Apple opts everyone into having their Photos analyzed by AI
Homomorphic-based Enhanced Visual Search is so privacy-preserving, iPhone giant activated it without asking
I have never liked Apple and lately even less. F.... US monopolies
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).
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....
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.
Between this and Tim Cook's generous personal donation to the Trump inauguration, those folks seem strangely silent.
Apple is always silent, because they know they have no justification for their bullshit.
Lemmy isn't promoted by Apple
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.
It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed.
Narrator: It doesn't.
Wait, what?
So you take a pic, it's analysed, the analysis is encrypted, encrypted data is sent to a server that can deconstruct encrypted data to match known elements in a database, and return a result, encrypted, back to you?
Doesn't this sort of bypass the whole point of encryption in the first place?
Edit: Wow! Thanks everyone for the responses. I've found a new rabbit hole to explore!
I hate apple so goddamn much
No one thinks Apple, or any other ecosystem for that matter, is completely private. It's just far more private than Android. Primarily because Apple is not an advertising company.
I heard that they were the first test-audience Apple used to test their new product, the IRope. Apple designed it to go around their user's necks. The other end of the IRope is designed to attach to a proprietary cryptographic dongle to work called the Lynch-Key. Apple says it's like a lynch-pin because it's critical to the function the IRope.
Apple never did hear back from the test-audience. -I think this product will be a real winner!
In case anyone came to the comments looking for directions on how to opt out:
For my iPad it was:
Thanks
It will just reset itself eventually plus they already trained on it, it's too late.
"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.
That's Apple though. "We know what you want better than you do" is almost a company mantra.
Not almost, it just is. It is the winning strategy right now. Everyone who is doing it gains massive profits somehow. Money speaks for itself, isn’t it?
Agreed, I'm not an Apple fan, but the headline is vague enough to make things seem worse than they are.
Apple opted customers in, got sued, and will now prompt customers if they want to be opted in or out.
And if there's a class action lawsuit then it'll be $95 million settlement spread out over 1.46 billion customers (this just happened over Siri spying).
Ease of use vs all the rest, as usual
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.
Not saying that it shouldn't be illegal and it's shady as fuck, but GDPR opt-outs are usually retroactive, meaning you can remove consent from data they've already processed, and they have to retroactively scrub your personal data out.
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.
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
Don't they mean Tim Apple?
1 million is pocket change for the trilionaire class.
It’s a symbolic pro-rape gesture in my eyes
and google isnt? and meta / facebook isnt? etc
"does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud." damn that's a bit much!
Edit; in this thread, people who miss the point of homomorphic encryption to dunk (sadly often rightfully so) on Apple.
To what end? They claim they can't read the data, nor the output, nor where it originated from. So... what's the point? If their claims are true then what is the point of all that data transfer, processing, and the massive engineering efforts they've put into it? If it's just so they can tag a location, then they could have just used geo location on the device without sharing anything. If it's to be able to search for " Eiffel Tower" and see pictures you have of it, well, haven't they already been able to do this before this feature with on-board AI processing that doesn't require the data to be shipped to Apple? Something seems off to me, but maybe because I'm not clear on the purpose.
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 don’t really understand the purpose of the feature — GPS tags are already embedded in the photo by the phone, so it knows the location of each picture. The phone also analyzes faces of people you’ve identified so you can search for people you know. What else does this new feature add?
I don’t know how much compute cost this adds to an already expensive computation.
At that scale and because they do pay for servers I bet they did the math and are constantly optimizing the process as they own the entire stack. They might have somebody who worked on the M4 architecture give them hint on how to do so. Just speculating here but arguably they are in a good position to make this quite efficient, even though in fine if it's actually worth the ecological costs is arguable.
Their chips are pretty good at not drawing much power. But then you also get to the balance of power cost, computing power and physical space.
Google and Microsoft are already building their own power generation systems for even faster AI slop. That would make power a lot cheaper, and super efficient chips might not be the best answer.
I don't know which way Apple will go, except further up their own behind. But either way, these are some really cool approaches to implementing this technology, and I hope they keep it up!
This would hypothetically be a possible way, but there's two issues with it:
For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.
In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing "AI" to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.
As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.
And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.
Somehow I am much less scared of AI being forced into everything compared to VR or crypto.
I guess it’s because I know AI is a nothing burger and will slowly lose hype.
While I agree that the AI they will implement will likely not be very effective, it doesn't have to be to cause massive human suffering. Eg. Google incorrectly marking exposed photos of your kid for your doctor as CSAM. There's also no guarantee that once these companies finally wake the fuck up (If they're not even unaware what they're doing is messed up) that they will close these holes they're punching, and that could mean they could replace AI with a mass surveillance tool at any point without you knowing. Nobody should be a fan of this.
Makes perfect sense, but what a bummer.
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
Although this is terrible, once again a headline on lemmy made me paranoid only to find out that my phone probably doesn’t even support this.
Going through the settings and turning things off is second nature to me by now, it’s not unique to Apple (looking at your Microsoft).
What we need is an opt out mode on every device. Similar to the accept necessary cookies only, we need every device to let you fully opt out from everything it can when you boot it up for the first time.
I don't think it's fair to say "once again a headline on lemmy", by connotation you're vaguely suggesting Lemmy is responsible.
I'm a big settings person as well but honestly Apple is a fucking evil genius at hiding options in menus within menus. Plus this was an opt-change done randomly in the middle of "nobody knows", I don't check all of my settings and their subsequent menus daily for any changes being made.
I'm just flabbergasted by the whole apple industry though. Like it's obvious when a company wants to offer a new user experience (their newest innovative design!), and it's obvious when a company wants to only tailor to "Their preferred vision of what an apple user and their experience should be". No one asked for this shit, and it's being shoved down everyone's throats.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I still watch people walk into a Dollar General knowing how crappy that company acts and how much more costly everything is. We're all slowly being pigeon holed into a "unified user experience" and it's the shittiest outcome.
$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.
Nothing but depressing news for common people all around.
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.
I don't even get it. Like, make a pop up with a short blurb explaining the feature. Most users will probably opt in, and you don't piss off the ones that don't want this.
I love how Apple advertises "Privacy by default" but they do this
Never accept the technology just because it is optional. Eventually it will become default and eventually maditory.
My iPhone 13 mini will be my last iPhone. They lost me when it turned out they donate to illegal settlements in the West Bank. This is just more fuel to the fire.
Pixel with a custom ROM is the way
I have an iPad, now I am scared..
This is data stealing?
Nah, they're just checking to see if you guys are well proportioned or maybe you need something they can sell you. For example, new clothes? Dave, isn't that the same jacket you always wear to work? You need a new one! Here are some options from Walmart, we'll just hide them here behind this thing you're browsing about right now... How about here too! And here!
Dammit! You WILL use this tech we spent billions on whether you want to or not.
Fuck this company. What a fucking joke they become.
once again having an old as fudge iphone has paid off
if only i could have kept my iphone 5 working i could still be using headphones
I still have my iPhone 6s as a backup for travel. Works fine. Replaced the screen 3x, battery 2x. Still kicking.
You can opt out
Supposedly. Whether or not it actually works is a different matter.
You could propably monitor web traffic from an another device on the same network. As far as i know, Wireshark can do this, maybe nmap too
Afterwards.
