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It's not that binary. Nobody is forcing anything, you can not buy a phone, you can not use the internet. Heck, you can even not install any updates! What is ha

It's not that binary. Nobody is forcing anything, you can not buy a phone, you can not use the internet. Heck, you can even not install any updates! What is happening, is that people make tradeoffs, and decide to what degree they trust who and what they interact with. Plenty of people might just 'go with the flow', but putting what Apple did here in the same bucket as what for example Microsoft or Google does is a gross misrepresentation. Present it all as equals just kills the discussion, and doesn't inform anyone to a better degree. When you want to take part in an interconnected network, you cannot do that on your own, and you will have to trust other parties to some degree. This includes things that might 'feel' like you can judge them (like your browser used to access HN right here), but you actually can't unless you understand the entire codebase of your OS and Browser, all the firmware on the I/O paths, and the silicon it all runs on. So you make a choice, which as you are reading this, is apparently that you trust this entire chain enough to take part in it. It would be reasonable to make this optional (as in, opt-in), but the problem is that you end up asking a user for a ton of "do you want this" questions, almost every upgrade and install cycle, which is not what they want (we have had this since Mavericks and Vista, people were not happy). So if you can engineer a feature to be as privacy-centric yet automated as possible, it's a win for everyone.

talldayo 2y ago
> What is happening, is that people make tradeoffs, and decide to what degree they trust who and what they interact with. People aren't making tradeoffs - that's the problem. Apple is making the tradeoffs for them, and then retroactively asking their users "is this okay?" Users shouldn't need to buy a new phone to circumevent arbitrary restrictions on the hardware that is their legal property. If America had functional consumer protections, Apple would have been reprimanded harder than their smackdowns in the EU.
- oneplane 2y ago
  People make plenty of tradeoffs. Most people trade most of their attention/time for things that are not related to thinking about technical details, legal issues or privacy concerns. None of this exists in their minds. Maybe the fact that they implicitly made this tradeoff isn't even something they are aware of. As for vectorised and noise-protected PCC, sure, they might have an opinion about that, but people rarely are informed enough to think about it, let alone gain the insight to make a judgment about it at all.
- cortesoft 2y ago
  They can just not enable the feature if they don't want this?
  - latexr 2y ago
    The feature is enabled by default. That’s the only reason we’re having this discussion at all.
gigel82 2y ago
I don't want my photos to take part in any network; never asked for it, never expected it to happen. I never used iCloud or other commercial cloud providers. This is just forceful data extraction by Apple, absolutely egregious behavior.
- oneplane 2y ago
  Your photos aren't taken. Did you read the article at all?
  - gigel82 2y ago
    The "network" mention was in reply to your comment about "participating in a network" which was never the case for one's personal photos (unless explicitly shared on a social network I guess). I did read the article, yes :) Maybe our photos are not sent bit-by-bit but enough data from the photos is being sent to be able to infer a location (and possibly other details) so it is the same thing: my personal data is being sent to Apple's servers (directly or indirectly, partially or fully) without my explicit consent. At least the last time they tried to scan everyone's photos (in the name of the children) they pinky promised they'd only do it before uploading to iCloud, now they're doing it for everyone's photos all the time - it's disgusting.
    - oneplane 2y ago
      No, your photos aren't sent, also not 'pieces' of it. They are creating vector data which can be used to create searchable vectors which in turn can be used on-device to find visual matches for your search queries (which are local). You can imagine it as hashes (created locally), some characters of that hash from some random positions being used to find out if those can be turned into a query (which is compute intensive so they use PCC for that). So there is no 'data' about what it is, where it is or who it is. There isn't even enough data to create a picture with. Technically, everything could of course be changed, heck, Apple could probably hire someone with binoculars and spy on you 24/7. But this is not that. Just like baseband firmware is not that, and activation is not that, yet using them requires communication with Apple all the same.

talldayo 2y ago

> What is happening, is that people make tradeoffs, and decide to what degree they trust who and what they interact with. People aren't making tradeoffs - that's the problem. Apple is making the tradeoffs for them, and then retroactively asking their users "is this okay?" Users shouldn't need to buy a new phone to circumevent arbitrary restrictions on the hardware that is their legal property. If America had functional consumer protections, Apple would have been reprimanded harder than their smackdowns in the EU.

oneplane 2y ago
People make plenty of tradeoffs. Most people trade most of their attention/time for things that are not related to thinking about technical details, legal issues or privacy concerns. None of this exists in their minds. Maybe the fact that they implicitly made this tradeoff isn't even something they are aware of. As for vectorised and noise-protected PCC, sure, they might have an opinion about that, but people rarely are informed enough to think about it, let alone gain the insight to make a judgment about it at all.
cortesoft 2y ago
They can just not enable the feature if they don't want this?
- latexr 2y ago
  The feature is enabled by default. That’s the only reason we’re having this discussion at all.

gigel82 2y ago

I don't want my photos to take part in any network; never asked for it, never expected it to happen. I never used iCloud or other commercial cloud providers. This is just forceful data extraction by Apple, absolutely egregious behavior.

oneplane 2y ago
Your photos aren't taken. Did you read the article at all?
- gigel82 2y ago
  The "network" mention was in reply to your comment about "participating in a network" which was never the case for one's personal photos (unless explicitly shared on a social network I guess). I did read the article, yes :) Maybe our photos are not sent bit-by-bit but enough data from the photos is being sent to be able to infer a location (and possibly other details) so it is the same thing: my personal data is being sent to Apple's servers (directly or indirectly, partially or fully) without my explicit consent. At least the last time they tried to scan everyone's photos (in the name of the children) they pinky promised they'd only do it before uploading to iCloud, now they're doing it for everyone's photos all the time - it's disgusting.
  - oneplane 2y ago
    No, your photos aren't sent, also not 'pieces' of it. They are creating vector data which can be used to create searchable vectors which in turn can be used on-device to find visual matches for your search queries (which are local). You can imagine it as hashes (created locally), some characters of that hash from some random positions being used to find out if those can be turned into a query (which is compute intensive so they use PCC for that). So there is no 'data' about what it is, where it is or who it is. There isn't even enough data to create a picture with. Technically, everything could of course be changed, heck, Apple could probably hire someone with binoculars and spy on you 24/7. But this is not that. Just like baseband firmware is not that, and activation is not that, yet using them requires communication with Apple all the same.