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Exactly, I don't want my shit sent all across the internet without my explicit prior consent, period. No amount of explanation can erase Apple's fuck-up.
by zombot 2y ago
Exactly, I don't want my shit sent all across the internet without my explicit prior consent, period. No amount of explanation can erase Apple's fuck-up.
- api 2y agoNot wrong, but it’s interesting that Apple gets so much flak for this when Google and Microsoft don’t even try. If anything they try to invade privacy as much as possible. Of course maybe that question has its own answer. Apple markets itself as the last personal computing company where you are the customer not the product so they are held to a higher standard. What they should do Is do the processing locally while the phone is plugged in, and just tell people they need a better phone for that feature if it’s too slow. Or do it on their Mac if they own one while that is plugged in.
- yard2010 2y agoIn other words: don't hate the player hate game, but the point still stands.
- drawkward 2y agoThe game, unlike Apple's policy, is opt-in. Hate the player and the game.
- okamiueru 2y agoWhataboutisms aren't all the great you know. Google and MS also get flak, and they also deserve it. But now that we're talking about these differences, I'd say that Apple users are notoriously complacent and defend Apple and their practices. So, perhaps in some part it is in an attempt to compensate for that? I'm still surprised how we've now accepted that Apple receives information pretty much every time we run a process (or rather, if it ran more than 12 hours ago, or has been changed).
- BlackFly 2y agoWell when you are building a feature that can only be appreciated by a subculture of people (privacy advocates), and they complain about the most basic faux pas that you could do in their culture (not asking them before you phone home with data derived from their data)... you have invited these people to criticise you. Most people I know of wouldn't care about such a feature other than a breathless sort of "Wow, Apple tech!" So they are building something which is intended to win over privacy conscious people, kudos to them, everyone stands to benefit. But the most basic custom in that subculture is consent. So they built something really great and then clumsily failed on the easiest detail because it is so meaningless to everyone except that target audience. To that audience, they don't bother criticising google or microsoft (again) because it goes without saying that those companies are terrible, it doesn't need to be said again.
- Helloyello 2y ago[dead]
- ylk 2y ago> a feature that can only be appreciated by a subculture of people (privacy advocates) Just because it can’t be “appreciated” by all users doesn’t mean it’s only “for” a small sub-group. It seems to me they’re just trying to minimise the data they have access to — similar to private cloud compute — while keeping up with the features competitors provide in a less privacy-respecting way. Them not asking for permission makes it even more obvious to me that it’s not built for any small super privacy-conscious group of people but the vast majority of their customers instead.
- gigel82 2y ago"not asking them before you phone home with data" is a basic faux pas for privacy advocates? LOL; that's a fundamental breach of trust of the highest degree, not basic by any means.
- Dylan16807 2y agoAre you under the impression that "basic" and "fundamental" are not synonyms?
- victorbjorklund 2y agoYou can always find someone worse. Does not mean we should not critise people/organizations. You think Trump is bad? Well, Putin is worse. You think Putin is bad? Kim Jong Un is worse.
- lapcat 2y ago> just tell people they need a better phone for that feature if it’s too slow. Or do it on their Mac if they own one while that is plugged in. The issue isn't slowness. Uploading photo library data/metadata is likely always slower than on-device processing. Apparently the issue in this case is that the world locations database is too large to be stored locally.
- phkahler 2y ago>> Apparently the issue in this case is that the world locations database is too large to be stored locally. What kind of capacity can ROM chips have these days? And at what cost?
- j2kun 2y agoFWIW, I work on homomorphic encryption at Google, and Google has all kinds of other (non-FHE) privacy enhancing tech, such as differential privacy, federated learning, and https://github.com/google/private-join-and-compute https://github.com/google/private-join-and-compute which are deployed at scale. Perhaps it's not as visible because Google hasn't defaulted to opt-in for most of these? Or because a lot of it is B2B and Google-internal (e.g., a differential-privacy layer on top of SQL for internal metrics) [edit]: this link was a very vague press release that doesn't say exactly how Google uses it: https://security.googleblog.com/2019/06/helping-organizations-do-more-without-collecting-more-data.html https://security.googleblog.com/2019/06/helping-organization...
- keeganpoppen 2y agouhhh yeah it's not visible because it's not used for anything. because it runs contrary to Google's entire raison d'être. if it's not turned on by default, what is even the point of doing it at all other than to pacify engineers who are perfectly happy to miss the forest for the trees? it's kind of like saying that you have the power of invisibility, but it only works if no one is looking at you.
- butlike 2y agoDoesn't Photos.app on iOS sync with iCloud OOTB?
- GeekyBear 2y agoApple does photo recognition on your device. Google, on the other hand, uploads photos to their server and does the analysis there. There is the infamous case of the parents who Google tried to have arrested after they used their Android device to seek medical assistance for their child during lockdown. Their doctor asked them to send images of the problem, and Google called the police and reported the parents for kiddie porn. > “I knew that these companies were watching and that privacy is not what we would hope it to be,” Mark said. “But I haven’t done anything wrong.” The police agreed. Google did not. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... Google refused to return access to his account even after the police cleared him of wrongdoing.
- zombot 2y ago> Apple does photo recognition on your device. If that were true, the whole homomorphic encryption stuff would be pointless.
- throw10920 2y ago> Google refused to return access to his account even after the police cleared him of wrongdoing. This is why I constantly work to help people reduce their dependence on Google. Screw that. If anyone ever tells you that they rely on Google for anything, show them this article.
- brokenmachine 2y agoI don't want to set up my own email server. But I definitely live in fear of Google fucking up and disabling my account.
- jchw 2y agoGoogle's reputation with privacy advocates is absolutely horrible, but that shouldn't have anything to do with Apple's practices. Comparing Apple and Google will indeed tell you a lot of interesting things, but that's not what this is about.
- 2y ago
- Klonoar 2y agoThey are not sending your actual photo, as has been covered at length on numerous threads on this very site.
- gigel82 2y agoThat's irrelevant if the information they do send is sufficient to deduce "Eiffel tower" or "dog" out of it: that's too much information to send.
- GeekyBear 2y agoThey don't have to send anything since they do all the image recognition on the user's own device. Sending everything to a server is, however, how Google's service works.
- gigel82 2y agoNo they don't, the whole reason for Homomorphic encryption is sending stuff out of your device. You don't need any encryption to process locally.
- GeekyBear 2y agoThe erroneous claim was that Apple handles image recognition and image search on servers, the way Google does. Apple handles those tasks on the users own device(s) for privacy reasons.
- rendaw 2y agoI don't think anyone made that claim in this thread.
- gigel82 2y agoThey do handle image recognition (at least some aspects of it) on their servers, unless you specifically went and disabled the right setting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533685