> What I want is very simple: I want software that doesn’t send anything to the Internet without some explicit intent first. At the risk of blaming the victim,

> What I want is very simple: I want software that doesn’t send anything to the Internet without some explicit intent first. At the risk of blaming the victim, it just seems so strange that in 2025 we are still having this discussion. If you are a privacy minded individual, you simply shouldn’t use social media, cloud services, or smartphones without severe restrictions. We simply cannot trust or rely on any of these companies to act in every one of our interests at once. I use my iPhone for sharing photos with my family. I also have a dedicated digital camera that is 100% always offline that I use occasionally for things I never ever want to touch the internet. I read a ton online, but I also have an e-reader that I keep in airplane mode and only load with calibre locally. Same thing with a laptop I keep offline for managing root certificates and keys I never want to worry about leaking. These articles that reverse engineer the policies of photos.app are interesting but honestly the smartphone is yet another device we don’t fully own. It’s designed to be always online running software we don’t control. If you want actual privacy you have to take matters into your own hands. Even Apple, who I believe has good intentions and some of the best privacy practices and transparency of all the big firms, is still going to do it their way for their benefit. Photos.app will always be hooked deep into Apple services, and we should expect the same for anything Apple ships. if you don’t want to talk to Apple services, just use something else.