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.
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.
Narrator: It doesn’t.
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!
Oh they’re here, just seething about this and their precious green texts or whatever the fuck else false sense of security they’ve been clinging to
- seething
- precious
- fuck
- sense
- clinging
we are logical chad and they are emotional wojak amirite
If you’re an apple fanboy, you’ve got a lot of secret closet cries these days
- fanboy
- secret closet
- cries
Doubling down on emotional Wojak framing I see.
Right I’m the one here turning life into a shitty boring meme
In case anyone came to the comments looking for directions on how to opt out:
- Go to Settings. 2) Scroll down and select “Photos.” 3) Locate the “Enhanced Visual Search” option. Turn off the toggle.
In case that you be aware that it is activated by default, 90% of the users are not. No advice by Apple
sorry, i think you had typo or two. what did you mean to say?
aware*
For my iPad it was:
- Settings
- Apps
- Photos
- Scroll down to Enhanced Visual Search
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.
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).
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.
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That was my suspicion too, but I didn’t want to come right out and say it without more information
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
I agree. Definitely.
However, your money actually just went to Trump, via Apple, and their hardware and services.
And it would go to him if I bought an android.
In pretty sure Xiaomi don’t pay Trump. But, you never really know.
What we do really know, is Apple do. Spending with Apple is spending with Trump, guaranteed.
So are a lot of other companies.
And, we can try and avoid them. Or, we can pay trump through them.
There are so many android manufacturers that wouldn’t even spit in trumps direction. The choice is there. It can be taken. Or, we can shrug, find excuses, and just give Trump our money through apple (in this example).
Yes, this is bigger than just phones. PLENTY of other combines donated to him.
You are avoiding those companies too, right?
Don’t they mean Tim Apple?
and google isnt? and meta / facebook isnt? etc
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Then he should also pay everyone else’s ransom for being gay in America.
Fair. Maybe if he’d given some of Apple’s ill gotten gains to gay organisations we wouldn’t be here!
I think it was his end run around Apple donating the money directly which would have been a complete disaster. I don’t think Cook supports trump in a “rah rah” sort of way, but knows if the company doesn’t pay him suck up money, it will come back to haunt them later.
Either way, it’s still gross.
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.
Oops didn’t mean to! /$
Never accept the technology just because it is optional. Eventually it will become default and eventually maditory.
“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.
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?
I have an iPad, now I am scared… Should I do something about this?
Fuck this company. What a fucking joke they become.
Dammit! You WILL use this tech we spent billions on whether you want to or not.
