I would love this this feature to be implemented in IOS. This could be used for several applications like pushing more people to Linux.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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You had us in the first half, NGL
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.
As far as we know, apple's system does not take screenshots automatically, storing them unencrypted, likely revealing secrets to other programs.
Not your keys, not safe encryption. As simple as that
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple fans would
It's closed source, so no way in hell
Apple fans will argue it is somehow better
I'm not sure I would use a open source Linux version of Recall, I think it would be like always sharing/streaming your desktop, so I think .bash_history is enough recall for me.
I would also allow an open source version of Co-Pilot because the AI snooping only happens within a single program.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the whole reason why I disabled the notifications for Lemmy app.
Its like Apple runs the notification servers or something
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
Apple at least tries to explain what is happening, and while not always great, you feel you understand why they are doing something or implementing new functionality unlike Windows who just dumps this shit on you without your consent and then you have to learn 5 years later that they put absolutely no thought in why they were doing, especially thinking about your privacy. Anyway, I use Arch, btw. ~/s~
I found it really weird too, Microsoft pushing Recall, an AI feature, vs Apple pushing Apple Intelligence, an AI feature.. and only Microsoft got backfired.
Recall was set to be default on for everybody and to record everything in a database which is trivial to extract data from.
There's a lot of nonsense Apple is doing too (like the chatgpt integration) but they didn't put keylogger into the system.
One records your every moment and was instantly exploited to get every piece of data you ever saw and the other does things when you ask it too and asks you before sending data off device. These are clearly exactly the same thing.
Hmm didn't know iCloud was on device...
iCloud is a data backup system, it has nothing to do with the topic at hand
I guess I thought it was the primary data storage dump. My point is that your data is already sent before you had a choice.
No
No, but if a linux distro implemented a local-only version of this, I would be interested in using it.
I honestly don't understand the use case. What do you find interesting about it?
My memory isn't perfect, it would be nice to have a second set of eyes, and I could describe things to it aside from knowing the exact words. "What was that website I visited within the last six months where I played an online game that was like snake but different?" or "What was that cryptocurrency i was researching which was touting it had perfect forward secrecy?" "Who was I emailing about the football game" etc.
I feel like those can be solved already by searching through your emails/browser history.
One thing it claimed was the ability to rewrite copy. Basically finally an improvement over spellcheck which has been the same for like 20 years. Would be nice to have something better built into the OS in every text field.
You could also have stuff like suggestions in your terminal when you're starting to write a command based on what's in the man pages and the layout of your filesystem.
Recall won't help with that. You also don't need an AI for the second one. Just something more than a basic shell.
I would trust them more than Microsoft because at least they would actually store it encrypted safely and not just basic ACLs that are easy to bypass.
Even with a root shell on macOS you can't bypass certain things like access to the camera for example. You'd have to work way harder to access recall data, not in a way that malware can trivially access.
I still wouldn't use it though, because I think the whole thing is dumb and I don't need my computer to spy on me so I can remember what I did yesterday. I have browser/shell history for that.
They already did, Spotlight is Machiavelli behind the “walled garden”
If a bunch of security experts came out in the wake of the feature's announcement talking about how much of a disaster it is, I hope they would.
You got me at trust
I don't think Apple is planning that. For now they're trying the approach to expose metadata like email headers to their AI, but that such data has been already accessible to the search functionality anyway.
It's very different from Recall, which dumps screen capture of webpages and passwords into a database file that's only protected by access rights.
apple fanboys. yes. the take it or leave it apple types would likely have a decent exodus. non apple users would not like but would not matter.