Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it?
2y 15d ago by discuss.tchncs.de/u/cmgvd3lw in privacy@lemmy.ml
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?
I would love this this feature to be implemented in IOS. This could be used for several applications like pushing more people to Linux.
You had us in the first half, NGL
Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.
Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does "local" even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there's nothing on that phone Apple can't access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that's not local anymore.
Do I trust them with the data they're absolutely gathering? No, but I don't trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.
If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn't announce Recall, that's the whole point. Apple wouldn't be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.
But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That's what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it's as bad as Microsoft's Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.
People don't believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don't give a shit about users' wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No one believes their assurances. There's no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.
Does that mean I'd ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple's, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.
Apple now has encrypted iCloud backups so they can’t see what you backup to them. GrapheneOS is obviously better but for an off the shelf OS ios ain’t bad.
Not fully encrypted unless you enable lockdown mode (and losing various features)
They have full control over your device. It's the same for Whatsapps encryption, where Facebook can still access everything on your decrypted client.
Pretty sure it’s not the same at all but keep saying things brother
So you manage your own encryption keys for cloud files? Thats pretty much the only way and even then you have to trust Apple because it's closed source.
creates privacy through taking power from the user.
What do you mean by that?
I'm pretty sure they mean how Apple won't let you install 3rd party apps and stuff, under the guise of pRiVAcY.
Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.
Do they not send everything directly to ChatGPT? Like, that logic is not broken with that for the Apple users?
They don't, actually. Most of AI stuff is processed on device, few go to their private infrastructure, and only certain Siri requests go to ChatGPT, if you give explicit permission.
That’s cool, at least. I’ve never used Siri and never will, but maybe I’ll mess around with their AI if it’s fully on-device.
Based on their claims Siri also works primarily on-device. It wasn't entirely clear if you can manually prevent the usage of their AI infrastructure, but they definitely implied it. So if that's true, there's no real reason to avoid just Siri while still using other AI stuff, cause they are one and the same. And since it runs locally, they can't even store the voice clips.
I do also trust that Siri is all on-device! Otherwise it would work as well as its competitors hahaha. I just hate voice commands, and will never use them. I want to use my hands for operating devices.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't on-device before. At least not all the time. But I have some good news for you, they added the ability to type your requests to Siri 😆
And to be fair, some certain things are definitely faster by voice than doing manually, like setting a timer and stuff. It's just daunting when the assistant misunderstands you or takes ages to respond. If they fixed all that, it could actually be useful.
So you use Android? Or Huawei?
Surely not.
Probably an Android phone that has been degoogled or installed with another OS, is my guess.
I use GrapheneOS. What's it to you?
Almost like mobile operating systems that are open source so I can check for myself that they're not spying on me exist or something.
This is always an interesting statement “i can check for my self” i know for sure that most users never checked a single line of code in the open source projects. Maybe you do but 95% do not and make this statement.
The 95% who don't trust the 5% who do. If there is a backdoor in open source projects it gets known very quickly.
Apart from that, open source projects usually are not for profit, they have no reason to add random unneeded data collection features for example.
Bruh what even is this comment? Huawei makes sense, but what's your deal with android? The whole point of android is that it's customizable, if you want privacy there are more than enough options.
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.
Recall doesn't either.. it's encrypted with Windows Hello Auth
But once a process is running its trivial to get weeks of extremely detailed history and lots of secrets you thought were ephemeral
Makes a lot of sense until the closed source affirmation. The source code of the OS they develop is closed source, but a lot of what they do is open source and independantly audited by experts, so there's that in the balance.
Windows is just a pile of trash.
What that Apple does is Open Source? This is the first time I've read this.
Swift, Webkit, Researchkit, Carekit, FoundationDB, CUPS, Darwin, LLVM and Clang, SwiftNIO, Turi Create, Homekit ADK,
Its one thing to be against a product but its essential to be well informed and not base our perceptions on biased informations.
I'm not familiar with all of them, but I know several of them are tools. Isn't it in apple's best interest to open source the tools if people use and improve them, and subsequently it means they get more money from the app store? And if these are the only things they open source, they still have a tight fist on the vast majority of their code base.
While on the subject of apple and FOSS. They may open source some tools, but do they give back to other projects? I.e. does apple push upstream? Substantially less than google and ms. And I would go so far to say almost never.
You're diverging from the main subject from what is open source to what you find acceptable behaviour from a corporation, which i do not involve in.
Yup, that's why I asked. I still hate Crapple and everything they stand for, but this is good data to start doing some in-depth research. Thanks.
Damn hating a product. You are damaged man.
Who says I am a man? Just kidding, I am. I do hate Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta and every other company out there that operate business on a predatory model. Am I damaged? Absolutely, at so many levels it's hard to count them. But that makes me just human, as you will find there is not 1 single human out there that is not damaged at some or other. On the brighter side, I am doing what I can to heal.
Darwin. Their BSD and the foundation of MacOS and therefore all the current OSes they produce.
I have heard of Darwin, and went back to read up on it to refresh my memory. While it is considered open source, it is also useless unless it is used for Apple's closed source operating systems, as can be appreciated in this explanation:
In the beginning, Apple used to make Darwin available as a separate OS, including compiled binaries, installers, ISOs, etc. that you could install on Apple hardware. However, for many years now, Apple only provides a source code dump, every time a new release of macOS comes out. It isn't even possible to compile this source code, because it depends on Apple's internal build tools and build pipeline. There have been some projects trying to patch Darwin to compile it with publicly available tools, but those projects have all died from lack of interest.
Open Source should be compilable and able to be used, at least that's my perspective, and I just may be wrong.
Here's the article this came from on StackExchange:
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/401832/why-is-macos-often-referred-to-as-darwin
Yeah, but that's just the kernel. Anything above that (window manager, the utilities that they didn't outright copy from BSD, apps, ...) is basically closed source.
Yes
I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.
While we’re publishing the binary images of every production PCC build, to further aid research we will periodically also publish a subset of the security-critical PCC source code.
Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
Not your keys, not safe encryption. As simple as that
Don't care if it's Apple, M$ or Google - non of them should do it that way.
I completely agree. I’ve started to migrate my work stuff to Linux to see if it will work.
I’m not hopeful that it will work, but the dev said I can try to use wine and that is not against their policy to do so and that I works but have to worry about an account ban.
So, let’s hope for the best.
I'm sure we wouldn't stop hearing about how it was the right decision even if we weren't having a conversation about it.
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.
Everyone suckles Apple's dick. Friends of mine were talking as if Microsoft has ended security and privacy, but are lapping up the Apple Intelligence crap
People.would be okay by getting fucked to death with a splintery rake if apple charged $999.99 for it.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Its like Apple runs the notification servers or something
That's the whole reason why I disabled the notifications for Lemmy app.
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.
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
Could they please explain why a laptop should not be able to scale content on third party monitors without lowering resolution? Why it shouldn't be able to connect to more than one monitor? Why we can't have a toggle for (insert random unneeded feature here, like only minimizing programs when clicking on the red x button that should close them). Why their tablets and phones aren't able to send things via Bluetooth? Etc.
It's closed source, so no way in hell
Apple fans will argue it is somehow better
Apple fans and people that fall for their slick marketing would
In my opinion the problem is not who would agree/disagree with it, its more like the fanbase and marketing is on another level and most people would just not care as long as they have the latest iPhone with the latest buzzword functions and features.
I feel people are more forgiving towards apple. I dont have any study or anything to back it up, just can't see why the die-hard userbase of the most isolated and curated ecosystem would care about anything.
Apple fans would
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.
No
Apple fanboys would.. other people I don't think so..
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 never bought any Apple product and thought they were overhyped, so it might be easy enough for me to say, but no, I personally wouldn't have been Ok with it.
I can see more people begrudgingly using it if Apple did it though.
Nope, but I also feel like Apple would have it off by default, unlike Microsoft.
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.
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.
They already did, Spotlight is Machiavelli behind the “walled garden”
Yes. Their privacy policy is very clear. They’ve put so much effort into providing privacy features, well before every other developer in the industry, that they’ve built their customer base on it. The class action suit that they would face for compromising that policy would be massive, and they would hemorrhage customers. They have strong financial reason to maintain their word. If you ask for your GDPR compliant abstract from Apple, it’ll only include your name, phone number, and billing address.
From a security standpoint, the privacy features are top notch. They use 256-bit AES encryption for iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Apple Wallet, Find My iPhone, HomeKit, FileVault, Secure Enclave, and now Apple Intelligence. Apple operating systems use a UNIX kernel design, keeping the application layer independent of the operating system layer, allowing full sandbox control and requiring user authorization for any API access.
Plus, nerds love to try and find chinks in the armor. In the event of the inevitable vulnerability, Apple is always quick to release a patch.
Edit: You asked a question about Apple products outside of an Apple instance. Look for the ones with all the downvotes to get a real answer from Apple customers. PC/Android users love to condescendingly reply to and downvote Apple supporting comments. I think it makes them feel superior. Lol
You clearly don’t know many Apple users.
Hi! I know many Apple users, and 100% of them bought it because "bro, it's Apple". It's basically the "im not poor" message that the Apple logo gives. They don't care about anything else aside that it's Apple and it plays CandyCrush.
Sounds like you know a bunch of rich kids with iPhones. Recall is a Windows feature. I assume OP was asking about Mac users. The majority of Mac users are creators, who care very much about the privacy of their work.
Believe me, poor kids will save for an iPhone too. But yes, the Mac audience is a bit more professional, although I still know of a couple of dumbasses using Mac because of the aesthetics at Starbucks.
You got me at trust
You're saying this like Micro$hit isn't just going to revert back to recall being opt-out (or non-removable) in a few weeks after the outrage dies down
Recall in principal is a cool idea. It is also one that M$ has not earned the trust for. I think Apple would be better received. I'm not sure I would like Apple's recall, but they have done more to foster trust than M$.
I am curious why you'd think that is a good idea. I find it absolutely useless, as anything that I'd like stored... We can already easily store. But recording EVERYTHING that happens in my computer??? What kind of data hoarding obsession is this?
That is a small vulnerability away of being the biggest mistake of your life, IMO.
Same reason file manager has a recents. It helps you return to previous work. Asking it if it remembers which paper had which conclusion or graph would make being a grad students easier. Perhaps it reminds you about some deliverable you promised in an email is due is three days. I see it as a good tool to organize productivity with. Like I said no one has earned the trust this software would require.
Yes! "Recents" works fine and doesn't even need to record everything you've done and consume AI resources!
For asking about papers and so... You can do that with an AI crawler on your files!! No need to store a screenshot of everything you've ever done!
The deliverable thing, again, it can be done by directly looking up your files.
But no, somehow they went full spy instead. Companies will love to put this feature in their employee's computers.
Wanna fire someone? Let's see if they used their computer once for an unrelated-to-work task...
Now if someone gains access to your computer they'll get everything that you didn't think you even had! So great!!
Yeah but recent only considers local files and you can't ask it which one said this or that if you don't remember. Its a good tool to keep track of a lot of things. As a student I would like that.
Once you find out we've had fuzzy finders for 40 years your mind is going to be blown.
I am not saying AI is not useful. It will be an amazing use case to sprinkle some AI into fuzzyfinders, but don't let it have everything that has ever been played on screen... Passwords, private windows, one-time messages... You must be very young if you don't see the problems with that.
There is a reason why we have password protected folders and files, or how we keep some stuff locked online, or how we use private browser windows. And you want to feed all that to an AI.
I know about the fuzzy finders and regular expressions. The Q was why I think it is helpful and I answered that. You're just hitting me with some dogma. You could also just know where your stuff is at and not need search tools either. Recall is a neat idea, but I don't have confidence in M$ execution or privacy.
And Apple has earned any trust? Jesus christ people, like less than 2 months ago they were caught restoring "deleted" photos from iCloud to user devices hahahahaha. Of course fans were excusing them talking about disk sectors like that has anything to do with cloud storage being available accidentally hahahaha.
But yeah, Apple cult followers will find a way to justify surrendering even more freedom to Apple with this BS for sure. And they will be paying top dollar for the pleasure hahahaha.