5 ms·

This is a terrible suggestion. "Taking Apple's word on it" is not a valid privacy strategy. Companies have shown time and again that they lie about what is happ

This is a terrible suggestion. "Taking Apple's word on it" is not a valid privacy strategy. Companies have shown time and again that they lie about what is happening behind the scenes, or even just change their policies for the worst. Then there are rogue employees, such as the Ubiquiti fiasco, and secret government data collection, such as PRISM, of which Apple was a participant. Apple has broken trust multiple times, including the FBI back door, and the CSAM fiasco. They are a public company beholden to shareholders, not your trusted friend from college. Even China has strong leverage over them due to their manufacturing and market there. They are fundamentally no different from Amazon. The poster is asking for a private solution this is emphatically not it.

ummonk 5y ago
Unless you design your own hardware and build your own fab to manufacture it, you're always taking the word of at least one company.
- novok 5y ago
  Yeah the same logic applies to any network connected device you buy that has microphones on them.
- colordrops 5y ago
  This is like saying that you might as well be an alcoholic since you smoke cigarettes. That's why you use VLANs on your home network and open source operating systems on your phone and computers. It reduces attack surface area. It's on your property and you can analyze where data is being sent. With cloud services, you have no idea what's going on with the data once it is on someone else's servers.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
> "Taking Apple's word on it" is not a valid privacy strategy. I respectfully disagree. If Apple says "we don't do X", and then is shown to do X, that would be a massive PR disaster. Whereas Amazon makes no privacy promises at all. In fact, they promise the opposite.
- kornhole 5y ago
  Granted that Amazon doesn't pretend too much to not be spying on you. Carefully read Apple's policies and statements to see where they give themselves plenty of wiggle room. Unfortunately most consumers' knowledge is no match for their PR and legal team's. Apple markets their products on privacy, but countless studies and analysis finds this to be a lot of theater.
  - dsomers 5y ago
    What’s the strongest evidence you have that proves this?
- cglong 5y ago
  You're right, it was: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-contractors-regularly-hear-confidential-details-on-siri-recordings https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
  - dsomers 5y ago
    This was changed as far as I know. Do you have evidence otherwise?
    - krono 5y ago
      Claiming that whatever has not been proven false must be true is the exact opposite of how it works. We have evidence and even admittance of abuse / improper handling in the past, but I'm unable to find any evidence that things have changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
      - dsomers 5y ago
        It seems like it was changed. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/08/28/apple-apologizes-for-listening-to-siri-conversations.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/08/28/apple-apologizes-for-lis... I was just asking a question, I wasn’t attempting some sort of gotcha. I really don’t care that much.
theshrike79 5y ago
"The CSAM fiasco" was just geeks on the internet being geeks on the internet. And some really bad marketing on Apple's part. The feature itself was perfectly fine, very few people even bothered to read up on it and focused on "OMG APPLE IS SCANNING MY PHOTOS!" without any nuance.
- dsomers 5y ago
  Yeah, they absolutely were not scanning photos and anyone with basic knowledge of how hashing works should know that. I was really disappointed with some of the reactions a saw coming from this community, which totally lacked any nuance or acknowledgment of how serious the issue of child abuse is.
  - ericd 5y ago
    How is running a detection algorithm on one’s photos not “scanning” them?
    - dsomers 5y ago
      It’s a bit of a stretch to say generating a hash from a file is scanning. Most computer science terms like this are metaphors, but when I create a scan with a ‘scanner’ I can create an exact copy of what was scanned. Since creating a hash from a file is a one way process that you cannot reproduce the original file from the hash output, I would not call this a scan. All you can do is match to known child porn files. But yes, go ahead, make more pedantic excuses on why we should protect people that hold child porn.
      - ericd 5y ago
        It’s not the creation of the hash of a single file that’s the “scanning” here, the scanning is the act of doing that to all of your files and looking for a match. Scanning is just looking over something for something specific. Scanning a hard drive isn’t copying it, nor is scanning the horizon. In the case of a scanner, I suppose it’s probably called that because it moves over a page with a bright light and camera to find the dark bits. There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection using a sort of hash made out of the image features detected. The output of a neural net run on an image is also a sort of hash in a (maybe) semantically meaningful vector space. And then you can look for similar or nearby vectors. This isn’t just useful for finding one type of image. So, in case you didn’t realize, and you’re actually arguing in good faith, no one is arguing against this because they want to defend sex offenders, so you can leave that out in the future, unless you want to seem disingenuous. It’s because it makes it easy to create a population-wide dragnet for other things. It’s not hard to apply something similar to find photos taken at a protest, for example. Or pictures of a specific person you happened to meet. Anyway, have a good one.

ummonk 5y ago

Unless you design your own hardware and build your own fab to manufacture it, you're always taking the word of at least one company.

novok 5y ago
Yeah the same logic applies to any network connected device you buy that has microphones on them.
colordrops 5y ago
This is like saying that you might as well be an alcoholic since you smoke cigarettes. That's why you use VLANs on your home network and open source operating systems on your phone and computers. It reduces attack surface area. It's on your property and you can analyze where data is being sent. With cloud services, you have no idea what's going on with the data once it is on someone else's servers.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

> "Taking Apple's word on it" is not a valid privacy strategy. I respectfully disagree. If Apple says "we don't do X", and then is shown to do X, that would be a massive PR disaster. Whereas Amazon makes no privacy promises at all. In fact, they promise the opposite.

kornhole 5y ago
Granted that Amazon doesn't pretend too much to not be spying on you. Carefully read Apple's policies and statements to see where they give themselves plenty of wiggle room. Unfortunately most consumers' knowledge is no match for their PR and legal team's. Apple markets their products on privacy, but countless studies and analysis finds this to be a lot of theater.
- dsomers 5y ago
  What’s the strongest evidence you have that proves this?
cglong 5y ago
You're right, it was: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-contractors-regularly-hear-confidential-details-on-siri-recordings https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
- dsomers 5y ago
  This was changed as far as I know. Do you have evidence otherwise?
  - krono 5y ago
    Claiming that whatever has not been proven false must be true is the exact opposite of how it works. We have evidence and even admittance of abuse / improper handling in the past, but I'm unable to find any evidence that things have changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
    - dsomers 5y ago
      It seems like it was changed. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/08/28/apple-apologizes-for-listening-to-siri-conversations.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/08/28/apple-apologizes-for-lis... I was just asking a question, I wasn’t attempting some sort of gotcha. I really don’t care that much.

theshrike79 5y ago

"The CSAM fiasco" was just geeks on the internet being geeks on the internet. And some really bad marketing on Apple's part. The feature itself was perfectly fine, very few people even bothered to read up on it and focused on "OMG APPLE IS SCANNING MY PHOTOS!" without any nuance.

dsomers 5y ago
Yeah, they absolutely were not scanning photos and anyone with basic knowledge of how hashing works should know that. I was really disappointed with some of the reactions a saw coming from this community, which totally lacked any nuance or acknowledgment of how serious the issue of child abuse is.
- ericd 5y ago
  How is running a detection algorithm on one’s photos not “scanning” them?
  - dsomers 5y ago
    It’s a bit of a stretch to say generating a hash from a file is scanning. Most computer science terms like this are metaphors, but when I create a scan with a ‘scanner’ I can create an exact copy of what was scanned. Since creating a hash from a file is a one way process that you cannot reproduce the original file from the hash output, I would not call this a scan. All you can do is match to known child porn files. But yes, go ahead, make more pedantic excuses on why we should protect people that hold child porn.
    - ericd 5y ago
      It’s not the creation of the hash of a single file that’s the “scanning” here, the scanning is the act of doing that to all of your files and looking for a match. Scanning is just looking over something for something specific. Scanning a hard drive isn’t copying it, nor is scanning the horizon. In the case of a scanner, I suppose it’s probably called that because it moves over a page with a bright light and camera to find the dark bits. There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection using a sort of hash made out of the image features detected. The output of a neural net run on an image is also a sort of hash in a (maybe) semantically meaningful vector space. And then you can look for similar or nearby vectors. This isn’t just useful for finding one type of image. So, in case you didn’t realize, and you’re actually arguing in good faith, no one is arguing against this because they want to defend sex offenders, so you can leave that out in the future, unless you want to seem disingenuous. It’s because it makes it easy to create a population-wide dragnet for other things. It’s not hard to apply something similar to find photos taken at a protest, for example. Or pictures of a specific person you happened to meet. Anyway, have a good one.