- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I have never liked Apple and lately even less. F… US monopolies
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Where’s the “Apple is the only tech giant that respects your privacy” crowd? Just because your data isn’t being publicly auctioned doesn’t mean they aren’t harvesting it and infringing on your privacy.
I switched to iPhone from Android because I was tired of Google making changes to their security and APIs that were killing my macros I’d write for my phone. I was also tired of Google sending everything good to the graveyard. Finally, I hated that Google would promise features or support for x number of years and then pull the rug out from under me (although, lack of support was usually caused by the manufacturer)
Before spending $1000 on my iPhone, I told my wife that it was a good investment because of Apple’s proven history of supporting devices with 5 years of updates; so we agreed that I’d keep this iPhone as my daily driver for 5 years because of the exuberant cost.
Well, my wish came true and here we are. I’ve got a phone that doesn’t respect my privacy, doesn’t respect my settings, has a frustrating UI/UX, and has low compatibility with most of my existing infrastructure. I gotta admit, though, my experience is far more consistent now, but not in a good way.
I cannot imagine spending $1000 on a phone in general. And even more so, I cannot imagine spending $1000 on a phone I cannot even sideload something like Newpipe on.
Since you are seemingly wealthy enough for this - maybe Pixel with GrapheneOS would be a right fit for you? Pixels also have longer support now (although I still think it’s very short, so I’d likely have to switch to Lineage afterwards).
Wealthy? Look at flagship phone sales numbers every year. Broke ass people have expensive gadgets all the time. Get a life.
Very few people spend $1000 outright on a phone, you know that right? Every major mobile provider has some sort of installment plan for purchasing a new device. Apple offers one directly as well.
Using fomo and marketinp to force people into debt for a phone. Definitely the moral and sensible choice.
That’s still spending $1000 on a phone, even more if you pay interest.
I tried the new iPhone 16 Pro. They should be ashamed of what they’ve created. If that’s their flagship phone, then I can’t even imagine how glitchy their base models are. It felt like a Fisher Price OS compared to Android. I returned it after two weeks. My several year old Pixel Pro can do more stuff more reliably than Apple’s brand new flagship device.
I have the 14 pro and my sister recently got the 16 base model. I don’t know why, but the pictures from her newer phone looked like a major leap backwards in quality. Also, the latest OS does feel like its features were written in crayon and that its waiting to kick off its training wheels. I can’t fully describe it: it’s not clunky or clumsy, it just feels like something is missing from the experience. I’ve never really felt this way from a phone version upgrade before.
I have used both iOS and Android for more than a decade. After every update on both systems I have to go through and delete/disable junk I don’t need/privacy issues.
The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.
iOS’s UI is terrible to use with everything taking twice as long as it should. So many illogical hidden commands.
Everything has gotten randomly harder to get basic things done.
My win 10 business computer with classic shell will stop being supported the end of the year… Oh joy…
The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.
What? I use a stock Pixel Pro and there’s no fluff. It’s very vanilla, but does everything I need it to do without fuss. I was using Nova Launcher Pro, but they sold it to an advertising company a while ago, so I went back to the stock launcher.
I am typing this on a pixel 8
Try disabling and removing the Google search bar. Can’t be done. Since Google search has gone down hill I never use it.
How about removing the the news feeds? You have to disable the Google app to get rid of it. If I want to read the news, I do a quick search. It’s not hard to do. I don’t need a news feed on my phone.
What about the stupid at a glance at the top of the home screen? It just takes up space for no benefit over the notification bar. It can’t be fully removed.
I also never us any voice assistant etc because it’s faster to type it in than repeat myself.
I currently have 19 apps on this phone disabled that I can’t uninstall… No fluff huh…
All of my apps are organized into folders and I am never more than one swipe and two taps away from opening the app I want. I don’t scroll, I don’t search, I know where everything is and have it opening in under a second.
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.
Narrator: It doesn’t.
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.I don’t want Apple exflitrating my photos.
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.
Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides [your] IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos. You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.
Apple did explain the technology in a technical paper published on October 24, 2024, around the time that Enhanced Visual Search is believed to have debuted. A local machine-learning model analyzes photos to look for a “region of interest” that may depict a landmark. If the AI model finds a likely match, it calculates a vector embedding – an array of numbers – representing that portion of the image.
So it’s local. And encrypted. How is this really news? Am I missing something?
AI bad grrrrr
Local and encrypted according to the company that just lost a lawsuit saying Siri totally wasn’t listening to you
Well they settled for $95 million to avoid a trial… which probably speaks more about what they are hiding tbh
“Apple is being thoughtful about doing this in a (theoretically) privacy-preserving way, but I don’t think the company is living up to its ideals here,” observed software developer Michael Tsai in an analysis shared Wednesday. “Not only is it not opt-in, but you can’t effectively opt out if it starts uploading metadata about your photos before you even use the search feature. It does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud.”
Reading the article, the service itself is interesting and it sounds like Apple might have found a way to process the data while preserving user privacy, but the fact that they unilaterally opted everyone in without giving them a choice is the biggest problem.
Remember, when you buy an apple product, you’re directly supporting Trump.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/03/tim-cook-apple-donate-1-million-trump-inauguration
It’s a cool idea: certain approaches to encryption still allow math to be performed. Here’s one example: say you encrypt data X with algorithm Z. then you could multiply Z by four, which would also multiply X by four. So you can run computations on the encrypted data without decrypting it.
It would be quite complex, but I suppose you could run a machine learning model this way to tag images without ever seeing the image, or knowing the resulting tag. Only the decryption key can be used read the results (which is on the user’s iphone, I suppose).
However… I don’t know how much compute cost this adds to an already expensive computation. The encryption used might not be the strongest out there. But the idea is pretty cool!
I love how Apple advertises “Privacy by default” but they do this
In case anyone came to the comments looking for directions on how to opt out:
- Go to Settings. 2) Scroll down and select “Photos.” 3) Locate the “Enhanced Visual Search” option. Turn off the toggle.
What does F… stand for?
FUS monopolies - he’s trying to use the Thu’um to shout them away.
$1m to Trump and now this!
Tim Apple was going to kick $1M to whomever won. For a guy with a net worth in the tens of billions, this is just a tip to the wait staff at the Table Of Success.
But the Apple photo library is a huge potential source of revenue. Its worth significantly more than $1M. This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images. If you’re not the client, you’re the product.
This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images
Huh? You pay for anything above 5 GB or so. It’s standard for most cloud providers to offer a free tier to get you hooked. Their storage after that isn’t all that cheap even.
The Fappening: Part II
I should stock up on tissues
“I want to masturbate to leaked pictures of celebrities” is probably the creepiest reaction to this article I can imagine.
An opt-out that you can’t opt out of because Apple already opted you in and took your photos?
This seems like it is going to be a huge lawsuit. Since a class action won’t deter them or help us, let’s all sue Apple individually in small claims court and kill them by death from a billion cuts.
According to another comment, the photos never leave your device, that part of the processing is done on-device. The global index is on Apple servers.
