, and live text can be used with no network connection.
  - masswerk 5y ago
    Also checked on Big Sur using a tiny menu bar add-on as a frontend. No connection needed. It's using a local neural network as said in the Vision framework docs.
- walterbell 5y ago
  OCR is local, but the resulting text can be indexed by "Siri & Search" (e.g. "Learn from this app" and "Show content in search"), which default on. Is OCR text stored alongside photos on the file system? E.g. can text be backed up along with photos, or is photo text recorded in OS storage that is unaccessible to the user?
  - masswerk 5y ago
    As I know it, as an enduser service, the input is a selected portion of the screen display (much like a screenshot), meaning, there shouldn't come any association with this. However, the framework is a general service available to about any app (probably requiring some sort of consent [I'm not an app developer]) and an app may use this for embedding or associating data. So availability to Siri indexing and/or the question of trusting an app regarding its data management shouldn't be different from what applies to any other stored content. Mind that there is no obligation to activate Siri.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
est31 5y ago
> However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance? I think this is a basic question of our time, because we introduce so many devices into our lives from various areas that all collect data. I feel that even if you do "privacy conscious" data collection, the data will still land in the hands of others. A lot of the data is also never even entering a device that you own but is always controlled by third parties (like infrastructure operators, shop owners (CCTV), etc). Sometimes I feel like technology has inherent impacts, no matter how much you want it to not have that impact, because it makes some uses of it really easy while making others really hard. Like copying data is so immensely easy now, to a degree that it's hard to not copy data. Think of the CCTV example for example. You might be a privacy conscious shop operator so you don't have a CCTV system set up. However, in your street there are 5 other shops, 2 not connected to the internet, 3 which are, and one with bad security that doesn't need password logins. Now you personally have tried to not collect data on your customers, but as the customers walk down the street to your shop, they come across all the other shops, and their images even land in the public internet. Right now, the impact is countered by video data being so horribly hard to process, taking so much space, etc. So that publicly accessible CCTV system only lets attackers obtain footage of the last 3 days. But eventually, as computers improve, CCTV operators will add facial recognition features, and maybe store the data obtained for longer periods, because the info whether some person walked down the road takes up way less space, so operators might opt to store it for weeks and years. Suddenly, someone accessing that one CCTV system with bad security has access to the last 10 years of pedestrians walking down the road, and it's only a 10 GB sqlite database (which by then will likely be not much data). This effect is not just local to CCTV operators, but can be seen everywhere. If a car manufacturer collects telemetry to improve their car product, and does it for all their fleet, they might build a database spanning decades. One day they might get hacked or think it's a good idea to sell that data to insurances, municipalities or whatever. The car manufacturer might not even do it, but you also carry a phone with you with google maps/grindr installed, etc, or it's the municipality which has installed license plate checking CCTV on the road. Or it's the mobile network operators because the cars have to use some means to talk to the car companies. Etc.
- masswerk 5y ago
  The real horrible part starts where recognition replaces the captured reality. Think of the Xerox JBig2 bug, incorrectly substituting image patches in scans. Now you have documents representing a fictional reality, but with real-life consequences. (Say, you live in a zone of conflict and your CCTV image is mismatched and substituted for a known offending actor. Now you and your surroundings may have a hell of a fire problem.)
coldtea 5y ago
>The basic premise of the article is that : more data -> more surveillance. Certainly, this could be possible. However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance? No. Surveillance is the collection of data by a third party. What that third party does to the data (e.g. whether it sells them to advertisers or not) is irrelevant. Especially if others like governments can also get access to those.
- martimarkov 5y ago
  I'd say when the data is observed is when it becomes surveillance. If Apple collects this data encrypts in cloud storage and only does analysis on device. Do you still see this as surveillance?
  - fraa-orolo 5y ago
    > I'd say when the data is observed is when it becomes surveillance. If I recall correctly, that was exactly the US government's defense after the 2013 Snowden leaks revealed it was tapping every internet connection possible and sucking in every piece of data available.
    - betterunix2 5y ago
      It depends on the meaning of "observe." What if the data is secret-shared among many independent parties, so that no single party (or even a group of parties smaller than some threshold) can process it in any way? This is a common model for using MPC to protect privacy while collecting user data; in fact the first real-world MPC deployment was organized in this manner.
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    Speaking for myself, yes, I do consider it surveillance even if Apple (or anyone else) does "on-device" analysis. The main issue is whether they give me a choice in the matter, and control over the data collected and how it is processed. Once the data is collected, BigTech can change their privacy policy or Terms of Services to access this data any time. (And that is exactly what they have been doing). Moreover, they still need to collect some data to ensure the "on device" analysis is working as intended. (That's where the clause "we may also collect data to improve our services" comes into picture).
8fingerlouie 5y ago
Live text in iOS 15 is on-device (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212788 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212788) > Live Text uses on-device intelligence to recognize text in photos across the entire system and on the web And as for AR Walking directions, i can't find any place documenting if it's on-device or cloud based, but i know Maps will download your route information from the cloud. But then again, if you're using GPS, i don't see how AR Walking Directions could do (more) harm. > The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance Prior to Apple and Google releasing the contact tracing protocol, various governments had some interesting ideas that focused more on finding infected people than it did on protecting privacy. Contact tracing has actually improved privacy by a lot. You're literally only a random id number, and the way you get notified if you've been in contact is if your random number appears on a list that gets broadcast to your phone. The checking happens on-device. The authorities never know anything but your random id number.
- mlindner 5y ago
  Contact tracing is also disabled by default, so it's kind of moot.
- walterbell 5y ago
  > Live text in iOS 15 is on-device By default, "Siri and Search" are enabled to scan and learn from on-device content in every app, even if iCloud is disabled. To opt-out, the user must manually go through every app's Settings and disable multiple radio button defaults per app. Apple Configurator needs to allow device-wide opt-out of search indexing and harvesting of photos and app data, especially when Siri itself is disabled in Configurator.
  - danielagos 5y ago
    "Siri and Search" is on-device, they just use iCloud to sync across devices (to avoid that, go to the iCloud settings and disable Siri): https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/siri-suggestions-search/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/siri-suggestions...
ourlordcaffeine 5y ago
Wasn't bluetooth beaconing already a thing pre-covid?
krageon 5y ago
> anything but Contact tracing is surveillance and has already resulted in large-scale leaks of sensitive information. Given those things, it is not unreasonable to call it out in this context. Nothing about that narrative is simplistic - the simplistic perspective is that it is for health and therefore okay.
- kettleballroll 5y ago
  > has already resulted in large-scale leaks of sensitive information I must have missed that, could you share more?
bengale 5y ago
I feel like I might be reaching for the tinfoil hat but it feels to me like there is a concerted effort to confuse the privacy conversation and turn it into one about how everyone is bad. Call me paranoid but I think Facebook would love to be in a situation where privacy is an all or nothing game, because no-one is going along for the absolutist privacy vision which means Facebook et al can do as they please. They and their peers also have the money to change the conversation to something like this. Again, call me crazy, but it's reminding me a lot of the oil companies big push for things like individual carbon footprints, and plastic straws being the real enemy.
amoshi 5y ago
>The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance. This is what happens when you buy into simplistic narratives. Guess you're not following the news. Things that look simple can be deceiving. >It did seek to assuage fears, however, by repeatedly assuring Singaporeans that the data collected with such technology would be used only for contact tracing during the pandemic. And that’s where things went wrong. >Earlier this month, it emerged that the government’s claim was false. The Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed that data could actually be accessed by the police for criminal investigations; the day after this admission, a minister revealed that such data had, in fact, already been used in a murder investigation. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/11/1016004/singapore-tracetogether-contact-tracing-police/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/11/1016004/singapor...
- mojzu 5y ago
  The article states that Singapore's app doesn't use the protocol developed by Google/Apple, so I assume their app has been designed to collect location data whereas my understanding of the Google/Apple protocol is that it doesn't reveal location data (at least by itself, maybe with enough data/matches you could figure out rough locations)
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  "The Singapore government had previously rejected Apple and Google’s system, saying that it would be 'less effective' in the Singaporean context." They didn't use Apple's contact tracing system. Probably for this very reason.
  - JimDabell 5y ago
    TraceTogether was already in wide-scale use in Singapore before Apple + Google’s exposure notification system was released.
  - amoshi 5y ago
    And US might be using them because Apple/Google are American companies and can just be sent a National Security Letter along with a gag order.
99mans 5y ago
> The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance. Wow, just wow. I am stunned to find such an ignorant comment on Hacker News. Maybe someone this naive could exist in the general population, but on a board with tech folks ... how can anyone be this blind?

version_five 5y ago

I don't understand how people can doublethink so easily about contact tracing. Of course it's surveillance, and it's extremely invasive. You can argue that it's worth it, but to pretend surveillance that you like isn't surveillance is intellectually dishonest.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
raxxorrax 5y ago
> how people can doublethink so easily It is really fascinating. It is nothing but surveillance of course. This time it actually may increase security in contrast to most programs government implemented. The difference is that the user has to consent to it, it is transparent and there is the possibility to just shut it off again. That will never happen with hidden data collection by third parties of any kind.

nixpulvis 5y ago

I think contact tracing is by definition more surveillence (even when reasonably private). It's just a question of how much value it actually adds during times of crisis like COVID. Then it's a matter of precedence.

dx034 5y ago
How is that more surveillance? Just observing identifiers you can't use to identify individuals (which is the case with contact tracing as implemented) is no surveillance. It's like counting the number of cars on a busy highway, you can use that data in many ways but not for surveillance.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  Because there is an element of Trust involved in the statement: "Just observing identifiers you can't use to identify individuals", which unless you completely understand the protocols and math (does anyone?) inflict at least a small amount burden on the mind. EDIT: Just to add a little bit to this reply. Using your example, counting the number of cars on a highway is clearly surveilling the group of highway goers. This could perhaps allow you to note that one demographic travels more on Sunday than another, or that a remote farmer himself was out for groceries last Tuesday.
  - Someone 5y ago
    So, you bought a device that runs software you cannot inspect on a zillion different CPUs (the one you think your phone runs on, the one running below it, the phone modem’s ones, the one in your flash disk, etc), one of which has to tell the phone network where your phone is all the time, so that the network can find your phone when you get a call. For most users, another one regularly tells the manufacturer of your phone where your phone is, so that, if you lose it, you can use it to locate your phone. With neither, you can check whether that data is deleted in a timely manner or whether extra data, such as IDs of phones near you, is being sent out and collected. Now, the seller of said phone adds a feature, documenting that it collects hashes of phones near you on your device. Again, there’s no way for you to check that, but why would that require more trust?

NorwegianDude 5y ago

Pretty sure the author is referencing iBeacon.

masswerk 5y ago
But this requires either a dedicated device or a dedicated app with according permissions running. Also, as I understand it, it's actually the device, which locates the beacon.

masswerk 5y ago

Also, I'm not aware that the image to text scan (Vision framework) in iOS 15 and macOS (user-accessible in macOS 12, but requiring some third party frontend in Big Sur) connects to a remote service. As for end-to-end encryption breaking image search, as I understood it, it was meant to locally match images to a set of encrypted hashes of known offending images before sending them to the iCloud and would warn the user of any conflicting images (also locally). (Personally, I think this may be just a step too far, but it's not implemented as represented in the article.) Finally, any biometric hashes are stored in a secure enclave and are not accessible by the "normal" machine.

CubsFan1060 5y ago
FWIW, I just checked, and live text can be used with no network connection.
- masswerk 5y ago
  Also checked on Big Sur using a tiny menu bar add-on as a frontend. No connection needed. It's using a local neural network as said in the Vision framework docs.
walterbell 5y ago
OCR is local, but the resulting text can be indexed by "Siri & Search" (e.g. "Learn from this app" and "Show content in search"), which default on. Is OCR text stored alongside photos on the file system? E.g. can text be backed up along with photos, or is photo text recorded in OS storage that is unaccessible to the user?
- masswerk 5y ago
  As I know it, as an enduser service, the input is a selected portion of the screen display (much like a screenshot), meaning, there shouldn't come any association with this. However, the framework is a general service available to about any app (probably requiring some sort of consent [I'm not an app developer]) and an app may use this for embedding or associating data. So availability to Siri indexing and/or the question of trusting an app regarding its data management shouldn't be different from what applies to any other stored content. Mind that there is no obligation to activate Siri.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

est31 5y ago

> However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance? I think this is a basic question of our time, because we introduce so many devices into our lives from various areas that all collect data. I feel that even if you do "privacy conscious" data collection, the data will still land in the hands of others. A lot of the data is also never even entering a device that you own but is always controlled by third parties (like infrastructure operators, shop owners (CCTV), etc). Sometimes I feel like technology has inherent impacts, no matter how much you want it to not have that impact, because it makes some uses of it really easy while making others really hard. Like copying data is so immensely easy now, to a degree that it's hard to not copy data. Think of the CCTV example for example. You might be a privacy conscious shop operator so you don't have a CCTV system set up. However, in your street there are 5 other shops, 2 not connected to the internet, 3 which are, and one with bad security that doesn't need password logins. Now you personally have tried to not collect data on your customers, but as the customers walk down the street to your shop, they come across all the other shops, and their images even land in the public internet. Right now, the impact is countered by video data being so horribly hard to process, taking so much space, etc. So that publicly accessible CCTV system only lets attackers obtain footage of the last 3 days. But eventually, as computers improve, CCTV operators will add facial recognition features, and maybe store the data obtained for longer periods, because the info whether some person walked down the road takes up way less space, so operators might opt to store it for weeks and years. Suddenly, someone accessing that one CCTV system with bad security has access to the last 10 years of pedestrians walking down the road, and it's only a 10 GB sqlite database (which by then will likely be not much data). This effect is not just local to CCTV operators, but can be seen everywhere. If a car manufacturer collects telemetry to improve their car product, and does it for all their fleet, they might build a database spanning decades. One day they might get hacked or think it's a good idea to sell that data to insurances, municipalities or whatever. The car manufacturer might not even do it, but you also carry a phone with you with google maps/grindr installed, etc, or it's the municipality which has installed license plate checking CCTV on the road. Or it's the mobile network operators because the cars have to use some means to talk to the car companies. Etc.

masswerk 5y ago
The real horrible part starts where recognition replaces the captured reality. Think of the Xerox JBig2 bug, incorrectly substituting image patches in scans. Now you have documents representing a fictional reality, but with real-life consequences. (Say, you live in a zone of conflict and your CCTV image is mismatched and substituted for a known offending actor. Now you and your surroundings may have a hell of a fire problem.)

coldtea 5y ago

>The basic premise of the article is that : more data -> more surveillance. Certainly, this could be possible. However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance? No. Surveillance is the collection of data by a third party. What that third party does to the data (e.g. whether it sells them to advertisers or not) is irrelevant. Especially if others like governments can also get access to those.

martimarkov 5y ago
I'd say when the data is observed is when it becomes surveillance. If Apple collects this data encrypts in cloud storage and only does analysis on device. Do you still see this as surveillance?
- fraa-orolo 5y ago
  > I'd say when the data is observed is when it becomes surveillance. If I recall correctly, that was exactly the US government's defense after the 2013 Snowden leaks revealed it was tapping every internet connection possible and sucking in every piece of data available.
  - betterunix2 5y ago
    It depends on the meaning of "observe." What if the data is secret-shared among many independent parties, so that no single party (or even a group of parties smaller than some threshold) can process it in any way? This is a common model for using MPC to protect privacy while collecting user data; in fact the first real-world MPC deployment was organized in this manner.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  Speaking for myself, yes, I do consider it surveillance even if Apple (or anyone else) does "on-device" analysis. The main issue is whether they give me a choice in the matter, and control over the data collected and how it is processed. Once the data is collected, BigTech can change their privacy policy or Terms of Services to access this data any time. (And that is exactly what they have been doing). Moreover, they still need to collect some data to ensure the "on device" analysis is working as intended. (That's where the clause "we may also collect data to improve our services" comes into picture).

8fingerlouie 5y ago

Live text in iOS 15 is on-device (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212788 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212788) > Live Text uses on-device intelligence to recognize text in photos across the entire system and on the web And as for AR Walking directions, i can't find any place documenting if it's on-device or cloud based, but i know Maps will download your route information from the cloud. But then again, if you're using GPS, i don't see how AR Walking Directions could do (more) harm. > The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance Prior to Apple and Google releasing the contact tracing protocol, various governments had some interesting ideas that focused more on finding infected people than it did on protecting privacy. Contact tracing has actually improved privacy by a lot. You're literally only a random id number, and the way you get notified if you've been in contact is if your random number appears on a list that gets broadcast to your phone. The checking happens on-device. The authorities never know anything but your random id number.

mlindner 5y ago
Contact tracing is also disabled by default, so it's kind of moot.
walterbell 5y ago
> Live text in iOS 15 is on-device By default, "Siri and Search" are enabled to scan and learn from on-device content in every app, even if iCloud is disabled. To opt-out, the user must manually go through every app's Settings and disable multiple radio button defaults per app. Apple Configurator needs to allow device-wide opt-out of search indexing and harvesting of photos and app data, especially when Siri itself is disabled in Configurator.
- danielagos 5y ago
  "Siri and Search" is on-device, they just use iCloud to sync across devices (to avoid that, go to the iCloud settings and disable Siri): https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/siri-suggestions-search/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/siri-suggestions...

ourlordcaffeine 5y ago

Wasn't bluetooth beaconing already a thing pre-covid?

krageon 5y ago

> anything but Contact tracing is surveillance and has already resulted in large-scale leaks of sensitive information. Given those things, it is not unreasonable to call it out in this context. Nothing about that narrative is simplistic - the simplistic perspective is that it is for health and therefore okay.

kettleballroll 5y ago
> has already resulted in large-scale leaks of sensitive information I must have missed that, could you share more?

bengale 5y ago

I feel like I might be reaching for the tinfoil hat but it feels to me like there is a concerted effort to confuse the privacy conversation and turn it into one about how everyone is bad. Call me paranoid but I think Facebook would love to be in a situation where privacy is an all or nothing game, because no-one is going along for the absolutist privacy vision which means Facebook et al can do as they please. They and their peers also have the money to change the conversation to something like this. Again, call me crazy, but it's reminding me a lot of the oil companies big push for things like individual carbon footprints, and plastic straws being the real enemy.

amoshi 5y ago

>The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance. This is what happens when you buy into simplistic narratives. Guess you're not following the news. Things that look simple can be deceiving. >It did seek to assuage fears, however, by repeatedly assuring Singaporeans that the data collected with such technology would be used only for contact tracing during the pandemic. And that’s where things went wrong. >Earlier this month, it emerged that the government’s claim was false. The Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed that data could actually be accessed by the police for criminal investigations; the day after this admission, a minister revealed that such data had, in fact, already been used in a murder investigation. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/11/1016004/singapore-tracetogether-contact-tracing-police/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/11/1016004/singapor...

mojzu 5y ago
The article states that Singapore's app doesn't use the protocol developed by Google/Apple, so I assume their app has been designed to collect location data whereas my understanding of the Google/Apple protocol is that it doesn't reveal location data (at least by itself, maybe with enough data/matches you could figure out rough locations)
ceejayoz 5y ago
"The Singapore government had previously rejected Apple and Google’s system, saying that it would be 'less effective' in the Singaporean context." They didn't use Apple's contact tracing system. Probably for this very reason.
- JimDabell 5y ago
  TraceTogether was already in wide-scale use in Singapore before Apple + Google’s exposure notification system was released.
- amoshi 5y ago
  And US might be using them because Apple/Google are American companies and can just be sent a National Security Letter along with a gag order.

99mans 5y ago

> The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance. Wow, just wow. I am stunned to find such an ignorant comment on Hacker News. Maybe someone this naive could exist in the general population, but on a board with tech folks ... how can anyone be this blind?