The problem with this article is that is poorly researched. Most of the services listed are running locally and storage is also local. (Things might change with automatic remote backups, but this is not what's addressed in the article.)
E.g., the Vision frameworks subjects any images to a local (built-in) neural network and returns the scanned text, which is then most probably put into the system clipboard. How is this surveillance, but copy-and-paste in MS Word was not?
> "iCloud secures your information by encrypting it when it's in transit and storing it in iCloud in an encrypted format. Many Apple services use end-to-end encryption, which means that only you can access your information, and only on trusted devices where you’re signed in with your Apple ID."
Edit: Mind that this would still apply much the same to copy-and-paste in MS Word and any (encrypted) remote backups of the resulting documents. Where is the significant difference? Also mind that iCloud backups are not mandatory, but yet another (optional) service.
I love Apple’s privacy stance and have bought in. However this article made me realize that if apple ever wanted to flip the switch and monetize the data they’d have a treasure trove to work from.
It’s not hard to imagine a future Apple facing stagnant revenue growth, a new CEO brought in to turn things around and enabling a new revenue stream monetizing their privacy features as ad features.
I think the real takeaway is we need better government regulations to ensure situations like that cannot occur. Eg. You can’t change the terms of service of existing customers in ways that reduce their data privacy.
This is just a collection of generic arguments against technology, as opposed to an article offering insight about Apple. Then they stuck Apple's name on it and there's the article.
The article is full of particular example of what Apple is doing, and explains how Apple is doing it (collecting more info) while touting "more pricacy".
The digitization of text from photos happens on device and not sent to any remote server afaik. However the article dismisses it and equates it to surveillance because
> All of these features increase the amount of data collected.
This looks like a cheap attempt to FUD, I don’t see how this feature has anything to do with surveillance.
All the locally running software doing this is proprietary, how do we can be so sure what it really does withou inspecting its source code (and making sure it corresponds to the on device binaries) ?
You own the network your device is on and you can see what it sends over the wire. Inspect network traffic if you wish.
With the billions of iOS devices running around the planet and with the fact that it just takes one person to blow the whistle on this sort of data collection, I just don't buy the argument that it might have been happening this whole time... purely on the basis that things happen sometimes.
You cannot practically do this in the age of certificate pinning. All you can say is that a smartphone communicates, which should be obvious. What it is communicating is frequently unknown.
You can just disable any network connections and see, if the service still works. Text recognition in images (Live text/Vision framework) does. Now you could obviously say, "Who knows about any logs, and whether they are secretly transferring them as soon as there is any network connection or not?" Well, this is another topic, namely this of basic trust, and applies to any application and any vendor. (And, if your business is operating systems, living up to this trust may be a vital business decision. In contrast to some vendor of a random app, there's a strong incentive to do so.)
> The new iPhone operating system, iOS 15, can digitise text in photos, enabling users to copy and paste text from an image, or call a phone number that appears in a picture. Scanning nearby buildings with an iPhone will make Maps recognise them and generate walking directions. Algorithms will identify objects in real-time video, and it will be possible to turn photos into 3D models for augmented reality. And users will now be able to carry their IDs in their phone. All of these features increase the amount of data collected.
The basic premise of the article is that : more data -> more surveillance. Certainly, this could be possible. However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance?
> Apple created the Bluetooth beacons tracking people in shops, gyms, hotels, airports and more by connecting to their phones.
I think, this is where the author lost me. The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance. This is what happens when you buy into simplistic narratives.
How is that more surveillance? Just observing identifiers you can't use to identify individuals (which is the case with contact tracing as implemented) is no surveillance. It's like counting the number of cars on a busy highway, you can use that data in many ways but not for surveillance.
Because there is an element of Trust involved in the statement: "Just observing identifiers you can't use to identify individuals", which unless you completely understand the protocols and math (does anyone?) inflict at least a small amount burden on the mind.
EDIT: Just to add a little bit to this reply. Using your example, counting the number of cars on a highway is clearly surveilling the group of highway goers. This could perhaps allow you to note that one demographic travels more on Sunday than another, or that a remote farmer himself was out for groceries last Tuesday.
So, you bought a device that runs software you cannot inspect on a zillion different CPUs (the one you think your phone runs on, the one running below it, the phone modem’s ones, the one in your flash disk, etc), one of which has to tell the phone network where your phone is all the time, so that the network can find your phone when you get a call. For most users, another one regularly tells the manufacturer of your phone where your phone is, so that, if you lose it, you can use it to locate your phone.
With neither, you can check whether that data is deleted in a timely manner or whether extra data, such as IDs of phones near you, is being sent out and collected.
Now, the seller of said phone adds a feature, documenting that it collects hashes of phones near you on your device.
Again, there’s no way for you to check that, but why would that require more trust?
But your point is very valid. We already live under mass surveillance, to the point of insanity. I reject this way of living and would like to be part of the solution... without giving up on the good aspects of the technology.
> EDIT: Just to add a little bit to this reply. Using your example, counting the number of cars on a highway is clearly surveilling the group of highway goers. This could perhaps allow you to note that one demographic travels more on Sunday than another, or that a remote farmer himself was out for groceries last Tuesday.
Analogies suck, don't use them: 13038042-A0D5-4E76-8964-AF27B0EAD352 travels more on Sunday than others, and BD1DC4FD-2D17-44E3-91CF-198403C5E2B4 was out for groceries last Tuesday. There is no database that correlates bd1dc4f to anything; indeed, check back soon and the physical phone that used to be bd1 is now f0f4442.
Much trust in these hashes we must have, no? Much more trust in the absence of catalogs of them that others have. I can't prove anything, nor do I try, but still it rests on my mind.
Analogies are terribly leaky abstractions: a camera set up to watch cars on a busy highway can absolutely draw conclusions, doubly so if there are multiple networked cameras, and if the camera can see a license plate it's game over.
A more realistic analogy would be "a camera monitors a busy road where all cars are replaced by identical black cubes with no windows, and a 256-bit license plate whose value is set entirely locally, is not known to anyone but the occupant of the car, and changes unpredictably on the hour". Can you track a car in this world? Sure, but it would require significant data collection and analysis and would almost always end up probabilistic at best.
Is this analogy useful? You decide. No, it is divorced from observable reality. Yes, because it avoids misunderstandings like "you didn't intend for your analogy to include license plate scanners but your audience assumed it possible".
Sound like a pretty naive take on this really. Because you can't figure out how to use the information doesn't mean someone else can't. OR can't correlate it with other information for a more complete surveillance picture than before.
If it has value in this modern world teams of specialists find ways to extract the signal from the noise.
But this requires either a dedicated device or a dedicated app with according permissions running. Also, as I understand it, it's actually the device, which locates the beacon.
Also, I'm not aware that the image to text scan (Vision framework) in iOS 15 and macOS (user-accessible in macOS 12, but requiring some third party frontend in Big Sur) connects to a remote service.
As for end-to-end encryption breaking image search, as I understood it, it was meant to locally match images to a set of encrypted hashes of known offending images before sending them to the iCloud and would warn the user of any conflicting images (also locally). (Personally, I think this may be just a step too far, but it's not implemented as represented in the article.)
Finally, any biometric hashes are stored in a secure enclave and are not accessible by the "normal" machine.
Also checked on Big Sur using a tiny menu bar add-on as a frontend. No connection needed. It's using a local neural network as said in the Vision framework docs.
OCR is local, but the resulting text can be indexed by "Siri & Search" (e.g. "Learn from this app" and "Show content in search"), which default on.
Is OCR text stored alongside photos on the file system? E.g. can text be backed up along with photos, or is photo text recorded in OS storage that is unaccessible to the user?
As I know it, as an enduser service, the input is a selected portion of the screen display (much like a screenshot), meaning, there shouldn't come any association with this. However, the framework is a general service available to about any app (probably requiring some sort of consent [I'm not an app developer]) and an app may use this for embedding or associating data. So availability to Siri indexing and/or the question of trusting an app regarding its data management shouldn't be different from what applies to any other stored content. Mind that there is no obligation to activate Siri.
Text in photos saved to the Camera Roll can be searched by Spotlight.
Even with Siri disabled, the option for "Siri & Search" defaults to on for all apps, including indexing of app data. This isn't specific to OCR, so is an existing issue with Apple's harvesting of data in iOS apps. But at least it can be turned off, one app at a time, with about 5 clicks per app = 100 clicks for 20 apps.
If you use all these services, well… Personally, I'm running happily without iCloud, Siri, and with Spotlight reduced to a mere file search. Also, I dislike features like Camera Roll. The point being, you can still run macOS and probably wide portions of iOS (which I'm not using much) much like a legacy machine. However, if you're using cloud services (including third party services like Dropbox, etc, esp., if you're a non-US-resident), you're making yourself accessible. But this is by no way exclusive to Apple devices. (Arguably, more services run locally on Apple devices than on others – e.g., I don't think Google translate for images runs locally, requiring you to share both content and endpoint data – and there are more provisions for privacy in iCloud than in most of comparable third party services.)
Agreed, I don't use iCloud or Siri on iOS/MacOS. On iOS, the default way to "save a photo" is to the Camera Roll, which means automatic OCR. On iOS, there's no way to disable Spotlight system wide, you only have the option to disable indexing of content on a per-app basis. That means hundreds of millions of iOS users are, by default, having all of their photos indexed locally with Siri + Spotlight extracting unknown "Learn From" analytics. This needs more coverage by tech publications, as it's far more invasive than client-side hash matching for illegal content.
> However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance?
I think this is a basic question of our time, because we introduce so many devices into our lives from various areas that all collect data. I feel that even if you do "privacy conscious" data collection, the data will still land in the hands of others. A lot of the data is also never even entering a device that you own but is always controlled by third parties (like infrastructure operators, shop owners (CCTV), etc).
Sometimes I feel like technology has inherent impacts, no matter how much you want it to not have that impact, because it makes some uses of it really easy while making others really hard. Like copying data is so immensely easy now, to a degree that it's hard to not copy data.
Think of the CCTV example for example. You might be a privacy conscious shop operator so you don't have a CCTV system set up. However, in your street there are 5 other shops, 2 not connected to the internet, 3 which are, and one with bad security that doesn't need password logins. Now you personally have tried to not collect data on your customers, but as the customers walk down the street to your shop, they come across all the other shops, and their images even land in the public internet.
Right now, the impact is countered by video data being so horribly hard to process, taking so much space, etc. So that publicly accessible CCTV system only lets attackers obtain footage of the last 3 days. But eventually, as computers improve, CCTV operators will add facial recognition features, and maybe store the data obtained for longer periods, because the info whether some person walked down the road takes up way less space, so operators might opt to store it for weeks and years.
Suddenly, someone accessing that one CCTV system with bad security has access to the last 10 years of pedestrians walking down the road, and it's only a 10 GB sqlite database (which by then will likely be not much data).
This effect is not just local to CCTV operators, but can be seen everywhere. If a car manufacturer collects telemetry to improve their car product, and does it for all their fleet, they might build a database spanning decades. One day they might get hacked or think it's a good idea to sell that data to insurances, municipalities or whatever. The car manufacturer might not even do it, but you also carry a phone with you with google maps/grindr installed, etc, or it's the municipality which has installed license plate checking CCTV on the road. Or it's the mobile network operators because the cars have to use some means to talk to the car companies. Etc.
The real horrible part starts where recognition replaces the captured reality. Think of the Xerox JBig2 bug, incorrectly substituting image patches in scans. Now you have documents representing a fictional reality, but with real-life consequences. (Say, you live in a zone of conflict and your CCTV image is mismatched and substituted for a known offending actor. Now you and your surroundings may have a hell of a fire problem.)
>The basic premise of the article is that : more data -> more surveillance. Certainly, this could be possible. However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance?
No. Surveillance is the collection of data by a third party.
What that third party does to the data (e.g. whether it sells them to advertisers or not) is irrelevant. Especially if others like governments can also get access to those.
I'd say when the data is observed is when it becomes surveillance. If Apple collects this data encrypts in cloud storage and only does analysis on device. Do you still see this as surveillance?
> I'd say when the data is observed is when it becomes surveillance.
If I recall correctly, that was exactly the US government's defense after the 2013 Snowden leaks revealed it was tapping every internet connection possible and sucking in every piece of data available.
It depends on the meaning of "observe." What if the data is secret-shared among many independent parties, so that no single party (or even a group of parties smaller than some threshold) can process it in any way? This is a common model for using MPC to protect privacy while collecting user data; in fact the first real-world MPC deployment was organized in this manner.
Speaking for myself, yes, I do consider it surveillance even if Apple (or anyone else) does "on-device" analysis. The main issue is whether they give me a choice in the matter, and control over the data collected and how it is processed.
Once the data is collected, BigTech can change their privacy policy or Terms of Services to access this data any time. (And that is exactly what they have been doing). Moreover, they still need to collect some data to ensure the "on device" analysis is working as intended. (That's where the clause "we may also collect data to improve our services" comes into picture).
It's against the site guidelines to do this on HN. Would you mind reviewing the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and sticking to them in the future? We'd appreciate it.
> Live Text uses on-device intelligence to recognize text in photos across the entire system and on the web
And as for AR Walking directions, i can't find any place documenting if it's on-device or cloud based, but i know Maps will download your route information from the cloud.
But then again, if you're using GPS, i don't see how AR Walking Directions could do (more) harm.
> The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance
Prior to Apple and Google releasing the contact tracing protocol, various governments had some interesting ideas that focused more on finding infected people than it did on protecting privacy. Contact tracing has actually improved privacy by a lot. You're literally only a random id number, and the way you get notified if you've been in contact is if your random number appears on a list that gets broadcast to your phone. The checking happens on-device. The authorities never know anything but your random id number.
By default, "Siri and Search" are enabled to scan and learn from on-device content in every app, even if iCloud is disabled.
To opt-out, the user must manually go through every app's Settings and disable multiple radio button defaults per app.
Apple Configurator needs to allow device-wide opt-out of search indexing and harvesting of photos and app data, especially when Siri itself is disabled in Configurator.
The policy says that quite a bit of data is sent to Apple, but theoretically decoupled from the user:
> To Make Suggestions and Search Results More Relevant, Some Information Is Sent to Apple and Not Associated with You. When you use Siri Suggestions, Look Up, Visual Look Up, or type in Search, Spotlight, Safari search, or #images search in Messages, any information sent to Apple does not identify you, and is associated with a 15-minute random, rotating device-generated identifier. Your device may send information such as location, topics of interest (for example, cooking or basketball), your search queries, including visual search queries, suggestions you have selected, apps you use, and related device usage data to Apple. This information does not include search results that show files or content on your device. If you subscribe to music or video subscription services, the names of these services and the type of subscription may be sent to Apple. Your account name, number, and password will not be sent to Apple. This information is used to process your request and provide more relevant suggestions and search results, and is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data Apple may have from your use of other Apple services. Aggregated information may be used to improve other Apple products and services. Common search queries may be shared with a web search engine to improve search results.
Contact tracing is surveillance and has already resulted in large-scale leaks of sensitive information. Given those things, it is not unreasonable to call it out in this context. Nothing about that narrative is simplistic - the simplistic perspective is that it is for health and therefore okay.
I feel like I might be reaching for the tinfoil hat but it feels to me like there is a concerted effort to confuse the privacy conversation and turn it into one about how everyone is bad.
Call me paranoid but I think Facebook would love to be in a situation where privacy is an all or nothing game, because no-one is going along for the absolutist privacy vision which means Facebook et al can do as they please. They and their peers also have the money to change the conversation to something like this.
Again, call me crazy, but it's reminding me a lot of the oil companies big push for things like individual carbon footprints, and plastic straws being the real enemy.
I don't understand how people can doublethink so easily about contact tracing. Of course it's surveillance, and it's extremely invasive. You can argue that it's worth it, but to pretend surveillance that you like isn't surveillance is intellectually dishonest.
It is really fascinating. It is nothing but surveillance of course. This time it actually may increase security in contrast to most programs government implemented. The difference is that the user has to consent to it, it is transparent and there is the possibility to just shut it off again. That will never happen with hidden data collection by third parties of any kind.
>The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance. This is what happens when you buy into simplistic narratives.
Guess you're not following the news. Things that look simple can be deceiving.
>It did seek to assuage fears, however, by repeatedly assuring Singaporeans that the data collected with such technology would be used only for contact tracing during the pandemic.
And that’s where things went wrong.
>Earlier this month, it emerged that the government’s claim was false. The Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed that data could actually be accessed by the police for criminal investigations; the day after this admission, a minister revealed that such data had, in fact, already been used in a murder investigation.
The article states that Singapore's app doesn't use the protocol developed by Google/Apple, so I assume their app has been designed to collect location data whereas my understanding of the Google/Apple protocol is that it doesn't reveal location data (at least by itself, maybe with enough data/matches you could figure out rough locations)
Which they can’t do - by design the location, etc in the apple/google protocol can’t be extracted by anyone without the tracked individual providing the key material
> The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance.
Wow, just wow. I am stunned to find such an ignorant comment on Hacker News. Maybe someone this naive could exist in the general population, but on a board with tech folks ... how can anyone be this blind?
“ If Apple is serious about privacy, it should offer an iPhone model for the privacy-conscious: one without facial recognition and without encryption-breaking tools, one in which it is easy to cover the camera, and in which the microphone can be mechanically turned off, among other features. If we want to keep our democracies in the digital age, we need to set limits on what gets tracked. “
So they want Apple to manufacture the Librem 5?[1]
You can't easily cover the camera in the Librem 5. The lack of coherent vulnerability tracking makes me suspect you'll be compromised by whoever anyway.
I'm even sure Apple would offer it if there was demand. But for the few thousands a year you can sell, it's easier to have 3rd party companies modify existing iPhones/Androids.
Yeah if there was enough of a market that Apple sold them, it would be much cheaper than the current cost to make these low-volume Librem devices, not to mention the domestically assembled one for $2000
This seems like a deflection - every media platform on the internet relies on the advertising platforms of BigTech in some way. Ultimately, all your data end up there somehow.
Yes, it's not very relevant for an opinion piece how and where it's published. I could make a video that criticises YouTube and it still makes sense to put it on YouTube.
Wired is trying to redefine “surveillance” to mean people collecting and sharing their own information, while at the same time conducting real, detailed surveillance on anyone reading this article.
You might wonder if they being completely disingenuous.
Has Wired, like Apple, claimed at any time that it won't do so? Can't you read the article for free on Wired, unlike with Apple products that you have to pay for and still are subject to excessive data collections that you often have no control over?
(And it's the ad platforms that are doing the detailed surveillance - similar to the one Apple is working on again to serve better" personalised ads").
Even if some of you do believe this is hypocrisy, does it in anyway change the facts highlighted in the article?
> Has Wired, like Apple, claimed at any time that it won't do so?
Do the stalkers ever defend themselves by claiming they never said they wouldn't stalk people? No, that's an utterly ridicuous notion. Stalking is illegal, nobody likes being surveilled by some stranger at all times. Whether they warned the victim of their intent is completely irrelevant.
This is fatalistic and wrong. There are plenty of platforms that do not sell you out in this manner (personal blogs run by ethical people exist, for one) and the platforms that do not deserve to be called out for their bad behaviour.
Ok, I get that some of you think it is hypocritical. Now that has been exposed - Does that mean the article is irrelevant? Do the facts change that Apple has been shifting and redefining its stance on user privacy and data collection to suit its business at the expense of its users privacy?
Tracking you online, while an invasion of privacy, is not the same as tracking you in real life.
I don't believe this is Apple's fault alone (not mentioning google would be a massive omission and everyone else would like to track you too but just doesn't have the scale). But what is being done with phone tracking is much more than just cookies
Websites can and many do gather various types of location data to have an idea you’ve moved around.
Don’t try to equivocate this away. The technology to enable it is software; software is everywhere. We can use WiFi to echo locate people in buildings. We know what we’re doing in technology.
HUMANS are paranoid by default in order to survive. We’ve seen again and again in history; new technology goes straight into agency control militarization. Don’t be naive.
We’re all doing it because we all watch each other normalize it. Mirror neurons and social obligations; sign up, sign in, consume and let us collect your metrics.
> Tracking you online, while an invasion of privacy, is not the same as tracking you in real life.
With the vast majority of our data tied to our IRL identity (thanks Facebook) with the express goal of causing us to do things IRL (consume product) with a very easy path to abuse (are you an activist, LE just needs to compel data from advertisers) - this seems like a very naive view in current year.
Where you browse from, what you look at, who you talk to.
All collated, filtered and condensed into a picture of you. All websites using a unique identifier to trace _you_ the individual across all visited sites.
Web tracking is much more pervasive than just knowing what you've read. It's a huge picture of you and it does follow your location, habits, impressions and other things in the real.
In top of that this is a WiredUK article. Of all the existing pervasive normalized surveillance in the UK why are they targeting Apple for “normalizing surveillance”?
I think it's unfortunate that commenters so often conflate authors with publishing platforms. Presumably, Wired, like just about any reputable media outlet, gives some amount of editorial independence to the writing staff to isolate them from the business side.
In fact, the author in this case isn't even employed by Wired. She's a professor of Ethics at Oxford.
This raises the obvious question: do people with opinions need to agree with all the practices of a publishing platform to submit their opinion to it? I doubt I agree with all of Hacker News' business practices, let alone Y Combinator's, yet here I am allowing my words to be forever served by them.
This is painfully stupid. Apple having literal backdoors on everyone's lives is the same as social media cookies? You must be an Apple apologist or stock holder.
I think this is clickbait. The future of tech is really scary and I fully empathise with that. These new societal problems around data tracking, and the ability to process that data do need to be solved, but trying to skirt around problematic technologies when solving user problems is not sustainable.
I think at least articles like this are good because they create a conversation. Many people who read HN are software engineers, and we all collectively bear at least a little responsibility to make good ethical choices around the tech we use and develop.
Users normalised surveillance by buying cheap Android phones from brands like Xiaomi, Huawei and others without thinking about real price of such device - data. Also by buying "smart" devices from these brands. Xiaomi Vacuum can gather tons of informations about home. Air Purifier also. But try to find products of similar quality for an equally low price and you will be faced with the choice of either overpaying or being added to the millions of people who are being tracked anyway. You will become a statistic. No wonder most people don't see any danger in this. Dilution of responsibility.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I wouldn’t say that “users” normalised it, as their choice in the matter is limited. Now it seems that hidden cost of those services is a problem that will need a cultural shift to see a solution. Education helps too.
Apologies if this sounds like a nitpick, I just think that the language we use when talking about these things matters more than we expect.
Surveillance was normalized far before that. People have been using Google products and social networks for years before these devices. The only difference is the extent to which one carries that Panopticon with them.
That's true - but it's mostly due to ignorance. One of my relative bought a Xiaomi phone (https://www.mi.com/in/redmi-9-power/), and after I pointed out to her that the Xiaomi customised Android OS on it as basically an adware and a blackhole for all personal data on the phone, she asked me for options. When I told her the OS could be replaced (from https://xiaomi.eu/community/), she asked me to do it.
That's one part of it.
The other is that I could replace the OS as Xiaomi (or Sony Open Devices) allow the bootloader to be unlocked and replace the OS. Apple iPhones do not even give you this option.
Google (Pixel), Samsung, Nokia, OnePlus, etc. All such companies are roughly equally evil. The difference might be price (though frankly it usually is not that divergent), but the tracking is the same. Given that the tracking is present at every price point, the price point is not relevant. The origin of the technology is not relevant. All that is relevant is the fact that this is normalised and it should not be.
How difficult would it be to add a GPS to one of those? At any rate, "smart" purifiers like the one GP is talking about connect to WiFi etc and are definitely able to find out your location.
air quality sensors are not a bad proxy of activity patterns. (now does that have any value? good question, and probably very much "depends". Probably does in the sense of things like law enforcement requesting data from siri etc for criminal cases, to feed into advertising targeting it's only a tiny datapoint)
Apple lost me as a customer completely with CSAM this year. But I am thankful because I dramatically reduced my smartphone usage to incidental and mandatory use-cases.
For me this is a strictly personal stance.
People will continue to fall into deep surveillance state not just because only “Nothing to hide” false assumptions. Governments love access to citizens data and partnership with corporations is guaranteed.
On a professional level I “trust” only FOSS software with network access, the others will be air-gaped as much as possible.
I agree. I've been meaning to buy an Apple laptop to develop on for years now and constantly kept putting it off; first because of quality concerns that have no place in a device with such a price tag and now because of this.
If only there was a Linux-compatible laptop with specs similar to the M1. The only thing that comes to mind are Thinkpads and those things are ugly as hell.
I use PureOS on old Macbook Air for casual browsing with Hardened Firefox and Emacs for RSS/Org-mode and it runs very smoothly.
Moved office to Arch/Manjaro, Win VM’s in isolation for design tasks.
M advancements of Apple are not so critical when considering cost per performance. There is no denying their advancements, but who knows what’s going on inside this architecture.
Some will say that I am overeating, but since reading Trusting trust (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...) I shifted my mind towards Raptor Computers direction.
The prices are high but paying for open hardware is smart investment in the current climate.
While personally decidedly not a fan of this, Apple's proposed attempt on CASM was quite different from what is generally alleged in that article.
In principle it matched a downloaded set of encrypted hashes of known offending images against any images before they were uploaded to the iCloud and this locally. A recorded offence would result in a local warning, and, if you proceeded, the offending image would have been exposed to further scrutiny and review (by this breaking the end-to-end encryption promise, but you would know and this would have implied your consent). It's not that far from Gatekeeper and other signature matching malware detectors. You may have already problems with the latter, but this is basically where we are.
The other thing they did was use AI image recognition to scan images sent via text. This wasn't a hash match and much more dangerous. I'm not sure why people get fixated on the CASM thing while ignoring this; this seems much worse to me.
The first feature of the three features will use the phone’s on-device machine learning to check the content of children’s messages for photos that look as if they may be sexually explicit. That analysis will be done entirely on the phone, Apple said, and it will not be able to see the those messages.
If a child receives such a message, it will be blurred and the child wil be warned that it could be sensitive and given information about such messages, as well as being given the option to block the contact. If a child decides to view a message, they will be told that their parents will be alerted, and an adult will then be notified.
> The other thing they did was use AI image recognition to scan images sent via text.
I think, this would have used the already built-in Vision framework [1], which runs locally, and only on any attempts of publishing to the iCloud. This is really the conflicting point: while it should be implemented at the publishing end, the concern for end-to-end encryption prevents any such idea, for which has to be migrated to a local service.
Regarding the procedures and treatment of children as receivers of such images, this is an actual (while restricted) leak, but it's a fact that minors are not recognised as independent individuals or as deserving much privacy of their own. It may be deplorable, but that's pretty much established in society and by law. Also, it may be argued that proceeding to view such an image after a warning implies consent.
>and only on any attempts of publishing to the iCloud.
The feature I'm referring to happens regardless of publishing to the cloud. It scans text messages real-time and uses AI rather than a hash of known/existing images. The other feature everyone is talking about uses CSAM hashes and scans only when publishing to the cloud, but of course that feature can be easily changed with a bit switch.
Is your objection an objection to parental controls on children's [1] devices in general, or is there something particular about that one?
[1] The description you quoted only applies to children under the age of 13. For children 13+ it still warns them, but if they elect to view anyway their parents are not notified. In the under 13 case if the child elects to view the material they are reminded that their parents will be notified if they do and given another chance to cancel.
It's not the parental control, it's the ability for Apple to spy on them with it. You are assuming their stated intended use 1. Is 100% accurate, 2. Will always be 100% accurate, 3. Won't be used by law enforcement with a warrant.
I more object to how it can be used more so than their stated use. The best way to ensure that I or my kids won't be spied on with AI searching text messages/images is not to have the ability exist. Trusting corporations to do the right thing doesn't go very far.
I'd argue, trusting an OS vendor with built-in services and apps is a much more secure bet than trusting the vendor of any random app. Simply, because they are easily caught (just a single user has to sniff the traffic) and trust is a major requirement for selling an OS. The incentives for compliance are high as are the stakes. Any change of policies would be most likely advertised openly as an improvement, and then it may be the right time to jump off the train.
I'd argue that we are in times when "trust" must be a result of open code access.
If in the past the GNU philosophy sounded somewhat extreme, today is the only real valuable option from a consumer perspective.
This are our intimate lives that we are talking about, that's the whole incentive for corporations to provide "advancements" for free - the personal data, gathered, categorized and automated for billions. "Solutions" sold to the public with marketing strategy "for the common good".
In actuality, we as a collective have fallen into this trap.
Driven by consumer lust and "social" success validation, emojis, colors and tech specs. We are sick to the core - watching unboxing and tech fetish videos.
I am guilty in this as others, I have used Apple products for 20 years.
The only justification that I have - I had fallen into this trough my work as a designer. At the time I had no idea about how software works and what is the perspective for the industry in the future.
Since invention of the iPhone things changed dramatically.
What are advancements for the end-user really? Better cameras? Or higher and higher prices? My last iPhone is SE with the old form factor - not updated and still working.
With CSAM and "parental AI" scanning proposal, Apple tried to normalize active policing on the device by third party criteria with no option of auditing (because of the sensitive nature of the data). UK government chimed in to approve and require even more access.:)
This operation is a failed text-book psyop. To make you comfortable when I am scanning your data in the name of the children (if you don't approve you may be have something to hide), you will be able to participate in the surveillance spectacle by snooping on your kids.
Hm, no. Utterly Disgusting.
How removed from reality one must be to even create this intrusion on privacy is beyond my comprehension.
The good part is that this Apple "mistake" was like jolt of thunder for me and my colleagues.
There is no more Apple tech talk in the office, sharing of Apple related news and speculations.
We don't care to support another monopolistic monster in the shareholders approved crusade to rule the world trough health, media and transportation data.
You cannot be a technically educated person continuing forward with closed eyes and singing along the corporate mantras anymore. Yes, the paychecks are good, I have no doubt.
I now understand why FOSS exists, and I am sincerely thankful for all the people involved in the process of creation of the real software advancement for humanity.
And if I cannot participate directly, I will find a way to support this process financially.
You are generally right. Mind that this (commercial OSes) is on an entirely different level. However, I'm afraid, if there was a way to effectively commercialize FOSS software, it would have gone the way of e-mail or Usenet.
Regarding iPhone (and smartphones in general), I'm with you. However, I don't think that this ill-fated CSAM filtering attempt was meant to establish intrusion. At least, if I was Apple, I would go a long way to avoid becoming a transparent tool for law enforcement and intelligence. There is no win down that route, only pain, lots of pain. They are doing fine without it, already.
Not knowing about the ability of it to do that is not evidence that the ability doesn't exist. You were already trusting them not to do this before, since they had full access to the texts and images as the developer of the app.
The development of systems that can recognize these kinds of images predates this and you likely have been previously aware of them already existing and the ease of deployment of them.
Trust of Apple is already all that stood between them being abused and them not being abused.
I don't really understand what argument is being made here.
You're depending on Apple not tampering with or receiving a tampered CSAM hash list. The same company that opened Chinese iCloud to the ccp, took down a voting app when asked by Russia and generally blows around like a leaf on the ask of authoritarian governments.
Gatekeeper and app notarization went from something you could bypass to now a hard block on distributing your own software on MacOS without approval from Apple.
The centralized root of trust is what really turns me away from Apple these days. Why should I put my faith in the world's largest corporation? Are all my eggs safer in this basket? Is this one 'too big to fail' now?
Let me explain to you as a journalist how this works.
- Facebook is under fire for its leaked papers.
- Google is a hot topic because of the lawsuit that reveals collusion with Facebook.
- Apple is relatively free of controversy recently after the CSAM blunder. Then let’s cook up a controversial piece on the other behemoth to cater the big chunk of readers that thinks and wants to see that Apple is evil too, “because of course they are and here is why”. Is this based on facts or on a simplistic interpretation of tech? Who cares!
Apple is a trusted brand for privacy. Even if FaceID is harmless in terms of surveillance potential, it still associates positively in the minds of users, such that when other vendors — or even the government - decide that they want to use it to, and not with the same on-device protection, etc - people will accept it willingly because it was safe when they did it with Apple.
I agree with other commenters here that these arguments lead to a sort of infinite regression. All of the things Apple has implemented is rather old tech by now. If we accept those as surveillance, we practically can’t have anything. Which sucks.
Apple is trusted now. But they might not always be. They could go the way of their competitors. Then where would we be?
(This thread seems hijacked already. The top comments are all missing the point to the degree I have to wonder if people are thick or it’s a PR hit team for Apple.)
Conflating tracking cookies with surveillance instruments such as phone/device scanning at all times is absolute gibbonry.
By this definition, making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance.
I'm tired of this stupid debate and the way its framed.
Over the last decade we have made absolutely incredible leaps in technology by any standard. By nature all new technology comes with the potential to do both good and bad, and usually it does a bit of both.
But making technology on its own is not a bad thing. Lying about it and/or actively ignoring the impact it has on society the way Google and Facebook did is. Conflating technology itself with shitty morals is dumb.
When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology. Go look at the salary threads here or discords full of new grads gaming out total compensations in excruciating detail instead of even considering for a second what impact the company has on the world. They have been taught nothing but capitalism, they know nothing but chase money. Some of them will not flinch in doing the same shit again at some other company 10 years down the line. Even speaking about morality is preaching, old-fashioned, religious, uncool, and dumb now so what do you expect. The best answer the media converged on last time was "hire more humanities students/ teach engineers more literature" as if anyone needs a college course to be taught that lying is wrong.
The issue is that Apple has no accountability, unlike Google and Facebook. The only people supposed to keep Apple in line (the SEC and other three-letter agencies) have a mutual interest in maintaining an Apple monopoly.
Plus, it's not like Apple's been caught lying before. Remember when they had to take down their M1 graphs because they were so obviously deceptive? Or how about that time when they said 'political slave labor is not used to build iPhones!' and then we found out that political slave labor is used to build iPhones?
Unless Apple adopts some form of transparency, I don't think I have the capability of trusting them. I agree though, I'm tired of this arguement too which is why I'd really appreciate if Apple gave us something other than a whitepaper of how things should work with no way for security researchers or the common person to verify if that's actually true.
Accountability does not work when society as a whole loses its moral compass. The people who were supposed to keep Google/FB accountable were negligent or complicit for a decade.
You may say slave labor is wrong but will you pay $500 more for an iPhone? Most people won't. They will point the finger at Apple while shopping for the cheapest deal on Amazon produced by yet more slave labor in China. Anything to avoid taking on personal responsibility and score a few more $$ for the retirement account. Only widespread personal responsibility works, but it can only arise within a culture that respects and rewards those who take it on and judges people a little more broadly than "success" and $$$.
Nope they might be better but they're not in the clear either. From their wikipedia page:
> Since version two the Fairphone is produced in Suzhou, China, by Hi-P International Limited.[3]
> Fairphone's founder Bas van Abel acknowledged in 2017 that it was currently impossible to produce a 100% fair phone, suggesting it was more accurate to call his company's phones "fairer"
$500 is a lot of money for most people, but there's definitely a market out there (especially if they give you a unique color so all your friends can see what a good person you are).
Issues of spinning up a new production line aside, I don't think the large mobile phone manufacturers would go for this idea, because it would mean admitting that the majority of their products are produced unethically.
Or, you know, this hypothetical phone might get new hardware revision at a slightly slower pace, and Apple might take a lower cut on each phone. Not the end of the world.
> but will you pay $500 more for an iPhone? Most people won't.
I really enjoy this thought exercise: what if everything was made ethically and cost reflected that. The world would probably be unrecognizable from what it looks like now.
The original iPod would never have been as wide-spread, for example, because the cost would have made it, truly, a luxury. That's if it was even invented at all, because it's pretty obvious that the iPod wasn't the first consumer electronic. Computers might be only affordable by large corporations, universities, and governments, so most of us here would not be working in the tech industry. Etc.
I think that this is important to remember because it really emphasizes that nearly every aspect of modern life is built on the backs of the disenfranchised. It's impossible to live truly ethically in this system. As a sibling post points out: there's no +$500 ethical iPhone option, so the power is literally out of the hands of the consumers (and I'd argue that having some sort of technology is very nearly required to function in our society, at least in the US).
As the saying goes: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
No. That's not the issue. The issue is whether it's bad to make systems that digitize lived experience because that data could be used to violate your privacy. Your capacity for trust notwithstanding, Apple has made a major brand commitment to privacy. Violating that would cost them everything. I trust them not to do so.
How do you justify this knowing that Apple bends over backwards to violate human rights in the Chinese market? What makes America different, just that they haven't been exposed in a significant manner yet?
In the long run, it becomes profitable to dig up landfills and recycle everything (see aluminium cans). Eventually, they'll dig up landfills to recover the old materials.
Over the last decade we have made absolutely incredible leaps in technology by any standard.
I don't think things are really that much different now compared to late 2011. At least not different enough to be considered an "absolutely incredible leap"
I think it may be hard to see technology changes in the moment, but over the last decade alone I think we've had a number of large changes that are starting to be taken for granted.
We have the proliferation of electric vehicles and (at least in the US) a large charging network. There is also a massive difference in the wearable markets. The watches are getting so good that health monitoring and early warning signs are either already here or on the horizon. Cell phones are significantly better. A decade ago a video call would be a novelty and now it is done without a second thought. We finally have the futuristic edge to edge screens and foldables are now on the market.
There are others but they may not fall into the technology that we interact with daily. Things such as the drug technology used to make the covid vaccine. There are also changes in ML with the significant improvements in deep learning and model training.
I'm not sure if any of those count as an incredible leap, I think each one was developed incrementally, but when looking over the course of a decade it feels like a large leap to me.
Changing a feature phone for smartphone with two cameras(front and back), internet, and general computing capacity was a leap(circa 2009). Having a better camera, faster CPU, bigger screen - doesn’t feel like much. I haven’t had a desire to get a new one in half a decade(I’d keep my iPhone 7 if it wasn’t suffocating thanks to megabytes for JS on every page).
Good technology is transparent. If advancements are done right, you would notice much difference.
The truth is, not that much was different between 2000 and 2010 or 1990 and 2000. But 2010 and 2020? This last decade has marked such massive improvements in ways we aren't noticing, and in things we aren't using. Everything from cameras with resolutions and ISOs that are off the charts, OLED, LiPo Battery density, robotics with walking and flight, guidance, wireless transmission and encoding/decoding, Machine learning in everything including your phone, and our phones... they are amazing pieces of kit. Oh, reusable rockets that land themselves! Cars that literally drive themselves. Spot, the robot dog? Right in my office right now, ultra-thin laptops, compact high quality microphones, headphones with unbelievable noise-canceling, 3-axis gimbals, 10-bit n-log external recorders, wireless solar powered remote security cameras, drones with amazing stabilized video quality that you used to need a helicopter to shoot, and on and on and on. The last decade has been insane, turning future dream tech in to Walmart black-friday super sale items. You may not appreciate or even notice the tech advancements in the last 10 years but they have been monstrous compared to any other decade.
Machine learning, cryptography and decentralized communications. That's about it. Nothing else really improved that much in the last 10 years, we can just make some 2010's technology cheaper.
And smartphones didn't improve much after Jobs died. 120hz display and wireless charging is all of the innovation in last 2 years. Smartphone is now just a fashion statement and not really a technology.
In 1990, nobody had a cellphone. In 2000, everybody has one. This change alone has a massive influence on society.
For example, planning a trip together for, say, 30 people. It used to take weeks. Today, you can basically decide the day before to join or not.
The whole SMS thing, with minor messages delivered in seconds, changes peoples behaviour. Not being contactable in a few hours maximum is not normal today. It used to be. A small message to shop something on the way home did not exist.
The worldwide students against climate movement could not happen at that scale in the 1990's, the comm infra simply wasn' t there
.
Nobody remembers phone numbers anymore.
Now that's cellphones. Add internet and GPS, and your society is massively different in a decade.
1990 had neither GUI nor sound nor network on consumer devices. 2000 consumer device did not have video input and could not playback video even of standard TV quality. 2010 basically had all that even on mobile but lacked fast cellular data.
I was thinking about this the other day. Its been a long time since anything meaningful was invented.
The last thing i can think of was the internet. Maybe cell phones. There's probably a bunch of medical stuff, but I'm not well versed in that area.
I mean real inventions. Things that didn't exist. Like light bulbs, or automobiles, or steam engines, or rockets, or jet travel. It seems like the era of real invention petered out in the 1950's to 1970's.
Now things like social media and ad targeting and viral videos are somehow considered innovation. Even the one recent thing I'm impressed by - commercial space flight - is just an iteration of something that already existed.
That's an interesting sidebar... I generally agree with the sentiment, but GPT(-1) came out in 2018. I don't think SoCs weren't nearly as powerful as they are today and GPGPUs were still somewhat nascent, I believe. In 2011 people were still buying PlayStation 3s
> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked
Some people will maximize the $$$ in any society. It's how to make the strive for the $$$ the most beneficial and the least destructive that is the challenge.
Agreed. The article is a giant stretch of logic from the start. There's this at the bottom, though, that I think is worth reading:
> All tech giants share a desire to digitise the world. What is left unsaid by Apple and others is that digitising the world entails surveilling it: recording everything, making it taggable, trackable, searchable – and hackable. Of course, asking tech companies not to digitise the world is like asking builders not to pave over natural areas. Unless society sets limits, that is not going to happen. That’s why governments create protected areas when it comes to building.
That last sentence is key. Of course governments are concerned, Big Tech is nudging gov out of the way. BT is becoming the collecting and controlling force.
I'm not suggesting one is better or worse than the other. But there is a subplot, and it's about control.
Capitalism is what got us to where we are today. It is a powerful form to deploy resources in a country. Is it abused in its current form? Yes. Laying the blame to all the woes on a generation of humanity at the feet of capitalism is a lazy argument at best. I would argue that we shouldn't destroy the capital system but deploy it in a more equitable way.
Also your comment strikes me as someone who doesn't actually engage with anyone under 30 in any real world way but only what is written on the internet. That would create a bias because all the people who might want to talk online to game out their compensation is probably a specific subset of individuals who would reinforce your worldview.
Society is made up of many people and it isn't built by select few. I suggest you reach out to different communities and find people who aren't as jaded as this rant post or offer a way put your energy into engaging and changing the trajectory of society towards where your values lie. Change takes work instead of arm chair quarterbacking a straw man.
No thats not destroying the capitalist system thats using the levers of the system to redistribute within the system structure. This would allow us to take better care of those who are left behind.
I am stating the truth as I see it, that's all. It's not some ideological screed against capitalism, it is literally just me describing reality. Reality does have sucky parts and I try to see them as clearly as I see the good parts. Some people call it "ranting", i just call it seeing clearly. It doesn't mean I have a solution to the problem I described, or that I don't engage with the real world. It literally just means I do so while making an attempt to see things as clearly and truthfully as possible. I don't want to get into the tired old debate of "capitalism good or capitalism bad", it is simply too narrow a lens to view everything through. In my view, the problem isn't even about capitalism, its just a manifestation of some of the uglier sides of human nature and competition for social status in the face of actual resource constraints in the world that mean we have to compete for who gets how many resources. Of course the root problems exist no matter what economic system we use.
> But making technology on its own is not a bad thing. Lying about it and/or actively ignoring the impact it has on society the way Google and Facebook did is. Conflating technology itself with shitty morals is dumb.
Even if you believe that Apple is somehow different from Google and Facebook, I think you're missing a key part of the argument made in the article: the technology not only can be used for unethical purposes, it almost certainly will be.
Apple itself doesn't need to be evil. The technology it's pushing is inherently vulnerable and given the value of what it enables to bad actors, will almost inevitably be hijacked for nefarious purposes eventually. Pretending that your technology isn't vulnerable and imminently capable of causing great harm to people is indeed unethical.
> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology.
Have you ever considered that technology has played and is playing a key role in the development of our money and fame-obsessed society? Money and fame have existed in some form for millennia, but thanks to the web and social media, for example, people are now bombarded with a previously unfathomable amount of media that glamorizes it in ways never before possible. This exposure now starts at a very early age and therefore almost certainly shapes how children relate to money, fame, their impressions of themselves, etc.
> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology.
Money and fame are self-propagating, you're able to sell more products with fame and make more money with money. Kindness, sincerity, and moral virtues are better than their absence, I agree, but being kind to one person doesn't have the capability of exponential growth, you can't expect that the one act of kindness will allow you later to be kind to 100, then 10,000, then 1,000,000 people.
Technology is a blessing and a curse, it's a Pandora's box that allows scalable ideas to scale to previously unimaginable levels. There was an article here yesterday about how WhatsApp scaled to 1 billion users with just 50 engineers. That kind of action - and its effects on society - would not be possible without technology.
I'm not proposing that as a reason for taking an action; it's nothing like a justification for greed or cruelty. Instead, I'm proposing that as an explanation for the shape of the world as we observe it. Technology, capitalism, and human nature combine to make actors who prioritize money more powerful and visible than those who prioritize kindness.
Likewise, I believe that dishonest, wealthy, power-hungry sociopaths make poor political leaders, and yet we seem to elect a lot of those.
Power and morality are not well correlated - they might be orthagonal to each other, or even inversely correlated!
If you build digital products that serve millions or billions of people, you can scale kindness. One easy change is to spend a bit of time learning about accessibility and incorporating it into your work.
Assuming that everyone who wants to maximize their income is a brainwashed capitalist drone is a mistake. There are many reasons why someone might want to maximize their income. Learning techniques and collecting information from your peer group is not immoral. Several people I know want to make as much money as they can so that they can pay off their house and have enough reserve cash to dedicate the rest of their lives to making an impact where money doesn’t matter to them anymore. Others have massive student loans and the pressure to get out of that debt is enormous.
Also, to suggest these companies are not making an impact on the world is insane. We are talking about companies like Apple and Google and yes… Facebook. Sure, they are not perfect moral companies but they have made massive impacts on the world.
Yes, there is massive downside to not maximizing for money to some extent. It can make the difference between being able to retire while one still has some fragment of youth or not, as well as determine whether you’re just keeping your head above water month to month or are solidly in the black. If you have kids and a significant other, this becomes even more true as you then want to ensure their comfort and wellbeing as well.
It’s less that morality isn’t taught in college and more that the system is structured such that those who don’t do the song and dance lose out big time. No that’s not great, but it’s no fault of the majority of individuals. The system itself needs to be changed. Make sure that people don’t have to work the majority of their waking lives just to have a chance of getting ahead and morality will become a more practical consideration.
> anyone needs a college course to be taught that lying is wrong.
I think the moral issues around a lot of tech is more than just "lying is bad" - to conflate it to that means that subtler moral issues will go unnoticed.
What are the moral issues people have with advertising? Is it that lying is wrong? No, I don't think so. What are the moral issues people have around the rentier structure of modern "App stores"? Likewise, it's not just about lying.
I also can't tell if your comment is suggesting that this moral breakdown is a break from the old, or a continuation. Most of the historical evidence seems indicative of a continuation.
Call me crazy but I don't believe everything is best taught directly like just crank out a college course. Ethics is one such subject. If you are truly interested in ethics, you can learn about it everywhere - in the news, on TV shows and movies, in novels, watching your friends and just reflecting on all that you see. If not, you can see all the same things without learning anything about ethics. Developing a sense of ethics is a natural by product of being constantly thoughtful and reflective about how your actions impact the world. It's the sort of thing you learn implicitly from your parents & peers & what gets rewarded in the world. In more concrete terms, honoring those who do good and punishing those who don't is a pretty good way to "teach" ethics. Ethics are more a matter of enforcement than teaching maybe.
> By this definition, making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance.
What a dumb argument. So cameras I use to take pictures of flowers normalize surveillance? Stop defending the Church of Apple - you sound like a brainwashed cult member.
The last decade has produced very few significant technological jumps in my opinion. Electric vehicles have been around for over a century and the iterations on devices has been largely targeted toward better cameras so people can take selfies to post on the ubiquitous social networks.
The mRNA technology is interesting but unproven as we are seeing with the relative ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines.
Software technology has been largely focused on new iterations of web frameworks and languages that target the young developers du jour who think that 5 year old frameworks are old school.
Mainly, small iterations of the same stuff is what has been dominating the technology space the last decade. My guess is that we are poised for some interesting new technologies, since it has been a largely ho-hum period for the last decade.
If only the efforts could be focused more toward actually making our lives better instead of focusing only on scraping our lives and diverting our eyes for the benefit of mega tech corporations and their wannabe startups.
> making anything that CAN be used for surveillance is normalizing surveillance
It is. Anything that can be abused will be abused, especially by governments. Companies rolling out clearly problematic technology adds legitimacy to them, it makes them normal.
> They have been taught nothing but capitalism, they know nothing but chase money.
Nobody is "taught" capitalism, it is imposed on them. We want to live comfortable, happy lives. We want to have influence in this world. It's not like some trillionaire is gonna come to me and just give me all that.
This is the most based thing I have ever seen on hacker news. The lack of nuance ( or in the other direction, the lack of genuine consideration in general ) around the moral/spiritual implications of technology in the last hundred years or so is truly sad. Very grateful that this is top comment
Thank you, it is an honor to be called based :) Usually people just call it like "hey you're kinda weird you must have aspergers or be a sociopath" (except they don't even call it that, they just think it and i have to guess).
1. Trust one of the Big-Tech platforms. Use all the conveniences that it provides, such as Cloud storage, integration between devices, etc. Trust them with not leaking/selling your data (or maybe you are ok with this?). You can be damn sure they will analyze your data, for yours and theirs benefit.
OR:
2. Local computing with Debian (or preferred alternative). Participate in reviewing the source code that runs on your machine. Store data locally in your computer or NAS at home network. Do the boring work yourself.
You cant really have "no surveillance" and cloud services at the same time.
That's really just #2 because you are not really taking advantage of any of the cloud services besides storage - which is the cheapest and least innovative cloud service.
Agreed, I chose (1) because after introspection I genuinely prefer the convenience given the tradeoffs. But I have the knowledge to pursue (2) at any point (right now my home linux server just acts as a pi-hole -- but it can do so much more if ever needed).
Unfortunately, most people aren't aware they even have a choice, or what the tradeoffs are. I would love to see option (2) more accessible to the average Joe, but I know better than to expect that will ever happen.
Not a US citizen, but what’s noticeably lacking in discussions about surveillance (such as this one) is faulting the very government that’s pressuring companies to comply with state surveillance programs. Doesn’t matter how big you are or how much you’re worth—if your interests do not align with the state you’re not above its power.
No kidding. The US government has been involved in domestic mass surveillance for about a quarter century now (see Carnivore), predating the pretext given by the terror attacks of 2001. When this was getting off the ground in the 90s, my recollection is that the criticism (if any) one found in the media was oblique. Any surprise that we now have surveillance capitalism?
This article might lead a reader to think that surveillance is in itself a problem, using terms like ‘invasive’, and ‘normalising’ (as though the thing being ‘normalised’ is undesirable). While it does appear to distinguish between surveillance and breach of privacy, it doesn’t do so carefully enough. What I actually want are devices that let me surveil MORE of my life, but in ways that respect my privacy, that leave me in control of that data. There are so many benefits that we can receive if companies/software/products were to offer us greater insights(/‘invasive surveillance’) into our lives without breaching our privacy or trust.
When I am surveilling my own life, with devices that only share my data in ways I happily consent to, there is no problem. I can reap great benefits through this. I can take photos of myself and my family. I can monitor my heart through a device on my wrist. I can write personal notes in a journal (whether on paper or digitised) for later reflection. I can keep a history of sites I’ve visited in my browser.
What a company like Apple claims to be doing is to try and bring us the benefits of surveillance without the breaches of privacy — without the forced and reluctant consent to share our data with everyone. Surveillance isn’t the enemy, it’s companies trying to make a product out of that data that really we’d prefer not to share at all.
It's odd Wired calls out Apple in particular. For almost every technology Apple works on, like the ones the article discusses that that in theory they _could_ use for surveillance, Google or Facebook is already ten steps ahead _actually_ using it for surveillance.
In terms of normizing surveillance, Apple is late to the party. The truth is "personalization" is a euphemism for surveillance. This language slight of hand has been popular with Google, Amazon, etc.
Per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", it's not the surveillance to fear per se, it's how our own meta data and such is being used against us. Now. This info isn't simply predicting behaviour, it's being used to alter and modify our behaviour.
I'm not giving Apple a free pass. But to call out Apple and not the others gives the masses a false sense of truth.
What's ironic is that the first thing you see when you hit wired.co.uk:
> Wired
> We and our partners store and/or access information on a device, such as unique IDs in cookies to process personal data. You may accept or manage your choices by clicking below or at any time in the privacy policy page. These choices will be signaled to our partners and will not affect browsing data.View Cookie Notice
We and our partners process data to provide:
> Use precise geolocation data. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Store and/or access information on a device. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Create a personalised content profile. Select personalised content. Measure ad performance. Measure content performance. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Develop and improve products.
It really irks me that they blind to how majorly hypocritical they seem when write stuff like that on a crappy journal like this.
Technology journalism died in early 2010s and never came back.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadThe premise is 'they offer features that use data & say they keep it secure. but what if they actually don't'
Seriously?
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" is a very legitimate and serious question.
Not to mention, it doesn't matter if they actually "do" keep it secure, themselves, as a company, would still have access to all this information.
E.g., the Vision frameworks subjects any images to a local (built-in) neural network and returns the scanned text, which is then most probably put into the system clipboard. How is this surveillance, but copy-and-paste in MS Word was not?
It's also part of the backup to iCloud, which is not encrypted, no?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
Edit: Mind that this would still apply much the same to copy-and-paste in MS Word and any (encrypted) remote backups of the resulting documents. Where is the significant difference? Also mind that iCloud backups are not mandatory, but yet another (optional) service.
Not all. Notably not iCloud backups. They're encrypted but Apple has the key.
Not sure if this is common knowledge (I highly doubt it). While legitimate, the English saying would have done just as well IMO.
...note that they can pick them up on their own at any age...
I applaud you for speaking/knowing a few sayings in latin, though.
I love Apple’s privacy stance and have bought in. However this article made me realize that if apple ever wanted to flip the switch and monetize the data they’d have a treasure trove to work from.
It’s not hard to imagine a future Apple facing stagnant revenue growth, a new CEO brought in to turn things around and enabling a new revenue stream monetizing their privacy features as ad features.
I think the real takeaway is we need better government regulations to ensure situations like that cannot occur. Eg. You can’t change the terms of service of existing customers in ways that reduce their data privacy.
> All of these features increase the amount of data collected.
This looks like a cheap attempt to FUD, I don’t see how this feature has anything to do with surveillance.
With the billions of iOS devices running around the planet and with the fact that it just takes one person to blow the whistle on this sort of data collection, I just don't buy the argument that it might have been happening this whole time... purely on the basis that things happen sometimes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbBqbONm1_Q
The basic premise of the article is that : more data -> more surveillance. Certainly, this could be possible. However, is there a way to collect more data and yet not increase surveillance?
> Apple created the Bluetooth beacons tracking people in shops, gyms, hotels, airports and more by connecting to their phones.
I think, this is where the author lost me. The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance. This is what happens when you buy into simplistic narratives.
It's just a question of how much value it actually adds during times of crisis like COVID. Then it's a matter of precedence.
EDIT: Just to add a little bit to this reply. Using your example, counting the number of cars on a highway is clearly surveilling the group of highway goers. This could perhaps allow you to note that one demographic travels more on Sunday than another, or that a remote farmer himself was out for groceries last Tuesday.
With neither, you can check whether that data is deleted in a timely manner or whether extra data, such as IDs of phones near you, is being sent out and collected.
Now, the seller of said phone adds a feature, documenting that it collects hashes of phones near you on your device.
Again, there’s no way for you to check that, but why would that require more trust?
But your point is very valid. We already live under mass surveillance, to the point of insanity. I reject this way of living and would like to be part of the solution... without giving up on the good aspects of the technology.
Analogies suck, don't use them: 13038042-A0D5-4E76-8964-AF27B0EAD352 travels more on Sunday than others, and BD1DC4FD-2D17-44E3-91CF-198403C5E2B4 was out for groceries last Tuesday. There is no database that correlates bd1dc4f to anything; indeed, check back soon and the physical phone that used to be bd1 is now f0f4442.
Spot the difference?
Or, it could attack the radio processor that runs a parallel operating system on our phones that we can't inspect.
Or hell, if the goal is "tracking people", they could attack the legal infrastructure that is used to legally track people via cellphones today.
A more realistic analogy would be "a camera monitors a busy road where all cars are replaced by identical black cubes with no windows, and a 256-bit license plate whose value is set entirely locally, is not known to anyone but the occupant of the car, and changes unpredictably on the hour". Can you track a car in this world? Sure, but it would require significant data collection and analysis and would almost always end up probabilistic at best.
Is this analogy useful? You decide. No, it is divorced from observable reality. Yes, because it avoids misunderstandings like "you didn't intend for your analogy to include license plate scanners but your audience assumed it possible".
If it has value in this modern world teams of specialists find ways to extract the signal from the noise.
As for end-to-end encryption breaking image search, as I understood it, it was meant to locally match images to a set of encrypted hashes of known offending images before sending them to the iCloud and would warn the user of any conflicting images (also locally). (Personally, I think this may be just a step too far, but it's not implemented as represented in the article.)
Finally, any biometric hashes are stored in a secure enclave and are not accessible by the "normal" machine.
Is OCR text stored alongside photos on the file system? E.g. can text be backed up along with photos, or is photo text recorded in OS storage that is unaccessible to the user?
Even with Siri disabled, the option for "Siri & Search" defaults to on for all apps, including indexing of app data. This isn't specific to OCR, so is an existing issue with Apple's harvesting of data in iOS apps. But at least it can be turned off, one app at a time, with about 5 clicks per app = 100 clicks for 20 apps.
I think this is a basic question of our time, because we introduce so many devices into our lives from various areas that all collect data. I feel that even if you do "privacy conscious" data collection, the data will still land in the hands of others. A lot of the data is also never even entering a device that you own but is always controlled by third parties (like infrastructure operators, shop owners (CCTV), etc).
Sometimes I feel like technology has inherent impacts, no matter how much you want it to not have that impact, because it makes some uses of it really easy while making others really hard. Like copying data is so immensely easy now, to a degree that it's hard to not copy data.
Think of the CCTV example for example. You might be a privacy conscious shop operator so you don't have a CCTV system set up. However, in your street there are 5 other shops, 2 not connected to the internet, 3 which are, and one with bad security that doesn't need password logins. Now you personally have tried to not collect data on your customers, but as the customers walk down the street to your shop, they come across all the other shops, and their images even land in the public internet.
Right now, the impact is countered by video data being so horribly hard to process, taking so much space, etc. So that publicly accessible CCTV system only lets attackers obtain footage of the last 3 days. But eventually, as computers improve, CCTV operators will add facial recognition features, and maybe store the data obtained for longer periods, because the info whether some person walked down the road takes up way less space, so operators might opt to store it for weeks and years.
Suddenly, someone accessing that one CCTV system with bad security has access to the last 10 years of pedestrians walking down the road, and it's only a 10 GB sqlite database (which by then will likely be not much data).
This effect is not just local to CCTV operators, but can be seen everywhere. If a car manufacturer collects telemetry to improve their car product, and does it for all their fleet, they might build a database spanning decades. One day they might get hacked or think it's a good idea to sell that data to insurances, municipalities or whatever. The car manufacturer might not even do it, but you also carry a phone with you with google maps/grindr installed, etc, or it's the municipality which has installed license plate checking CCTV on the road. Or it's the mobile network operators because the cars have to use some means to talk to the car companies. Etc.
No. Surveillance is the collection of data by a third party.
What that third party does to the data (e.g. whether it sells them to advertisers or not) is irrelevant. Especially if others like governments can also get access to those.
If I recall correctly, that was exactly the US government's defense after the 2013 Snowden leaks revealed it was tapping every internet connection possible and sucking in every piece of data available.
Once the data is collected, BigTech can change their privacy policy or Terms of Services to access this data any time. (And that is exactly what they have been doing). Moreover, they still need to collect some data to ensure the "on device" analysis is working as intended. (That's where the clause "we may also collect data to improve our services" comes into picture).
Do you work for Apple's PR firm by any chance?
> Live Text uses on-device intelligence to recognize text in photos across the entire system and on the web
And as for AR Walking directions, i can't find any place documenting if it's on-device or cloud based, but i know Maps will download your route information from the cloud. But then again, if you're using GPS, i don't see how AR Walking Directions could do (more) harm.
> The contact tracing protocol for Covid was anything but more surveillance
Prior to Apple and Google releasing the contact tracing protocol, various governments had some interesting ideas that focused more on finding infected people than it did on protecting privacy. Contact tracing has actually improved privacy by a lot. You're literally only a random id number, and the way you get notified if you've been in contact is if your random number appears on a list that gets broadcast to your phone. The checking happens on-device. The authorities never know anything but your random id number.
By default, "Siri and Search" are enabled to scan and learn from on-device content in every app, even if iCloud is disabled.
To opt-out, the user must manually go through every app's Settings and disable multiple radio button defaults per app.
Apple Configurator needs to allow device-wide opt-out of search indexing and harvesting of photos and app data, especially when Siri itself is disabled in Configurator.
> To Make Suggestions and Search Results More Relevant, Some Information Is Sent to Apple and Not Associated with You. When you use Siri Suggestions, Look Up, Visual Look Up, or type in Search, Spotlight, Safari search, or #images search in Messages, any information sent to Apple does not identify you, and is associated with a 15-minute random, rotating device-generated identifier. Your device may send information such as location, topics of interest (for example, cooking or basketball), your search queries, including visual search queries, suggestions you have selected, apps you use, and related device usage data to Apple. This information does not include search results that show files or content on your device. If you subscribe to music or video subscription services, the names of these services and the type of subscription may be sent to Apple. Your account name, number, and password will not be sent to Apple. This information is used to process your request and provide more relevant suggestions and search results, and is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data Apple may have from your use of other Apple services. Aggregated information may be used to improve other Apple products and services. Common search queries may be shared with a web search engine to improve search results.
Contact tracing is surveillance and has already resulted in large-scale leaks of sensitive information. Given those things, it is not unreasonable to call it out in this context. Nothing about that narrative is simplistic - the simplistic perspective is that it is for health and therefore okay.
I must have missed that, could you share more?
Call me paranoid but I think Facebook would love to be in a situation where privacy is an all or nothing game, because no-one is going along for the absolutist privacy vision which means Facebook et al can do as they please. They and their peers also have the money to change the conversation to something like this.
Again, call me crazy, but it's reminding me a lot of the oil companies big push for things like individual carbon footprints, and plastic straws being the real enemy.
It is really fascinating. It is nothing but surveillance of course. This time it actually may increase security in contrast to most programs government implemented. The difference is that the user has to consent to it, it is transparent and there is the possibility to just shut it off again. That will never happen with hidden data collection by third parties of any kind.
Guess you're not following the news. Things that look simple can be deceiving.
>It did seek to assuage fears, however, by repeatedly assuring Singaporeans that the data collected with such technology would be used only for contact tracing during the pandemic. And that’s where things went wrong.
>Earlier this month, it emerged that the government’s claim was false. The Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed that data could actually be accessed by the police for criminal investigations; the day after this admission, a minister revealed that such data had, in fact, already been used in a murder investigation.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/11/1016004/singapor...
They didn't use Apple's contact tracing system. Probably for this very reason.
Wow, just wow. I am stunned to find such an ignorant comment on Hacker News. Maybe someone this naive could exist in the general population, but on a board with tech folks ... how can anyone be this blind?
So they want Apple to manufacture the Librem 5?[1]
[1] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
Librem 5 has a microphone/camera hardware kill switch.
Audience Measurement
Targeting Cookies
Social Media Cookies
Store and/or access information on a device
Create a personalised ads profile
Select personalised ads
Create a personalised content profile
Select personalised content
Measure ad performance
Measure content performance
Apply market research to generate audience insights
Use precise geolocation data
Actively scan device characteristics for identification
Link different devices
Receive and use automatically-sent device characteristics for identification
Wired is trying to redefine “surveillance” to mean people collecting and sharing their own information, while at the same time conducting real, detailed surveillance on anyone reading this article.
You might wonder if they being completely disingenuous.
(And it's the ad platforms that are doing the detailed surveillance - similar to the one Apple is working on again to serve better" personalised ads").
Even if some of you do believe this is hypocrisy, does it in anyway change the facts highlighted in the article?
Do the stalkers ever defend themselves by claiming they never said they wouldn't stalk people? No, that's an utterly ridicuous notion. Stalking is illegal, nobody likes being surveilled by some stranger at all times. Whether they warned the victim of their intent is completely irrelevant.
I don't believe this is Apple's fault alone (not mentioning google would be a massive omission and everyone else would like to track you too but just doesn't have the scale). But what is being done with phone tracking is much more than just cookies
That was true a decade ago, but time flies.
Don’t try to equivocate this away. The technology to enable it is software; software is everywhere. We can use WiFi to echo locate people in buildings. We know what we’re doing in technology.
HUMANS are paranoid by default in order to survive. We’ve seen again and again in history; new technology goes straight into agency control militarization. Don’t be naive.
We’re all doing it because we all watch each other normalize it. Mirror neurons and social obligations; sign up, sign in, consume and let us collect your metrics.
With the vast majority of our data tied to our IRL identity (thanks Facebook) with the express goal of causing us to do things IRL (consume product) with a very easy path to abuse (are you an activist, LE just needs to compel data from advertisers) - this seems like a very naive view in current year.
Where you browse from, what you look at, who you talk to.
All collated, filtered and condensed into a picture of you. All websites using a unique identifier to trace _you_ the individual across all visited sites.
Web tracking is much more pervasive than just knowing what you've read. It's a huge picture of you and it does follow your location, habits, impressions and other things in the real.
In fact, the author in this case isn't even employed by Wired. She's a professor of Ethics at Oxford.
This raises the obvious question: do people with opinions need to agree with all the practices of a publishing platform to submit their opinion to it? I doubt I agree with all of Hacker News' business practices, let alone Y Combinator's, yet here I am allowing my words to be forever served by them.
Link different devices? No way. Select personalized ads? Sure!!
I think at least articles like this are good because they create a conversation. Many people who read HN are software engineers, and we all collectively bear at least a little responsibility to make good ethical choices around the tech we use and develop.
Or do you mean Samsumg normalizing surveillance.
[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I wouldn’t say that “users” normalised it, as their choice in the matter is limited. Now it seems that hidden cost of those services is a problem that will need a cultural shift to see a solution. Education helps too.
Apologies if this sounds like a nitpick, I just think that the language we use when talking about these things matters more than we expect.
That's one part of it.
The other is that I could replace the OS as Xiaomi (or Sony Open Devices) allow the bootloader to be unlocked and replace the OS. Apple iPhones do not even give you this option.
Google (Pixel), Samsung, Nokia, OnePlus, etc. All such companies are roughly equally evil. The difference might be price (though frankly it usually is not that divergent), but the tracking is the same. Given that the tracking is present at every price point, the price point is not relevant. The origin of the technology is not relevant. All that is relevant is the fact that this is normalised and it should not be.
Google ads know your age, location, and tons of personal information. Thats enough info for identify fraud.
What does the Air purifier send, level of dust? It does not even know where it is.
How difficult would it be to add a GPS to one of those? At any rate, "smart" purifiers like the one GP is talking about connect to WiFi etc and are definitely able to find out your location.
For me this is a strictly personal stance.
People will continue to fall into deep surveillance state not just because only “Nothing to hide” false assumptions. Governments love access to citizens data and partnership with corporations is guaranteed.
On a professional level I “trust” only FOSS software with network access, the others will be air-gaped as much as possible.
If only there was a Linux-compatible laptop with specs similar to the M1. The only thing that comes to mind are Thinkpads and those things are ugly as hell.
Moved office to Arch/Manjaro, Win VM’s in isolation for design tasks.
M advancements of Apple are not so critical when considering cost per performance. There is no denying their advancements, but who knows what’s going on inside this architecture.
Some will say that I am overeating, but since reading Trusting trust (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...) I shifted my mind towards Raptor Computers direction. The prices are high but paying for open hardware is smart investment in the current climate.
In principle it matched a downloaded set of encrypted hashes of known offending images against any images before they were uploaded to the iCloud and this locally. A recorded offence would result in a local warning, and, if you proceeded, the offending image would have been exposed to further scrutiny and review (by this breaking the end-to-end encryption promise, but you would know and this would have implied your consent). It's not that far from Gatekeeper and other signature matching malware detectors. You may have already problems with the latter, but this is basically where we are.
The first feature of the three features will use the phone’s on-device machine learning to check the content of children’s messages for photos that look as if they may be sexually explicit. That analysis will be done entirely on the phone, Apple said, and it will not be able to see the those messages.
If a child receives such a message, it will be blurred and the child wil be warned that it could be sensitive and given information about such messages, as well as being given the option to block the contact. If a child decides to view a message, they will be told that their parents will be alerted, and an adult will then be notified.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ap...
I think, this would have used the already built-in Vision framework [1], which runs locally, and only on any attempts of publishing to the iCloud. This is really the conflicting point: while it should be implemented at the publishing end, the concern for end-to-end encryption prevents any such idea, for which has to be migrated to a local service.
Regarding the procedures and treatment of children as receivers of such images, this is an actual (while restricted) leak, but it's a fact that minors are not recognised as independent individuals or as deserving much privacy of their own. It may be deplorable, but that's pretty much established in society and by law. Also, it may be argued that proceeding to view such an image after a warning implies consent.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision
The feature I'm referring to happens regardless of publishing to the cloud. It scans text messages real-time and uses AI rather than a hash of known/existing images. The other feature everyone is talking about uses CSAM hashes and scans only when publishing to the cloud, but of course that feature can be easily changed with a bit switch.
[1] The description you quoted only applies to children under the age of 13. For children 13+ it still warns them, but if they elect to view anyway their parents are not notified. In the under 13 case if the child elects to view the material they are reminded that their parents will be notified if they do and given another chance to cancel.
I more object to how it can be used more so than their stated use. The best way to ensure that I or my kids won't be spied on with AI searching text messages/images is not to have the ability exist. Trusting corporations to do the right thing doesn't go very far.
If in the past the GNU philosophy sounded somewhat extreme, today is the only real valuable option from a consumer perspective.
This are our intimate lives that we are talking about, that's the whole incentive for corporations to provide "advancements" for free - the personal data, gathered, categorized and automated for billions. "Solutions" sold to the public with marketing strategy "for the common good".
In actuality, we as a collective have fallen into this trap. Driven by consumer lust and "social" success validation, emojis, colors and tech specs. We are sick to the core - watching unboxing and tech fetish videos.
I am guilty in this as others, I have used Apple products for 20 years.
The only justification that I have - I had fallen into this trough my work as a designer. At the time I had no idea about how software works and what is the perspective for the industry in the future.
Since invention of the iPhone things changed dramatically. What are advancements for the end-user really? Better cameras? Or higher and higher prices? My last iPhone is SE with the old form factor - not updated and still working.
With CSAM and "parental AI" scanning proposal, Apple tried to normalize active policing on the device by third party criteria with no option of auditing (because of the sensitive nature of the data). UK government chimed in to approve and require even more access.:)
This operation is a failed text-book psyop. To make you comfortable when I am scanning your data in the name of the children (if you don't approve you may be have something to hide), you will be able to participate in the surveillance spectacle by snooping on your kids. Hm, no. Utterly Disgusting.
How removed from reality one must be to even create this intrusion on privacy is beyond my comprehension.
The good part is that this Apple "mistake" was like jolt of thunder for me and my colleagues. There is no more Apple tech talk in the office, sharing of Apple related news and speculations.
We don't care to support another monopolistic monster in the shareholders approved crusade to rule the world trough health, media and transportation data.
You cannot be a technically educated person continuing forward with closed eyes and singing along the corporate mantras anymore. Yes, the paychecks are good, I have no doubt.
I now understand why FOSS exists, and I am sincerely thankful for all the people involved in the process of creation of the real software advancement for humanity. And if I cannot participate directly, I will find a way to support this process financially.
Regarding iPhone (and smartphones in general), I'm with you. However, I don't think that this ill-fated CSAM filtering attempt was meant to establish intrusion. At least, if I was Apple, I would go a long way to avoid becoming a transparent tool for law enforcement and intelligence. There is no win down that route, only pain, lots of pain. They are doing fine without it, already.
The development of systems that can recognize these kinds of images predates this and you likely have been previously aware of them already existing and the ease of deployment of them.
Trust of Apple is already all that stood between them being abused and them not being abused.
I don't really understand what argument is being made here.
Gatekeeper and app notarization went from something you could bypass to now a hard block on distributing your own software on MacOS without approval from Apple.
- Facebook is under fire for its leaked papers. - Google is a hot topic because of the lawsuit that reveals collusion with Facebook.
- Apple is relatively free of controversy recently after the CSAM blunder. Then let’s cook up a controversial piece on the other behemoth to cater the big chunk of readers that thinks and wants to see that Apple is evil too, “because of course they are and here is why”. Is this based on facts or on a simplistic interpretation of tech? Who cares!
I do t know what their definition of “surveillance” is, but if it includes Face ID, then it’s not a very useful one.
Apple is a trusted brand for privacy. Even if FaceID is harmless in terms of surveillance potential, it still associates positively in the minds of users, such that when other vendors — or even the government - decide that they want to use it to, and not with the same on-device protection, etc - people will accept it willingly because it was safe when they did it with Apple.
I agree with other commenters here that these arguments lead to a sort of infinite regression. All of the things Apple has implemented is rather old tech by now. If we accept those as surveillance, we practically can’t have anything. Which sucks.
Apple is trusted now. But they might not always be. They could go the way of their competitors. Then where would we be?
Conflating tracking cookies with surveillance instruments such as phone/device scanning at all times is absolute gibbonry.
I'm tired of this stupid debate and the way its framed.
Over the last decade we have made absolutely incredible leaps in technology by any standard. By nature all new technology comes with the potential to do both good and bad, and usually it does a bit of both.
But making technology on its own is not a bad thing. Lying about it and/or actively ignoring the impact it has on society the way Google and Facebook did is. Conflating technology itself with shitty morals is dumb.
When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology. Go look at the salary threads here or discords full of new grads gaming out total compensations in excruciating detail instead of even considering for a second what impact the company has on the world. They have been taught nothing but capitalism, they know nothing but chase money. Some of them will not flinch in doing the same shit again at some other company 10 years down the line. Even speaking about morality is preaching, old-fashioned, religious, uncool, and dumb now so what do you expect. The best answer the media converged on last time was "hire more humanities students/ teach engineers more literature" as if anyone needs a college course to be taught that lying is wrong.
Plus, it's not like Apple's been caught lying before. Remember when they had to take down their M1 graphs because they were so obviously deceptive? Or how about that time when they said 'political slave labor is not used to build iPhones!' and then we found out that political slave labor is used to build iPhones?
Unless Apple adopts some form of transparency, I don't think I have the capability of trusting them. I agree though, I'm tired of this arguement too which is why I'd really appreciate if Apple gave us something other than a whitepaper of how things should work with no way for security researchers or the common person to verify if that's actually true.
You may say slave labor is wrong but will you pay $500 more for an iPhone? Most people won't. They will point the finger at Apple while shopping for the cheapest deal on Amazon produced by yet more slave labor in China. Anything to avoid taking on personal responsibility and score a few more $$ for the retirement account. Only widespread personal responsibility works, but it can only arise within a culture that respects and rewards those who take it on and judges people a little more broadly than "success" and $$$.
> Since version two the Fairphone is produced in Suzhou, China, by Hi-P International Limited.[3]
> Fairphone's founder Bas van Abel acknowledged in 2017 that it was currently impossible to produce a 100% fair phone, suggesting it was more accurate to call his company's phones "fairer"
Issues of spinning up a new production line aside, I don't think the large mobile phone manufacturers would go for this idea, because it would mean admitting that the majority of their products are produced unethically.
I really enjoy this thought exercise: what if everything was made ethically and cost reflected that. The world would probably be unrecognizable from what it looks like now.
The original iPod would never have been as wide-spread, for example, because the cost would have made it, truly, a luxury. That's if it was even invented at all, because it's pretty obvious that the iPod wasn't the first consumer electronic. Computers might be only affordable by large corporations, universities, and governments, so most of us here would not be working in the tech industry. Etc.
I think that this is important to remember because it really emphasizes that nearly every aspect of modern life is built on the backs of the disenfranchised. It's impossible to live truly ethically in this system. As a sibling post points out: there's no +$500 ethical iPhone option, so the power is literally out of the hands of the consumers (and I'd argue that having some sort of technology is very nearly required to function in our society, at least in the US).
As the saying goes: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
But technology can be made without doing bad, see Librem or Pine64.
If you subtract Librem from Apple, what you're left with is anti-consumer surveillance stuff.
(None of that is specific to Librem/Purism or Pine64, but mostly applies to the tech industry at large, of course.)
I don't think things are really that much different now compared to late 2011. At least not different enough to be considered an "absolutely incredible leap"
We have the proliferation of electric vehicles and (at least in the US) a large charging network. There is also a massive difference in the wearable markets. The watches are getting so good that health monitoring and early warning signs are either already here or on the horizon. Cell phones are significantly better. A decade ago a video call would be a novelty and now it is done without a second thought. We finally have the futuristic edge to edge screens and foldables are now on the market.
There are others but they may not fall into the technology that we interact with daily. Things such as the drug technology used to make the covid vaccine. There are also changes in ML with the significant improvements in deep learning and model training.
I'm not sure if any of those count as an incredible leap, I think each one was developed incrementally, but when looking over the course of a decade it feels like a large leap to me.
The truth is, not that much was different between 2000 and 2010 or 1990 and 2000. But 2010 and 2020? This last decade has marked such massive improvements in ways we aren't noticing, and in things we aren't using. Everything from cameras with resolutions and ISOs that are off the charts, OLED, LiPo Battery density, robotics with walking and flight, guidance, wireless transmission and encoding/decoding, Machine learning in everything including your phone, and our phones... they are amazing pieces of kit. Oh, reusable rockets that land themselves! Cars that literally drive themselves. Spot, the robot dog? Right in my office right now, ultra-thin laptops, compact high quality microphones, headphones with unbelievable noise-canceling, 3-axis gimbals, 10-bit n-log external recorders, wireless solar powered remote security cameras, drones with amazing stabilized video quality that you used to need a helicopter to shoot, and on and on and on. The last decade has been insane, turning future dream tech in to Walmart black-friday super sale items. You may not appreciate or even notice the tech advancements in the last 10 years but they have been monstrous compared to any other decade.
Those alone have the potential for incredible changes.
That's really not the truth at all.
For example, planning a trip together for, say, 30 people. It used to take weeks. Today, you can basically decide the day before to join or not.
The whole SMS thing, with minor messages delivered in seconds, changes peoples behaviour. Not being contactable in a few hours maximum is not normal today. It used to be. A small message to shop something on the way home did not exist.
The worldwide students against climate movement could not happen at that scale in the 1990's, the comm infra simply wasn' t there .
Nobody remembers phone numbers anymore.
Now that's cellphones. Add internet and GPS, and your society is massively different in a decade.
The last thing i can think of was the internet. Maybe cell phones. There's probably a bunch of medical stuff, but I'm not well versed in that area.
I mean real inventions. Things that didn't exist. Like light bulbs, or automobiles, or steam engines, or rockets, or jet travel. It seems like the era of real invention petered out in the 1950's to 1970's.
Now things like social media and ad targeting and viral videos are somehow considered innovation. Even the one recent thing I'm impressed by - commercial space flight - is just an iteration of something that already existed.
Some people will maximize the $$$ in any society. It's how to make the strive for the $$$ the most beneficial and the least destructive that is the challenge.
It worked pretty well for 18th century France.
> All tech giants share a desire to digitise the world. What is left unsaid by Apple and others is that digitising the world entails surveilling it: recording everything, making it taggable, trackable, searchable – and hackable. Of course, asking tech companies not to digitise the world is like asking builders not to pave over natural areas. Unless society sets limits, that is not going to happen. That’s why governments create protected areas when it comes to building.
I'm not suggesting one is better or worse than the other. But there is a subplot, and it's about control.
Also your comment strikes me as someone who doesn't actually engage with anyone under 30 in any real world way but only what is written on the internet. That would create a bias because all the people who might want to talk online to game out their compensation is probably a specific subset of individuals who would reinforce your worldview.
Society is made up of many people and it isn't built by select few. I suggest you reach out to different communities and find people who aren't as jaded as this rant post or offer a way put your energy into engaging and changing the trajectory of society towards where your values lie. Change takes work instead of arm chair quarterbacking a straw man.
So you actually do want to destroy the capitalist system.
Even if you believe that Apple is somehow different from Google and Facebook, I think you're missing a key part of the argument made in the article: the technology not only can be used for unethical purposes, it almost certainly will be.
Apple itself doesn't need to be evil. The technology it's pushing is inherently vulnerable and given the value of what it enables to bad actors, will almost inevitably be hijacked for nefarious purposes eventually. Pretending that your technology isn't vulnerable and imminently capable of causing great harm to people is indeed unethical.
> When you build a society where people worship money & fame instead of kindness or sincerity or any moral virtue at all, some people will do literally anything to maximize the $$$ and your society is fucked. It has nothing to do with technology.
Have you ever considered that technology has played and is playing a key role in the development of our money and fame-obsessed society? Money and fame have existed in some form for millennia, but thanks to the web and social media, for example, people are now bombarded with a previously unfathomable amount of media that glamorizes it in ways never before possible. This exposure now starts at a very early age and therefore almost certainly shapes how children relate to money, fame, their impressions of themselves, etc.
Money and fame are self-propagating, you're able to sell more products with fame and make more money with money. Kindness, sincerity, and moral virtues are better than their absence, I agree, but being kind to one person doesn't have the capability of exponential growth, you can't expect that the one act of kindness will allow you later to be kind to 100, then 10,000, then 1,000,000 people.
Technology is a blessing and a curse, it's a Pandora's box that allows scalable ideas to scale to previously unimaginable levels. There was an article here yesterday about how WhatsApp scaled to 1 billion users with just 50 engineers. That kind of action - and its effects on society - would not be possible without technology.
Likewise, I believe that dishonest, wealthy, power-hungry sociopaths make poor political leaders, and yet we seem to elect a lot of those.
Power and morality are not well correlated - they might be orthagonal to each other, or even inversely correlated!
Also, to suggest these companies are not making an impact on the world is insane. We are talking about companies like Apple and Google and yes… Facebook. Sure, they are not perfect moral companies but they have made massive impacts on the world.
It’s less that morality isn’t taught in college and more that the system is structured such that those who don’t do the song and dance lose out big time. No that’s not great, but it’s no fault of the majority of individuals. The system itself needs to be changed. Make sure that people don’t have to work the majority of their waking lives just to have a chance of getting ahead and morality will become a more practical consideration.
I think the moral issues around a lot of tech is more than just "lying is bad" - to conflate it to that means that subtler moral issues will go unnoticed.
What are the moral issues people have with advertising? Is it that lying is wrong? No, I don't think so. What are the moral issues people have around the rentier structure of modern "App stores"? Likewise, it's not just about lying.
I also can't tell if your comment is suggesting that this moral breakdown is a break from the old, or a continuation. Most of the historical evidence seems indicative of a continuation.
What a dumb argument. So cameras I use to take pictures of flowers normalize surveillance? Stop defending the Church of Apple - you sound like a brainwashed cult member.
The mRNA technology is interesting but unproven as we are seeing with the relative ineffectiveness of the Covid vaccines.
Software technology has been largely focused on new iterations of web frameworks and languages that target the young developers du jour who think that 5 year old frameworks are old school.
Mainly, small iterations of the same stuff is what has been dominating the technology space the last decade. My guess is that we are poised for some interesting new technologies, since it has been a largely ho-hum period for the last decade.
If only the efforts could be focused more toward actually making our lives better instead of focusing only on scraping our lives and diverting our eyes for the benefit of mega tech corporations and their wannabe startups.
It is. Anything that can be abused will be abused, especially by governments. Companies rolling out clearly problematic technology adds legitimacy to them, it makes them normal.
> They have been taught nothing but capitalism, they know nothing but chase money.
Nobody is "taught" capitalism, it is imposed on them. We want to live comfortable, happy lives. We want to have influence in this world. It's not like some trillionaire is gonna come to me and just give me all that.
1. Trust one of the Big-Tech platforms. Use all the conveniences that it provides, such as Cloud storage, integration between devices, etc. Trust them with not leaking/selling your data (or maybe you are ok with this?). You can be damn sure they will analyze your data, for yours and theirs benefit.
OR:
2. Local computing with Debian (or preferred alternative). Participate in reviewing the source code that runs on your machine. Store data locally in your computer or NAS at home network. Do the boring work yourself.
You cant really have "no surveillance" and cloud services at the same time.
Unfortunately, most people aren't aware they even have a choice, or what the tradeoffs are. I would love to see option (2) more accessible to the average Joe, but I know better than to expect that will ever happen.
https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...
When I am surveilling my own life, with devices that only share my data in ways I happily consent to, there is no problem. I can reap great benefits through this. I can take photos of myself and my family. I can monitor my heart through a device on my wrist. I can write personal notes in a journal (whether on paper or digitised) for later reflection. I can keep a history of sites I’ve visited in my browser.
What a company like Apple claims to be doing is to try and bring us the benefits of surveillance without the breaches of privacy — without the forced and reluctant consent to share our data with everyone. Surveillance isn’t the enemy, it’s companies trying to make a product out of that data that really we’d prefer not to share at all.
Per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", it's not the surveillance to fear per se, it's how our own meta data and such is being used against us. Now. This info isn't simply predicting behaviour, it's being used to alter and modify our behaviour.
I'm not giving Apple a free pass. But to call out Apple and not the others gives the masses a false sense of truth.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
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It really irks me that they blind to how majorly hypocritical they seem when write stuff like that on a crappy journal like this.
Technology journalism died in early 2010s and never came back.