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

  •  namingthingsiseasy   ( @namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev ) 
    18•3 months ago

    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.

  •  kipo   ( @kipo@lemm.ee ) English
    17•3 months ago

    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.

    •  ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝   ( @HK65@sopuli.xyz ) English
      11•3 months ago

      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.

      •  kipo   ( @kipo@lemm.ee ) English
        6•3 months ago

        If they did this in Europe, I would argue it is a GDPR violation and it would be impossible for Apple to remove the data they collected. I hope the EU fines Apple out the nose for this.

  •  utopiah   ( @utopiah@lemmy.ml ) 
    13•3 months ago

    “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.

  •  Boomkop3   ( @Boomkop3@reddthat.com ) 
    13•3 months ago

    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!

    •  utopiah   ( @utopiah@lemmy.ml ) 
      4•3 months ago

      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.

      •  Boomkop3   ( @Boomkop3@reddthat.com ) 
        1•3 months ago

        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!

        •  utopiah   ( @utopiah@lemmy.ml ) 
          1•3 months ago

          Yep, reading their blog post to read a bit better. I don’t like that it’s enabled by default, especially despite iCloud off (which should be a signal to say the user does NOT want data leaving their device) but considering what others are doing, this seems like the best trade off.

  •  dubyakay   ( @dubyakay@lemmy.ml ) 
    8•3 months ago

    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?