I have never liked Apple and lately even less. F… US monopolies
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.
Makes perfect sense, but what a bummer.
Oops didn’t mean to! /$
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!
I don’t really understand the purpose of the feature — GPS tags are already embedded in the photo by the phone, so it knows the location of each picture. The phone also analyzes faces of people you’ve identified so you can search for people you know. What else does this new feature add?
It let’s you type “eiffel tower” into search and get those pictures. Rather than all the other unspeakable things you did in Paris that night
Current implementation seems like overkill. Why not just:
- Search “Eiffel tower”
- send search term to Apple server that already exists (Apple Maps)
- server returns gps coordinates for that term
- photos app displays photos in order of nearest to those coordinates
Because you took two selfies in a restaurant near there, made a huge stunning collage of a duck below the tower and a couple photos from a while away to get the whole tower in view.
I’m running this tech at home, because we had the same use case. Except for me it’s running on a nas, not Apple’s servers. The location solution doesn’t quite work as well when you’re avid photographer
If you read the article, you would know that the hard work is done locally on your iPhone not on apples server.
Because then they don’t have an excuse to move all your data to Apple servers and scan it for later use.
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.
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!
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.
I bet they did the math
Did they? Because it seems like everyone else is in a hype bubble and doesn’t give a shit about how much this costs or how much money it makes.
At least it’s not going to be the overhyped LLM doing the analysis, it seems, considering the input is a photo data.
not going to be the overhyped LLM doing the analysis
Here indeed I don’t think so but other vision models, e.g. https://github.com/vikhyat/moondream are relying on LLM to generate the resulting description.
My gosh, what is with people’s reliance on single thing
Well to be fair, and even though I did spend a bit of time to write about the broader AI hype BS cycle https://fabien.benetou.fr/Analysis/AgainstPoorArtificialIntelligencePractices LLMs are in itself not “bad”. It’s an interesting idea to rely on our ability to produce and use languages to describe a lot of useful things around us. So using statistics on it to try to match is actually pretty smart. Now… there are so many things that went badly for the last few years I won’t even start (cf link) but the concept per se, makes sense to rely on it sometimes.
Looks like they did “Brakerski-Fan-Vercauteren (BFV) HE scheme, which supports homomorphic operations that are well suited for computation (such as dot products or cosine similarity) on embedding vectors that are common to ML workflows” namely they use a scheme that is both secure and efficient specifically for the kind of compute they do here.
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).
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.
Between this and Tim Cook’s generous personal donation to the Trump inauguration, those folks seem strangely silent.
I switched to iPhone from Android because I was tired of Google making changes to their security and APIs that were killing my macros I’d write for my phone. I was also tired of Google sending everything good to the graveyard. Finally, I hated that Google would promise features or support for x number of years and then pull the rug out from under me (although, lack of support was usually caused by the manufacturer)
Before spending $1000 on my iPhone, I told my wife that it was a good investment because of Apple’s proven history of supporting devices with 5 years of updates; so we agreed that I’d keep this iPhone as my daily driver for 5 years because of the exuberant cost.
Well, my wish came true and here we are. I’ve got a phone that doesn’t respect my privacy, doesn’t respect my settings, has a frustrating UI/UX, and has low compatibility with most of my existing infrastructure. I gotta admit, though, my experience is far more consistent now, but not in a good way.
I have used both iOS and Android for more than a decade. After every update on both systems I have to go through and delete/disable junk I don’t need/privacy issues.
The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.
iOS’s UI is terrible to use with everything taking twice as long as it should. So many illogical hidden commands.
Everything has gotten randomly harder to get basic things done.
My win 10 business computer with classic shell will stop being supported the end of the year… Oh joy…
I don’t believe that Win10 will die, due to the huge amount of users and companies. I think that it will be the same a with Win7, which survived several years it’s announced end. There are still users which can’t even update to Win11 with a relative new computer (without tricks), not because the lack of sources, but because it’s specs don’t appear in the list made by M$ of supported specs, as in my case with a 3 years old Laptop, because my AMD Radeon 9425 don’t appears in this idiotic list, offering to buy a new PC to use Win11 🤬💩
The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.
What? I use a stock Pixel Pro and there’s no fluff. It’s very vanilla, but does everything I need it to do without fuss. I was using Nova Launcher Pro, but they sold it to an advertising company a while ago, so I went back to the stock launcher.
I am typing this on a pixel 8
Try disabling and removing the Google search bar. Can’t be done. Since Google search has gone down hill I never use it.
How about removing the the news feeds? You have to disable the Google app to get rid of it. If I want to read the news, I do a quick search. It’s not hard to do. I don’t need a news feed on my phone.
What about the stupid at a glance at the top of the home screen? It just takes up space for no benefit over the notification bar. It can’t be fully removed.
I also never us any voice assistant etc because it’s faster to type it in than repeat myself.
I currently have 19 apps on this phone disabled that I can’t uninstall… No fluff huh…
All of my apps are organized into folders and I am never more than one swipe and two taps away from opening the app I want. I don’t scroll, I don’t search, I know where everything is and have it opening in under a second.
That’s true about the search bar. I do actually use that to find and open apps though, so I hadn’t considered it fluff. I don’t use Google to search the web though. I forgot about the news feed because I don’t have it. I uninstalled the news app and a bunch of other crap I don’t need. Idk what At A Glance feature you’re talking about. I don’t think I have that. Overall you are right. There’s some initial fluff that I forgot about because I removed it years ago.
While I’m still struggling to find an appropriate replacement for my photo editing apps, I’m happy to report that support and usability for most popular Linux distros have improved to the point that I now find Linux not only more stable, but easier to navigate than Win 10 was even at its best.
The amount of noise associated with Windows, generally due to people answering questions about the wrong version of windows or the wrong application, searching for any help topics is like trying to run through mud. It’s literally quicker now to learn a totally new skill on Linux than to try to update your knowledge base on Windows.
Gimp and inkscape where great replacement for me (amateur)
But maybe this is something for you:
I cannot imagine spending $1000 on a phone in general. And even more so, I cannot imagine spending $1000 on a phone I cannot even sideload something like Newpipe on.
Since you are seemingly wealthy enough for this - maybe Pixel with GrapheneOS would be a right fit for you? Pixels also have longer support now (although I still think it’s very short, so I’d likely have to switch to Lineage afterwards).
Very few people spend $1000 outright on a phone, you know that right? Every major mobile provider has some sort of installment plan for purchasing a new device. Apple offers one directly as well.
Using fomo and marketinp to force people into debt for a phone. Definitely the moral and sensible choice.
I mean, I agree with you? I wasn’t saying it’s a moral plan just explaining to the parent poster that people don’t need to be exorbitantly wealthy to “buy” a new device
That’s still spending $1000 on a phone, even more if you pay interest.
It’s just baked into your bill at that point.
I tried the new iPhone 16 Pro. They should be ashamed of what they’ve created. If that’s their flagship phone, then I can’t even imagine how glitchy their base models are. It felt like a Fisher Price OS compared to Android. I returned it after two weeks. My several year old Pixel Pro can do more stuff more reliably than Apple’s brand new flagship device.
I have the 14 pro and my sister recently got the 16 base model. I don’t know why, but the pictures from her newer phone looked like a major leap backwards in quality. Also, the latest OS does feel like its features were written in crayon and that its waiting to kick off its training wheels. I can’t fully describe it: it’s not clunky or clumsy, it just feels like something is missing from the experience. I’ve never really felt this way from a phone version upgrade before.
There’s that, but it was really glitchy too. Siri only worked half the time. The subtitles would start and then stop after a couple sentences and need to be restarted constantly. There were a never ending stream of glitches. Test selection is still awful. It’s just not a good phone compared to the competition. I will say that it looked and felt nice though. The build quality of the actual hardware seemed good.
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
Lemmy isn’t promoted by Apple
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.
Wait, what?
So you take a pic, it’s analysed, the analysis is encrypted, encrypted data is sent to a server that can deconstruct encrypted data to match known elements in a database, and return a result, encrypted, back to you?
Doesn’t this sort of bypass the whole point of encryption in the first place?
Edit: Wow! Thanks everyone for the responses. I’ve found a new rabbit hole to explore!
Doesn’t this sort of bypass the whole point of encryption in the first place?
No, homomorphic encryption allows a 3rd party to perform operations on encrypted data without decrypting it. The resulting answer is in encrypted form and can only be decrypted by whoever has the key.
Extremely oversimplified example:
Say you have a service that converts dollar amounts to euros using the latest exchange rate. You send the amount in dollars, it multiplies by the exchange rate and then returns the euro amount.
Now, let’s assume the clients of this service do not want to disclose the amounts they are converting. What they could do is pick a large random number and multiply the amount by this number. The conversion service multiplies this by the exchange rate and returns the ridiculously large number back. Then you divide thet number by the random number you picked and you have converted dollars to euros without the service ever knowing the actual amount.
Of course the reality is much more complicated than that but the idea is the same: you can perform operations on data in its encrypted form and now know what the data is nor the decrypted result of the operation.
So homomorphic encryption means the server can compute on the data without actually knowing what’s in it. It’s counter-intuitive but better not think about it as encryption/decryption/encryption precisely because the data is NOT decrypted on the server. It’s sent there, computed on, then a result is sent back.
It might still be possible to compare ciphertexts and extract information from there, right? Welp I am not sure if the whole scheme is secure against related attacks.
extract information
I don’t think so, at least assuming the scheme isn’t actually broken… but then arguably that would also have far reaching consequence for encryption more broadly, depending on what scheme the implementation would be relying on.
The whole point is precisely that one can compute without “leaks”.
Edit: they are relying on Brakerski-Fan-Vercauteren (BFV) HE scheme, cf https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encryption
IIRC, for this kind of guarantee, you need a CCA(Chosen-ciphertext attack)-security. I dunno if this scheme satisfies such a security.
Dunno either, funnily enough skimming through https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/144 I noticed authors are from KUL https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/
Why do I say “funnily enough” is because, just like with e.g. IMEC for chips, some of the foundation of modern technology, comes from the tiny and usually disregarded country of Belgium.
Maybe they “encrypt” it in jpg? XD
I’m not pretending to understand how homomorphic encryption works or how it fits into this system, but here’s something from the article.
With some server optimization metadata and the help of Apple’s private nearest neighbor search (PNNS), the relevant Apple server shard receives a homomorphically-encrypted embedding from the device, and performs the aforementioned encrypted computations on that data to find a landmark match from a database and return the result to the client device without providing identifying information to Apple nor its OHTTP partner Cloudflare.
There’s a more technical write up here. It appears the final match is happening on device, not on the server.
The client decrypts the reply to its PNNS query, which may contain multiple candidate landmarks. A specialized, lightweight on-device reranking model then predicts the best candidate by using high-level multimodal feature descriptors, including visual similarity scores; locally stored geo-signals; popularity; and index coverage of landmarks (to debias candidate overweighting). When the model has identified the match, the photo’s local metadata is updated with the landmark label, and the user can easily find the photo when searching their device for the landmark’s name.
That’s really cool (not the auto opt-in thing). If I understand correctly, that system looks like it offers pretty strong theoretical privacy guarantees (assuming their closed-source client software works as they say, with sending fake queries and all that for differential privacy). If the backend doesn’t work like they say, they could infer what landmark is in an image when finding the approximate minimum distance to embeddings in their DB, but with the fake queries they can’t be sure which one is real. They can’t see the actual image either way as long as the “128-bit post-quantum” encryption algorithm doesn’t have any vulnerabilies (and the closed source software works as described).
by using high-level multimodal feature descriptors, including visual similarity scores; locally stored geo-signals; popularity; and index coverage of landmarks (to debias candidate overweighting)
…and other sciencey-sounding technobabble that would make Geordi LaForge blush. Better reverse the polarity before the dilithium crystals fall out of alignment!
Heh though that’s all legit right?
That’s the point. It’s a list of words that may or may not mean something and I can’t make an assessment on whether or not it’s bullshit. It’s coming from Apple, though, and it’s about privacy, which is not good for credibility.
I don’t know what a geo-signal is, but everything else listed there makes perfect sense given the context.
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.
What if I don’t want Apple looking at my photos in any way, shape or form?’
I don’t want Apple exflitrating my photos.
I don’t want Apple planting their robotic minion on my device to process my photos.
I don’t want my OS doing stuff I didn’t tell it to do. Apple has no business analyzing any of my data.“opt out” to looking at my data ✅
Yeah I was gonna say… I’ll defend Apple sometimes but ultimately this should only be opt-in and they are wrong for not doing that. Full stop.
What if I don’t want Apple looking at my photos in any way, shape or form?’
Then you don’t buy an iPhone. Didn’t they say a year or two ago that they’re going to scan every single picture using on-board processing to look for images and videos that could be child porn and anything suspicious would be flagged and sent to human review?
Well, the other cloud services just did server side csam scan long before apple and they do it respecting your privacy less than apple.
Apple wanted to improve the process like EU wants it, so that no illegal data can be uploaded to apple’s servers making them responsible. That is why they wanted to scan on devices.
But any person who ever used spotlight in the last 4 years should have recognised how they find pictures with words. This is nothing new, apple photos is analysing photos with AI since a very long time.
TLDR edit: I’m supporting the above comment - ie. i do not support apple’s actions in this case.
It’s definitely good for people to learn a bit about homomorphic computing, and let’s give some credit to apple for investing in this area of technology.
That said:
-
Encryption in the majority of cases doesn’t actually buy absolute privacy or security, it buys time - see NIST’s criteria of ≥30 years for AES. It will almost certainly be crackable <oneday> either by weakening or other advances… How many people are truly able to give genuine informed consent in that context?
-
Encrypting something doesn’t always work out as planned, see example:
“DON’T WORRY BRO, ITS TOTALLY SAFE, IT’S ENCRYPTED!!”
Yes Apple is surely capable enough to avoid simple, documented, mistakes such as above, but it’s also quite likely some mistake will be made. And we note, apple are also extremely likely capable of engineering leaks and concealing it or making it appear accidental (or even if truly accidental, leveraging it later on).
Whether they’d take the risk, whether their (un)official internal policy would support or reject that is ofc for the realm of speculation.
That they’d have the technical capability to do so isn’t at all unlikely. Same goes for a capable entity with access to apple infrastructure.
- The fact they’ve chosen to act questionably regarding user’s ability to meaningfully consent, or even consent at all(!), suggests there may be some issues with assuming good faith on their part.
How hard is it to grasp that I don’t want Apple doing anything in my cellphone I didn’t explicitely consent to?
I don’t care what technology they develop, or whether they’re capable of applying it correctly: the point is, I don’t want it on my phone in the first place, anymore than I want them to setup camp in my living room to take notes on what I’m doing in my house.
My phone, my property, and Apple - or anybody else - is not welcome on my property.
Sorry for my poor phrasing, perhaps re-read my post? i’m entirely supporting your argument. Perhaps your main point aligns most with my #3? It could be argued they’ve already begun from a position of probable bad faith by taking this data from users in the first place.
Oh yeah I kinda missed your last point. Sorry 🙂
-
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!
I hate apple so goddamn much
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
and google isnt? and meta / facebook isnt? etc
1 million is pocket change for the trilionaire class.
Don’t they mean Tim Apple?
What a great picture 😃 and true on so many controversial topics…
The “donation” has nothing to do with Apple. Tim Cook is a gay man who doesn’t want himself or his family to be lynched by Trump’s wandering gangs of violent homophobic and racist thugs. That wasn’t a donation - it was protection money for the mob.
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.
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!
Never accept the technology just because it is optional. Eventually it will become default and eventually maditory.
Fuck this company. What a fucking joke they become.
I have an iPad, now I am scared… Should I do something about this?
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?
Local and encrypted according to the company that just lost a lawsuit saying Siri totally wasn’t listening to you
Well they settled for $95 million to avoid a trial… which probably speaks more about what they are hiding tbh
AI bad grrrrr
$1m to Trump and now this!
Tim Apple was going to kick $1M to whomever won. For a guy with a net worth in the tens of billions, this is just a tip to the wait staff at the Table Of Success.
But the Apple photo library is a huge potential source of revenue. Its worth significantly more than $1M. This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images. If you’re not the client, you’re the product.
This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images
Huh? You pay for anything above 5 GB or so. It’s standard for most cloud providers to offer a free tier to get you hooked. Their storage after that isn’t all that cheap even.
“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.
Ease of use vs all the rest, as usual
Nothing but depressing news for common people all around.
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.
Thanks
Seems like this is on phones that are Apple Intelligence capable?
I’m on a 12 Pro, and I don’t have this option. Guess I’m safe, for now…
In case that you be awaew 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*
