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?

  • 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.

  • “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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

  •  umbrella   ( @umbrella@lemmy.ml ) 
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    17 days ago

    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.

  • 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?

    •  TheFriar   ( @TheFriar@lemm.ee ) 
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      17 days ago

      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.

    • 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

      • 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 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.

  • 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