It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed. The data is sent encrypted and not decrypted by the remote system performing the analysis.
From the link:
Put simply: You take a photo; your Mac or iThing locally outlines what it thinks is a landmark or place of interest in the snap; it homomorphically encrypts a representation of that portion of the image in a way that can be analyzed without being decrypted; it sends the encrypted data to a remote server to do that analysis, so that the landmark can be identified from a big database of places; and it receives the suggested location again in encrypted form that it alone can decipher.
If it all works as claimed, and there are no side-channels or other leaks, Apple can’t see what’s in your photos, neither the image data nor the looked-up label.
It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed. The data is sent encrypted and not decrypted by the remote system performing the analysis.
What if I don’t want Apple looking at my photos in any way, shape or form?’
I don’t want Apple exflitrating my photos.
I don’t want Apple planting their robotic minion on my device to process my photos.
I don’t want my OS doing stuff I didn’t tell it to do. Apple has no business analyzing any of my data.
Well they don’t. I don’t want to justify the opt-in by default but, again (cf my reply history) here they are precisely trying NOT to send anything usable to their own server. They are sending data that can’t be used by anything else but your phone. That’s the entire point of homomorphic encryption, even the server they are sent to do NOT see it as the original data. They can only do some kind of computations to it and they can’t “revert” back to the original.
If they don’t look at my data, they don’t even have to encrypt it.
If they don’t try to look at my data, they don’t need to wonder whether they should ask my permission.
I don’t want Apple or anybody else looking at my data, for any reason, is my point.
It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed. The data is sent encrypted and not decrypted by the remote system performing the analysis.
From the link:
What if I don’t want Apple looking at my photos in any way, shape or form?’
I don’t want Apple exflitrating my photos.
I don’t want Apple planting their robotic minion on my device to process my photos.
I don’t want my OS doing stuff I didn’t tell it to do. Apple has no business analyzing any of my data.
Well they don’t. I don’t want to justify the opt-in by default but, again (cf my reply history) here they are precisely trying NOT to send anything usable to their own server. They are sending data that can’t be used by anything else but your phone. That’s the entire point of homomorphic encryption, even the server they are sent to do NOT see it as the original data. They can only do some kind of computations to it and they can’t “revert” back to the original.
If they don’t look at my data, they don’t even have to encrypt it.
If they don’t try to look at my data, they don’t need to wonder whether they should ask my permission.
I don’t want Apple or anybody else looking at my data, for any reason, is my point.
Narrator: It doesn’t.