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Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it?

With the recent WWDC apple made some bold claims about privacy when it comes to so called Apple Intelligence. This makes me wonder if they did something to what Microsoft did with Recall feature, would people be less concerned and to an extend praise their effort?

Do you trust apple with their claims?

Lexam ,

I would love this this feature to be implemented in IOS. This could be used for several applications like pushing more people to Linux.

cmgvd3lw OP ,

You had us in the first half, NGL

deweydecibel , (edited )

Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.

Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does "local" even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there's nothing on that phone Apple can't access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that's not local anymore.

Do I trust them with the data they're absolutely gathering? No, but I don't trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.

If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn't announce Recall, that's the whole point. Apple wouldn't be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.

But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That's what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it's as bad as Microsoft's Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.

People don't believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don't give a shit about users' wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No one believes their assurances. There's no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.

Does that mean I'd ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple's, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.

RestrictedAccount ,

So you use Android? Or Huawei?

Surely not.

luckyeddy ,

Probably an Android phone that has been degoogled or installed with another OS, is my guess.

Scubus ,

Bruh what even is this comment? Huawei makes sense, but what's your deal with android? The whole point of android is that it's customizable, if you want privacy there are more than enough options.

TheAnonymouseJoker ,

Can you elaborate on how Huawei makes sense? Or did you fall for US government propaganda? Have they provided any hard evidence in 5-6 years?

AVincentInSpace , (edited )

I use GrapheneOS. What's it to you?

Almost like mobile operating systems that are open source so I can check for myself that they're not spying on me exist or something.

Quique ,

This is always an interesting statement “i can check for my self” i know for sure that most users never checked a single line of code in the open source projects. Maybe you do but 95% do not and make this statement.

pumpkinseedoil ,

The 95% who don't trust the 5% who do. If there is a backdoor in open source projects it gets known very quickly.

Apart from that, open source projects usually are not for profit, they have no reason to add random unneeded data collection features for example.

hemmes ,
@hemmes@lemmy.world avatar

creates privacy through taking power from the user.

What do you mean by that?

abfarid ,
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

I'm pretty sure they mean how Apple won't let you install 3rd party apps and stuff, under the guise of pRiVAcY.

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.

Do they not send everything directly to ChatGPT? Like, that logic is not broken with that for the Apple users?

abfarid ,
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

They don't, actually. Most of AI stuff is processed on device, few go to their private infrastructure, and only certain Siri requests go to ChatGPT, if you give explicit permission.

Rai ,

That’s cool, at least. I’ve never used Siri and never will, but maybe I’ll mess around with their AI if it’s fully on-device.

abfarid ,
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

Based on their claims Siri also works primarily on-device. It wasn't entirely clear if you can manually prevent the usage of their AI infrastructure, but they definitely implied it. So if that's true, there's no real reason to avoid just Siri while still using other AI stuff, cause they are one and the same. And since it runs locally, they can't even store the voice clips.

Rai ,

I do also trust that Siri is all on-device! Otherwise it would work as well as its competitors hahaha. I just hate voice commands, and will never use them. I want to use my hands for operating devices.

abfarid ,
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

I'm pretty sure it wasn't on-device before. At least not all the time. But I have some good news for you, they added the ability to type your requests to Siri 😆
And to be fair, some certain things are definitely faster by voice than doing manually, like setting a timer and stuff. It's just daunting when the assistant misunderstands you or takes ages to respond. If they fixed all that, it could actually be useful.

steal_your_face ,
@steal_your_face@lemmy.ml avatar

Apple now has encrypted iCloud backups so they can’t see what you backup to them. GrapheneOS is obviously better but for an off the shelf OS apple ain’t bad.

Salzkrebs ,

They have full control over your device. It's the same for Whatsapps encryption, where Facebook can still access everything on your decrypted client.

steal_your_face ,
@steal_your_face@lemmy.ml avatar

Pretty sure it’s not the same at all but keep saying things brother

Salzkrebs ,

So you manage your own encryption keys for cloud files? Thats pretty much the only way and even then you have to trust Apple because it's closed source.

Natanael ,

Not fully encrypted unless you enable lockdown mode (and losing various features)

pound_heap ,

Apple's PR is better.
With Microsoft all news titles were like "OMG Windows will take screenshots of all you do and send it to AI", and with Apple it's more like "Apple is carefully adding AI to their products, respecting user privacy as they always have been".

Of course, when one looks into technical details they would find that MS Recall is strictly local and runs only on special hardware that people don't even have yet.

Apple Intelligence does send your data to cloud and scans everything you have in Apple ecosystem, not just screenshots. Of course they say it's done in very privacy respecting ways, and provide a lot of technical information to back this claim. But at the end it's closed source and is subject to change at any time.

Having said that, Apple users are used to and value that Apple magically takes care of everything, so they are happy to pay premium for Apple's products whatever the company does.

NGC2346 ,

Makes a lot of sense until the closed source affirmation. The source code of the OS they develop is closed source, but a lot of what they do is open source and independantly audited by experts, so there's that in the balance.

Windows is just a pile of trash.

jjlinux ,

What that Apple does is Open Source? This is the first time I've read this.

NGC2346 ,

Swift,
Webkit,
Researchkit,
Carekit,
FoundationDB,
CUPS,
Darwin,
LLVM and Clang,
SwiftNIO,
Turi Create,
Homekit ADK,

Its one thing to be against a product but its essential to be well informed and not base our perceptions on biased informations.

jjlinux ,

Yup, that's why I asked. I still hate Crapple and everything they stand for, but this is good data to start doing some in-depth research. Thanks.

Quique ,

Damn hating a product. You are damaged man.

jjlinux ,

Who says I am a man? Just kidding, I am. I do hate Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta and every other company out there that operate business on a predatory model. Am I damaged? Absolutely, at so many levels it's hard to count them. But that makes me just human, as you will find there is not 1 single human out there that is not damaged at some or other. On the brighter side, I am doing what I can to heal.

wuphysics87 ,

I'm not familiar with all of them, but I know several of them are tools. Isn't it in apple's best interest to open source the tools if people use and improve them, and subsequently it means they get more money from the app store? And if these are the only things they open source, they still have a tight fist on the vast majority of their code base.

While on the subject of apple and FOSS. They may open source some tools, but do they give back to other projects? I.e. does apple push upstream? Substantially less than google and ms. And I would go so far to say almost never.

NGC2346 ,

You're diverging from the main subject from what is open source to what you find acceptable behaviour from a corporation, which i do not involve in.

matthewc ,

Darwin. Their BSD and the foundation of MacOS and therefore all the current OSes they produce.

jjlinux ,

I have heard of Darwin, and went back to read up on it to refresh my memory. While it is considered open source, it is also useless unless it is used for Apple's closed source operating systems, as can be appreciated in this explanation:

In the beginning, Apple used to make Darwin available as a separate OS, including compiled binaries, installers, ISOs, etc. that you could install on Apple hardware. However, for many years now, Apple only provides a source code dump, every time a new release of macOS comes out. It isn't even possible to compile this source code, because it depends on Apple's internal build tools and build pipeline. There have been some projects trying to patch Darwin to compile it with publicly available tools, but those projects have all died from lack of interest.

Open Source should be compilable and able to be used, at least that's my perspective, and I just may be wrong.

Here's the article this came from on StackExchange:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/401832/why-is-macos-often-referred-to-as-darwin

jonne ,

Yeah, but that's just the kernel. Anything above that (window manager, the utilities that they didn't outright copy from BSD, apps, ...) is basically closed source.

matthewc ,

Yes

pound_heap ,

I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.

While we’re publishing the binary images of every production PCC build, to further aid research we will periodically also publish a subset of the security-critical PCC source code.

Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

abuttandahalf ,

As far as we know, apple's system does not take screenshots automatically, storing them unencrypted, likely revealing secrets to other programs.

jose1324 ,

Recall doesn't either.. it's encrypted with Windows Hello Auth

Natanael ,

But once a process is running its trivial to get weeks of extremely detailed history and lots of secrets you thought were ephemeral

programmer_belch ,
@programmer_belch@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Not your keys, not safe encryption. As simple as that

Ilandar ,

"People" would be, yes. Apple is continuously praised by its rabid fans for engaging in anti-consumer practices disguised as "courage" or "security". There will always be a very vocal group who believe it is the greatest, most humane and ethical company on the planet. Whether the same people who criticised Microsoft would be criticising Apple is another question.

Eol ,

I'm sure we wouldn't stop hearing about how it was the right decision even if we weren't having a conversation about it.

mojoaar ,
@mojoaar@lemmy.world avatar

Don't care if it's Apple, M$ or Google - non of them should do it that way.

M500 ,

I completely agree. I’ve started to migrate my work stuff to Linux to see if it will work.

I’m not hopeful that it will work, but the dev said I can try to use wine and that is not against their policy to do so and that I works but have to worry about an account ban.

So, let’s hope for the best.

jose1324 ,

Everyone suckles Apple's dick. Friends of mine were talking as if Microsoft has ended security and privacy, but are lapping up the Apple Intelligence crap

macabrett ,

I think the people who already really like Apple would be okay with it and find a million reasons to justify it. I don't think that's a good thing.

space_of_eights ,

Do you trust apple with their claims?

No. I inherently distrust trillion dolllar tech companies in poorly regulated economies. They are able to get away with a lot of crap and they know it. That's how the Cult of Apple works. I would not be surprised when they violate their own privacy policy knowingly and structurally.

Fungah ,

People.would be okay by getting fucked to death with a splintery rake if apple charged $999.99 for it.

umbrella , (edited )
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

yes lol. have you ever talked to apple fanboys? its a cult where the corporation can't possibly be wrong.

they would justify with flimsy justifications and hold their ground that its actually the best use of ai just yet.

some_guy ,

No. The whole world turned against them in 2021 (I think?) when they were gonna have on-device monitoring for CSAM. They'd get run over by a bus for this too, same as MS.

becausechemistry ,

It was a scan during upload to their cloud photos system. Everyone else does it on their servers, Apple was going to run the scan before so they didn’t have to ever have them. To not have images scanned before upload, a user would just not have to use their cloud photos service.

The messaging was really badly handled. They almost certainly just scan all the same photos on their servers instead now.

Natanael ,

The perceptual hash algorithm was broken in hours, then so fully broken that modified images were visually indistinguishable from unmodified images, so you could send people images with hash values that match flagged photos.

Also, then there's the thing of the risk of various jurisdictions pushing for adding detection of other banned content.

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

That brings me to a recent discovery:

I got a text via matrix, my notifications dont show content, yet the „places“ app suggested a route to an address given in the message.

I checked and had no appointment or other text which the app could have read it from.

This suggests to me two things: apple is reading our screens already, our governments do as well.

Can someone confirm or deny?

TheFriar , (edited )

Apple has been trying to be the next advertising giant. They’ve been growing their advertising revenue and plan on doubling it this year. They went from $4b ad revenue to $7.5 2022/2023. And if you remember correctly, that was right when you started seeing all their “apple cares about your privacy!” ads and got into it with Facebook. They’re not out here to protect our privacy. They’re trying to take the advertising revenue from the other ad giants and corner that market for themselves.

Think about it. They have gotten people locked into their OS/ecosystem. They basically hold the advertising golden ticket. They’re not here to make your digital life more private. They’re here to get your data for themselves, locking out the competition. They aim to bring more people into the gate and shut it behind them while extracting all of our advertising milk with their more advanced data udder sucking machine. The pasture looks nice, but when those gates close, the skies darken and the farmer corners you with that look in his eye.

I don’t know where that metaphor came from. But that’s how I see it in my head. The moo cow with the pretty eyelashes and the shiny bell around her neck is pulled into a false sense of security by the smiling farmer at the gate, but that shit turns dark real quick when she’s locked in.

Niiru ,

Can't neither but it's sooo easy to achieve with telemetry.

Your friend searched for the place. Your friend send you (any) message. Anyone and their mother know you are affiliated with your friend. Said place is now connected with you.

That's why telemetry doesn't need to read your screen

abfarid , (edited )
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

It's weird to assume that OS doesn't "read" the notification content, because how else would it categorize them by priority, and provide smart replies and stuff.

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

Thanks for offering your opinion. I find it weird to assume the worst at all times yet here we are.

My point is that it makes zero sense to use encryption on iOS devices at all if they read your stuff anyway, no?

abfarid ,
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

Not really, it can make sense. By "reading" your messages/notifications they could just perform semantic search/categorization, or now, run a local LLM. It doesn't necessarily mean they send that data to servers or make people actually read it.
Encryption just means the data stored on your device is not saved in plaintext. So if somebody gets their hands on your phone, they won't be able to hot-wire the memory chip and directly read all the data.

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

We have a misunderstanding here. I know that encryption as a whole will do that. But using anything else than imessage for example or whatsapp makes no sense if they can read it anyway. No point in using matrix, threema, signal and whatever. I need to get rid of this phone.

abfarid ,
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

If it's the encrypted transfer protocols that you're talking about, then it's just for the transfer of data. It was never meant to make things secure on the endpoints. Encrypting your whatsapps, signals and so on just ensures the ISPs and mobile operators can't read your messages. Also prevents an occasional MITM attack. Once the data reaches your device it's not encrypted anymore, as you can read it and copy it.

haui_lemmy ,
@haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com avatar

I know. You do get that the normal person does not think their phone manufacturer listens in on the stuff they have on their phone, yes? That is what I‘m talking about.

abfarid ,
@abfarid@startrek.website avatar

I don't follow. No I don't think that most people think that Apple and Samsung are spying on them. But a lot of people are concerned about NSA and the likes having access through the cellular service. Which is what the encryption is for.

cmgvd3lw OP ,

That's the whole reason why I disabled the notifications for Lemmy app.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Its like Apple runs the notification servers or something

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Apple fans would

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