The output stays local on your disk (in theory). So I’m not sure that breaks any rule. But in theory, Apple Intelligence can query it. Again, close to 0 documentation, so it is hard to know how this is consumed.
I'm from the US, but I did do some research after I saw other commenters claiming it violates GDPR. I tend to agree with them after reading up a bit on it and asking a couple of AIs. Apple can avoid some of the cross-border entanglements, but GDPR does not care where the processing happens, just what the scope of it is, what its purpose is, whose information is being used.
It'll be interesting to see if anybody goes after Apple for this.
Please stop using AI to author your articles. It was really hard to read it despite how interesting the topic was. I dropped halfway because it was just too annoying.
I second this. Unfortunately you just can’t just “unslop” it, much like you can’t just “shake the dirt away” from food that fell into a bucket of… you get my point, it won’t be good to eat anyway. Bonus additional ironic parallel could magically manifest if you can guess the bucket content.
Anyway, it’s a shame, this could have been excellent work. Instead, I find reading it unpleasant and part of my attention rots away wondering if you even checked what the LLM wrote for you. You probably did, and I could also do it myself, but still…
I was bothered not so much by the slopful article as by the AI-written text in the dashboard that iKnow produces. I ran the program on my Mac and it did display charts and graphs with names of people and organizations I’ve interacted with over the years, but I couldn’t figure out what it all was supposed to mean.
One example: "323 people, 122 events and other records, 200 employers and 1 stored group — as the store on this Mac links them. Read live just now. Colour is what each node is to you: the stored group in red, family and closeness by iKnow’s rules on the kinship scorecard. Size is how many rows in the store name it."
Claude etc. can be prompted to produce clearer explanations than that.
Yep I cannot fathom why people feel OK shipping anything like that publicly. The headers are also all completely stupid.
> Every node as a list — the graph is not the only way in
> Family, as the scorecard has it
> Reachable, exactly as stored
Oh good I was worried it was going to show me something altered
> WHY RESOLVABLE MATTERS
Oh fuck off. This isn't Axios! I hate these pathetic brainrot stupid phrases Why it matters What Happened What Changed, how patronizing. Instaclosed, instakilled python, what a fucking waste of my time and a waste of an article too
Yeah seriously. Article becomes unreadable immediately after the intro. I believe this author probably could actually write two years ago, it's a shame people are just giving up on that and choose to turn out stuff like this instead.
I'm having more trouble spotting AI text these days. It used to jump out at me. I'm not sure if it's that the LLMs are better or it's just becomming so normal to see that I stop recognizing it. This one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read. Going back and scrolling deeper into the post, it does become much sloppier.
That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protected. What does that even mean? Why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? I don't care that there's 51 database files and 181 other things and 278 doodads. Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and like you said, your eyes start to glaze over because there's so much irrelevant information. Slop.
A human would've said something like "It's a database in Library/IntelligencePlatform with three columns" and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.
I disagree. Hand-authored articles can be slop too. This research is great, and your subjective feelings about word cadence don't affect the information. I guarantee you read AI output every day and don't know it.
Hand-authored engagement or clout (LinkedIn) farming articles and corporate press releases are usually slop, most others aren't. I'd be surprised if corporate press releases today weren't largely AI-written - no one would know the difference.
Agreed, I haven't read most of it because it's poorly written: too verbose, points are buried, it's three times longer than it should be. I still don't know what this database is used for and don't want to go through that writing to find out.
There was a very obvious and unnerving shift in style that happened early in the article where it went from human to LLM. I find such shifts really glaring. Agents, in their current state, simply cannot produce quality prose and are not good enough to write blog posts targeting a human audience.
I found the topic fascinating, but eventually I started skimming and then gave up on it.
It says there's 137 live/certain facts in my graph. I can see where they're sourced from/a statistical breakdown of type/the number of unique confidence values/how many citations they're using/how many ingests contributed no facts. Am I missing where I can see what the actual facts are?
A lot of these statistics aren't very useful for mining insights from the graph, from a technical standpoint of how the graph works or from a personal standpoint of how the graph is interacting with my personal data.
Thanks for the research. Have you looked into how to secure / disable the subsystem?
(I hate that a discussion on the OP has been hijacked by a discussion on AI writing; the substantive questions are all at the bottom. I wish mods would 'detatch and move' the AI subthread.)
open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy_AllFiles" << this made it reappear in settings
The data I see from iKnow is a sloppy clusterfuck, I suspect from botched syncs and lazy bookkeeping on my part, and the fluctuating quality of Apple's "services" over the years. My Mac settings probably go back to the 1990s and Apple periodically did a bad job. Pain points I remember: Google contacts being separated and then with a new phone not syncing correctly, Mac address book burping on contact avatar images, importing lists of contacts from short-lived 3rd party apps, shared Photos fucking shit up, the iPhotos upgrade fiascos, transient contact info for my kids, moving onto/off of Gmail, etc.
If the FBI got ahold of my (and others'?) iKnow data, a lot of people might end up in a sloppy jail with a sloppy judge sloppily applying a sloppy law...
So my questions regarding security implications of running your code, my LLM friend reviewed the code and expressed possible concerns over (a) malicious browser extensions now get to see what they couldn't before; (b) you are not using https. There was bunch more but they can all be addressed on my end. Your thoughts?
You don’t need https for a web running locally; nothing goes into the network. Malicious browser extension can be real, but if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph
> if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph
That is certainly true, and it is equally true that that possibility places a responsibility on you to put that in a section in your readme.
So yeah, I may have a bad extension but that thing never had access to the possibly aptly named 'IntelligencePlatform' that's keeping tabs on my digital activities, until I ran your code. Correct?
I would go further and suggest that you do not access any website or open any files via your browser while you have malicious browser extensions installed. You do not need this project's README to tell you this.
My evil extension|browser may know what porn I watch or which sites I am visiting or possibly lift some bits it is not supposed to have. But it does not have access to Apple's comprehensive graph of my digital activities on their devices. Only Apple Inc. has that access.
So in fact the OP needs to put in the readme that "malicious browser extensions are a potential attack surface."
As a matter of fact, one could argue that a posting like this on Hackernews could potentially be a very sophisticated 'human engineering' effort by parties that have backdoors to browsers but have been defeated by Apple's security features.
I don't think your request is reasonable because I don't agree with your categorical assertion nor your risk assessment, not because I misunderstand the mechanics of your threat model.
"[A]ny app with Full Disk Access" requires yours truly's personal approval.
You acknowledge the threat is real yet say it is "niche".
And frankly, given that Apple can not possibly 'iKnow' more about me than myself, it seems running your 'niche critical but whocares' python server can only be informative to potential 3rd parties locked out of my Apple machine because they do NOT have been give permission by me to have "Full Disk Access".
When you install a browser extension, your browser will notify you if it can read or modify page content before you enable it the first time. Using OPs tool is not unique in that it becomes vulnerable when paired with nefarious browser extensions, because all pages are. Https doesn't even solve that.
This is akin to some medicine saying that if paired with another specific medicine, you won't get desired results, and you are upset that it doesn't include a warning against combining the medicine with cyanide because you might die. The pairing with cyanide is irrelevant to the medicine and is just a side effect of cyanide.
My friend you need to trust your LLM less here, this is extremely off base. If you have malware installed, the problem is the malware. Far more is at risk from it than some brand new dashboard that no malware has been sitting around waiting for. Malware will be waiting for API keys, bank passwords, your Internet connection to resale as a residential proxy. Things that will actually make them money. Your concerns are unfounded and misplaced.
I liked the start of the article, but glazed over once it switched to an AI voice. AI;DR.
It's a shame because I really appreciate your work here. Could be resolved as trivially as providing a copy of your writing style and having it adapt to that.
Im still optimistic that Apple will do all this stuff on your device as opposed to in an opaque cloud somewhere you have 0 visibility into. Meta probably has 1000x this system in a data warehouse somewhere. If this info is not leaving the device that’s fine with me.
Probably, but how much meta hardware do you own? Hell how much meta software do you have installed? I know people use varied amounts, but meta doesn't really make anything worth owning. I guess Apple is speedrunning the point where they don't either, which sucks, because I have no idea where to find a fanless linux laptop that doesn't get hot but has the performance of a m1.
My understanding is that collecting these data and constructing the knowledge graph violates the European General Data Protection Directive (GDPR). According to the GDPR, personal data (such as an email's sender name and email address) are provided for a specific purpose (in the case of sending an email, for identifying the sender and facilitating email replies). Similarly, a calendar invitation is provided to organize a meeting. Processing that data for a different purpose (as described here, for constructing a knowledge graph) without the subject's explicit consent is unlawful.
I'm not sure. IMO when you buy a Mac (or use Windows or an Android phone) you have accepted so much that there is nothing which is not allowed.
But nevertheless: as far as I have understood it everything is built on your computer and is still used on your computer. You - as the user of the Mac - has took and saved the information. Your Mac is then only working for you - if Apple doesn't load the information in their enviroment.
It's on the person's Mac so it is a little more complicated. The person you send your data to is the Data Controller, and fails you by not publishing their privacy policy. But Apple isn't a Sub-Processor here, because they aren't sending the data to Apple.
I'm saying that because I wish the GDPR also covered the software providers who perform Data Processing against the will of all parties, but it isn't the case. Lastly, they're a person and not a business.
It is however clear that building a database of people which may contain race, religion or political opinions is illegal, even if it's just a person doing it.
GDPR applies to persons and businesses. The fact that you're violating GDPR, because without your knowledge Apple has deployed software on your computer that compiles this knowledge graph makes Apple complicit. Imagine violating a speed limit, because your car's speed indicator has a software flaw that causes it to show a lower speed.
This is not equivalent at all. You don’t need to create a GDPR notice because the user types their personal info into their own documents for example, despite you being on the path of it going to disk.
This probably depends on your relationship with the data subject.
If you send a friend an email, they may add you to their address book and set a reminder for your birthday while they're at it. They don't need your permission to do that, so why would a device acting on their behalf?
On the other hand, if a customer of mine asks for the data I have on them, do I have to send them my Personal Knowledge Graph facts about them? That's less obvious, and I'd lean towards Apple's helpful database being a liability even if it's local.
That seems wildly optimistic. I can think of various provisions under GDPR that make this perfectly fine.
For example, purpose limitation allows for compatible processing, and parsing calendar events to allow for queries like “when does mom’s flight land” is absolutely covered under that.
And, of course, GDPR doesn’t require consent. Performance of a contract is a perfectly valid legal basis other than explicit consent, and the operating system terms of service you agree to when upgrading or setting up a new device will cover this.
On a side note, you don’t want GDPR to work the way you think it works unless you really want cookie consent banners dialed up to a million.
None of this should be construed to mean that I like this feature in macOS or am defending it. I’m merely pointing out that this interpretation of GDPR does not match reality.
Just spent 30 minutes poking around this. It's horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.
Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.
I'm quite frustrated with some aspects of macOS, particularly driving it from the keyboard, so I'm probably going to get a better experience out of it in the end.
The bad news is the hardware. The most important parts of a laptop, to me anyway, is that it runs silent and doesn't get hot to touch. Not just to avoid sweaty fingers but because I usually have my laptop in or on my lap. Nothing I can find could replace my m1 8gb macbook air in that regard.
I can find some pretty cool linux laptops from framework or tuxedo, but they have fans and they get hot.
>All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.
Wait until you discover that macOS entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings, before every bootup, to reach out to security.apple.com.
Have a network-wide PiHole (allegedly) blocking the entire *.apple.com domain? No you don't, (at least) not at bootup, because APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use any network-discoverable DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings) to [attempt a] phone-home.
----
I finally made the full switch to Linux earlier this year. Been a (primarily) Apple user since 1992.
This is why throwing an extra DNS server on the network doesn't truly work. You have to actually remove the DNS protocol from existence entirely and perform TLS inspection if you want to filter effectively. This is of course the kind that requires you to install a certificate authority on all devices connected to the network. Otherwise devices and applications will get around you with stuff like this, or DoT/DoH.
TLS inspection is starting to reach general availability but it's pricey. You could probably set something up if you own your router. The only vendor I know offering it OOTB is Ubiquiti/UniFi and only on their more expensive enterprise units that advertise "NeXT AI Cybersecurity". I have a hunch there is no actual AI or even ML involved, but this is the world we live in now.
This does work for unencrypted DNS and DoT over port 853, but it fails for DoT over any other port and DoH, which looks just like a website visit. You can't tell whether a website is acting as a DoH server without TLS inspection, and you can't differentiate between multiple websites on the same IP address either (unless a client is stupid enough to use SNI). Some clients do actually hardcode direct IP addresses to get around entirely missing DNS servers, notably Windows.
Only if there a) is a DNS request, b) it does not use DNS over HTTPs.
PiHole is not and never has been a reliable way to guarantee anything, regardless of how you configure it - just gets the low-hanging fruit. Plenty of devices hard-code their own DNS servers ("smart" TVs are a good example) and will happily ignore whatever DHCP gives them if they have a route to the internet.
I don’t even give a flying fuck about Apple itself. All they want is to sell me some macs and app store subscriptions. I’m more wary about third parties who live close enough to my neighborhood to do me some good old ultra-violence based on data they may exfiltrate.
If you intend to use PiHole, why is your DHCP server configuring a non-PiHole DNS server?
And why would you expect the pre-boot environment to respect OS network configuration?
Just like every non-Apple system I’ve ever seen with pre-boot network support, it has its own configuration, which defaults to DHCP.
I’d honestly be more suspicious if the firmware tried to grovel through OS data to find a working network configuration you may not want it to use.
Not that it would have very good luck doing so on a security-conscious user’s system, given that, on most systems at least, pre-boot networking is configured long before encrypted boot volumes are unlocked, since at that point you’re already well on your way to booting a specific OS with its own network stack and the pre-boot networking environment is no longer required.
a thing I did recently was block all macos daemons that communicate with the network except dnsresponder and rapport (just for ipad syncing). There were almost 100 services I had to investigate, but it was worth it.
1) Before macOS boots, LittleSnitch ("LS") does not have any ability to block hostnames, e.g: on every boot, any modern Apple product ignores any manually-configured DNS IP and attempts to phone-home
2) Allegedly, this user profile information is stored locally (so LS wouldn't see any outgoing connection attempt to Apple servers)
3) LS does not block DNS-resolution, only IP-connection (i.e. your ISP sees all DNS queries, whether you click `ACCEPT` or `DENY` when LS popup asks)
4) If you're using LS with intentions of primary DNS blockage, you have failed; try pi-hole (or other local hardware DNS resolver); use physically-dedicated hardware (e.g: Raspberry Pi) to run your PiHole, not a Docker/Prox/&c
5) I am investigating another user's comment on using TLS certs to DENY-all DNS, but need to research further on this (new info to me!)
At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.
A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern.
If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat relentless transcription.
With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?
I too would've found this fascinating at one point, but my jaded older self now just finds this incredibly creepy, unsettling and not at all surprising.
That saying is what it is for good reasons, but the path to post-capitalist dystopian hell is paved with bad intentions covered with plausible deniability.
I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.
I suspect a lot of the fascination is because the information can be used to improve our quality of life. I suspect the cynicism comes from those who have the most access to this information using it to improve their quality of life at our expense. (That, and actually making use of the information takes more effort than most people are willing to expend.)
I have always been leery of data collection, but I have my own parallel: there was a lot of optimism about the benefits of personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course, that was pushed by the industry itself. I have since realized that what was happening then was not all that different from what is happening today. The outcomes were different because the tools were different, but it basically reduced/reduces to a bunch of people trying to enrich themselves by promising one thing and delivering another.
Maybe a decade or so ago I had a discussion with a colleague about chat apps and he said, why would you want to have a conversation on snapchat if it is not saved, and I was like, why are you having this conversation now, you can't save it either.
I swear I know the difference and when to use their, there, they're, but based on my iPhone messages, you'd think I was an illiterate buffoon. There are plenty of examples where I could show where they're making me look dumb with their edits.
No, it's an exploration of what could happen based on things we've already seen/experienced but with the knob turned to an 11. It's what should happen in pretty much what if round table situation. "Hey, would could build this thing that does something that we are specifically thinking about that would be cool/fun/benevolent" is only part of the discussion. "How could someone else turn and use it in a way not anticipated so they use it for their own gains in a way that is shocking/malevolent" should be the natural follow up. Can the thing be updated to not be used for unintended negative purposes or will the negative out weigh the positive so that it shouldn't be made in the first place??? Sadly, it seems the follow up questions are never asked. Instead, we get scifi people doing it and then getting reviews like yours instead of looking deeper into point
I go out as-a-fox as a street photographer using a shtick that makes sure people almost always remember my name and i find it a little embarrassing that I can't remember that many names or if it is a Megan how exactly I am supposed to spell it, etc.
I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.
I've also become totally exhausted by all these "someone is making your computer do X behind your back" revelations. Whether it's the app developer or OS vendor, it doesn't really matter. When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user, and instead start operating on behalf of the OS vendor and app developers? Every day there's a new case of this.
Largely, I believe, when phones crossed over from being basic communication devices to being smartphones, but retained their 'appliance' nature.
An entire generation thereby grew up with personal computing represented by vendor-controlled handheld appliances, and naturally regarded actual PCs in the same manner.
And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor. When I buy an Apple computer, I don't want to have a relationship with Apple. I don't want to log in to iCloud. I don't want them deciding what software I can run and what I can't. I don't want them wagging their finger disapprovingly at me when I download and run something not "notarized" by them. I don't want them mediating my use of my own computer! When I buy a Windows PC it's even worse. Again, I don't want to log into a Microsoft account. I don't want them pushing other software on me via in-OS ads. I don't want to send telemetry back to them. I don't want them recording my screen and saving it god knows where for nebulous "features".
When I buy a table saw, I don't expect DeWalt to hang around my workshop telling me what I can and can't cut, watching and logging what wood I use and when I use it, what my finished product looks like, changing the features and buttons on the saw in the middle of the night. Why the fuck do we tolerate this from software??
It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions! Some of them are letting telemetry and metrics and A/B testing creep in. And some third part Linux software is just as intrusive and demanding as commercial Windows/Mac software.
> I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor.
This is precisely it.
When I buy a screwdriver, I just want to use it when I need it. I don't want to have an account with Craftsman and give them any PII, etc. No, I just want to use the product I purchased.
It is really the same with any tech product. I bought it, I want to use it. I want zero contact with the manufacturer (even if I like them).
You bought a Mac that comes with Apple things. Macs don’t ship without Apple things. You get them for Apple things. You entered into the relationship explicitly. What’s the gripe?
As much as a sibling comment gets it right, this is wrong:
> And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
They never built those skills. I know that a lot of us cheered the computer revolution, thinking that everyone born after would understand the things that older generations didn't get, but most didn't care and didn't learn.
But it was the internet that made all the spying, profiling, and tracking possible. Before that, there was no motivation, so all software was developed and sold solely on its benefits to the user.
Today, even free software can have telemetry and ulterior motives.
Chrome was the first major piece of software to incorporate automatic background installation of software updates without explicit user assent in 2008. Now, it's everywhere. I think this was an underappreciated event in the history of software freedom.
I always thought the quote "you're not the customer you're the product" originated with RMS, I went to look it up before I commented and it turns out it was Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman in 1973! Just as true now as then. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/
Yes, and if the OS maker is not mining you for data, they are leaving mountains of cash on the table. So mine they must and mine they will. The financial incentives are overwhelming.
We should be removing those incentives at every level: legislative, societal, government and private.
People want the features that these things drive. PCs stopped being a purely "user says X, do X" thing at approximately the moment they became powerful enough to run things in the background. The idea that the computer would be helpful and do things for you beyond what you explicitly asked for is pretty attractive. People don't like being spied on, but good news, this one is all local. This isn't like Facebook building a social graph for you so they can sell the data to advertisers.
for me it was around the time of windows 8, that I felt my computer had a lot of things to do that weren't the application I actually wanted to use. Before that I would just occasionally feel that the system could be a little kludgy.
The charitable take is that computing has grown to expand more and more use cases, and to deliver good experiences for those use cases requires simplifying assumptions, and that's where the inherent complexity of life leaks in.
Amplifying the dystopia is that this feature was heavily written up by an AI. So we have a feature in which machines monitor our lives being described to us by another machine which comes with its own set of dystopian risks, and no genuine human to human interaction.
Evidence sample of native Claudish: “The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half.”
The interesting aspect for me is that what we perceive as "claudism" here is exactly how TV reporters have always talked - and to a point, how marketers / pitchers talk. How did it end up having this disproportionate weight in AI engines ?
Presumably because it was at least for a good while ranked high in evaluations because it sounded punchy and gave the impression of being insightful. In isolation. Before it oversaturated everything.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot with zoom recordings. In office we used to have chats about a wide range of topics that were sometimes heated, but also respectful. Now with every meeting recorded, it’s all become pretty saccharine.
I don't think this is the same situation at all. Zoom recordings are outside your control and you know your boss or HR will have access to them. And relationships with employers are often closer to enemy than friend.
Your friend's Mac creating a knowledge graph is totally different because they control it. It gives them power to remember more about their interactions with you, but they would have to actively abuse it to hurt you in any way. If you can't trust someone with information then don't give it to them in the first place expecting them to forget it.
The problem is what happens if you get hacked or Apple decides to sell you out/work with law enforcement. I would only trust code like that if it was fully transparent about what it's doing, open source and strictly opt in. Apple is doing it in the background and that makes it instantly suspicious.
Adjacent to this I think it’s becoming clear that these technologies also change the signals we receive from one another. For example remembering details in a conversation is a signal that you were listening. If some system makes a breach into that social interaction you lose that signal. Now remembering details is no longer a signal.
I’m seeing it with polished websites. A polished site used to be a signal that a product was somewhat well thought out—at least it was worth the creators time to polish its marketing page. While now that AI products spit those out with AI speak that signal is lost.
I wonder if we’ll find out that the signal itself was more important than the means of sending the signal.
> With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome.
As this becomes normalized, people will retreat to a safer persona even in private conversations. This does not solve the problem at all; a great many mental illnesses and dynamics around pathological abuse are tied to the details of how each of us has a private and public-facing persona.
Already I see Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are heavily resenting the demands placed on them to be always in 'branding'/'self-marketing' modes, and are seeking ways to retreat from the relentless expectations of being always in 'public persona', and are suspicious that this way of living is harmful.
Exactly. It’s a chilling effect on an ever-increasing proportion of human interaction. If everything you say is on permanent record then the safest course of action is to say little, and keep it as bland as possible.
I think of privacy as the right to be myself, because I get to choose which parts of my persona(s?) to expose.
People change over time, and those I care about will be part of the journey. We don’t remember each other’s mistakes all the time.
And then, of course, there is the effort we put into these relationships. I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises than their LLM of choice automatically sends me a carefully crafted messaged based on our interactions.
> I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises
Do most people really remember all the birthdays they acknowledge? For me they must be diarised, or beyond immediate family there's no chance.
I used to think it was artificial and pointless to wish people happy birthday after being reminded by google calendar. I now know enough adults who have taken (mostly minor) offence to being forgotten, that I play the game.
I don't understand what's wrong with the tech industry in the past 20 years. It feels like every time there is an opportunity to do the wrong thing, there is a mad rush towards that opportunity. Quickly! Do the wrong thing _first_ so some other company doesn't get to profit from evil instead of us. No company seems to consider abstaining from evil practices; burying the knowledge, or building systems which cannot be used for evil. The question only seems to be, how can _our_ evil succeed and benefit us.
This is context for local LLMs like Siri so that when you say “Text James and tell him …” it knows which James you mean.
Likewise, you could say “Tell my boss I’m not coming in tomorrow” and it would have to know who your boss is.
We could get super angry about this, but seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device, it really doesn’t seem like a big deal. Is it much different to your car remembering who you call and where you go at what times for navigation purposes?
Because its also used by other apps (e.g. Photos has a feature to identify faces and catalog people in your photo library, Messages has a feature to allow important messages through Do Not Disturb and infers importance from these stores).
It leaves the device every night in your effectively unencrypted iCloud Backup, on by default, readable by Apple, and turned over to the US government without a warrant thanks to FAA702.
Microsoft had this solved with Cortana 12 years ago. I would tell Cortana to text my boss, and if it didn’t know who my boss was, they would ask me who my boss was then it would store it for later boss calls.
The spying has no excuse and in the 2000s we would’ve called this malware and spyware, appropriately.
On top of dabinat's point on consent, there is the resource use and accuracy part.
I can't imagine how much sleuthing is needed to infer who's would be someone's divorced mother if it wasn't explicitely labelled, but it's completely unneeded until the day they actually try to use that info through some Apple service. Then, they'll be in for a surprise the day it infers it's their boss instead.
> seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device
Running the tool on my Macbook (which I don't really use, but which is logged into my iCloud) shows tons of activity/names/contacts that's shared ("donated" in the system's terms) over from my iPhone, which I wouldn't have expected to synchronize to this laptop. The apps aren't installed on the laptop, I don't get notifications there or have any interaction with those people. I can even see some stats showing volume of activity on work apps installed on my phone inside a managed work profile, but it does seem to have filtered the actual contacts out.
This is deeply troubling,
this data is unnecessary collected and impossible to opt out from apparently and may be read at any point in the future by an attacker or by apple itself without notice
"It's for you own good. It would be harmful to disable it. And you don't understand it so you shouldn't have an opinion. I trust Apple to do this safely, even if I don't want whatever this is."
Is how I'm generally greeted when I ask this sort of question.
Turn off your Mac and use a different operating system. Because it doesn't matter how you disable this feature in isolation. It is merely the current projection of Apple's opinion of its relationship with you. It's a hydra and you are going to lose the fight.
I expected the article to address that. Maybe it's obvious?:
Disable the daemons, delete the directory, lock down permissions to the database files / directory, lock down the daemons' permissions, delete the daemons, ...
I'm not recommending those things - I don't know what the consequence is for the system - but that's where I'd start.
do i see that right - the data in unencrypted, the profile is built by an undocumented background profiler without consent or an option of opting out, it is consumed by cloud connected platforms like siri and apple intelligence and ANY application on my mac can access it?
Yeah I could see that it correlated my WhatsApp calls with real person names (i.e. de-anonymizing WhatsApp), inferred my race based on face clusters (illegal under AI act), built a co-appearance network ("who stands beside whom in photos"), etc. etc.
None of this shit is legal, but the laws are toothless anyway: Apple can get "fined" a couple million and that's it. The fallout from the press would be a harder hit for them.
It’s not like Apple is actually hiding this. I mean it’s sitting there in perfectly readable structured format. I’m most surprised this isn’t known earlier, it indicates to me how little MacOS users investigate their own devices if we are talking about this 4 years after it rolled out.
If Microsoft didn't this, this wouldn't be interesting research, but a cause for uproar.
And yes, I know they're probably already doing it, but in the cloud.
Apple makes money of your data as does anyone else. The just use your compute and energy for it too and convinced everyone that was privacy.
The problem is that most people don't know it's happening. If, when you first set up your Mac, you were asked "Do you want the OS to construct a social profile about you to help with ... (list of features)" and you could say yes or no.
When you do that, it's quite hard for it not to sound creepy. And most people would probably say no.
But I don't think it should be prohibited by regulation. Some people might want it, or genuinely find it useful.
> What if I told you that every Mac since 2022 ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you: who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, with whom, what you do and when.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends." And Calendar and Reminders knows where I go. And so forth.
The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.
I wonder how they get around GDPR. Normally I'd expect the EU to dish out a pretty hefty fine for this sort of thing, but something tells me Apple lawyers and penpushers has been busy making sure this passes, even though it's technically illegal.
For the GDPR to have impact here, wouldn't they have to be collecting the information in the first place? If they're doing all the work on your own computer, that wouldn't trigger any GDPR issues.
How far does this go? Are the Bayesian spam filters that email clients have had for years that use your own classifications GDPR violations because they collect data about what you do or don’t mark as spam? Is your browser a GDPR violation because it collects data about your system that can be used to fingerprint you? Does your OS violate the GDPR when it displays your most recently accessed files in a file picker or as first suggestions when you search for something? Is the SMART monitoring built into your drives a GDPR violation? My understanding of the GDPR is that it applies to data the company is collecting about you. If the company never gets the data in the first place, then they haven’t collected it.
1. Spam filters. No, the data was collected explicitly for the spam filter to work. Anything else? Not unless you consent to it.
2. Browser collection. The browser itself? There's an agreement when installing it. The websites? There's the cookie banners.
3. OS. Is it your data? No permission needed. Your device, your data. Other people's data? Unclear. Depends on what you told the person when you collected said data.
4. SMART. I don't know a lot about how it works.
I was talking about the data you collect. Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed? You're agreeing, and it has to be an unambiguous. Sending the data outsids the EU? Explicit checkbox.
> Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed?
Ok, but that seems to contradict your original assertion that it doesn't matter where the data is processed. The processes we're talking about run on your computer, processing data about you so that the services your OS provides can use that data to make the services work. That sounds a lot to me like "your own data processed on your device"
More and more companies will start to use this loophole...
Next, Google will be downloading a database of 2 billion ads to your PC to check against all your private data and decide which ad to show you for anything you search in the future.
And because its all on your PC, no GDPR issues - you are processing your own data.
in this hypothetical setup you're effectively downloading malware, I wouldn't really consider that a loophole. Regulation that concerns data ownership can do precisely what the name says, give you control over where your data lives.
If you have full sovereignty over your data and your computer and you decide to use software that downloads ads and blasts them to you, at some point even in the best jurisdiction you're responsible for what you install
Except it isn't... Because the company with an ad in the database for sex toys targeted at the trans community will have a damn good idea about your sexual orientation when you click that carefully targeted ad and arrive at their website.
iCloud Backup, on by default, is not end to end encrypted and uploads almost the entire contents of your device to Apple’s servers every night in a format they can read (effectively unencrypted). This includes your entire message history over SMS and iMessage and all attachments thereto.
It is safe to assume that the data collected and assembled by these daemons is part of the iCloud Backup, which you never have to explicitly enable; it happens when you log in to iCloud on the device, usually within minutes of first powering it on for most people.
Also available to any other app with "full disk access" to just read and upload. A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).
Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user. That's hardly unique to this data, and is a well known issue when it comes to personal data and the applications you run under the unix permissions model. That this is at least behind the "full disk access" control makes it more protected than something like all of the tax and accounting data your financial software is storing in your Documents or home folder (well, technically under macOS your Documents folder also has its own permission, but it's the same sort of thing where anything with permission to read from your Documents folder can read anything in there).
It's an eternal balancing act because every time Apple implements some new restriction in their OS that prevents apps from doing whatever they want, whenever they want, people get mad at them. But without those restrictions, the ever increasing amount of personal data that is stored on your computer is exposed to the ever increasing number of data slurping applications that you run.
This drives me crazy. I'm slowly working on isolating every application into it's own sandbox but the fact that this wasn't built into the kernel drives me up the wall.
>Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user.
That not being the case is the whole purpose of the per-app sandboxes which macOS has along with TCC. We're not discussing plain Unix permissions alone.
Ok, and the data is in a location that you need to grant full disk access to an application in order to access it. So what is the complaint here? Is it that if you run an application and give it access to the data that it has access to the data?
> A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).
I assume you mean 'many' and not 'make'—this is untrue; you only need to grant FDA if you're trying to access protected areas, like the knowledge graph store.
Granting full disk access to an app that you don't trust not to surreptitiously exfiltrate your data is the kind of user error where the buck stops with PEBCAK.
> The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.
Agreed. None of this is magic, and the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free. Many HN people even _build_ those platforms.
Would I like to see more controls around this? Yes, absolutely. Having some random app be able to read this data with only a single permission barrier is room for improvement. I would also like to see more tooling included to inspect and correct this data. Something like a Monica[1], but local and built on local data. Suddenly address book data is no longer a list of names and numbers, but a part of a data structure that you can use to surface information, like friend's preferences or vacation photos together. Not everything that collects data is insidious and a Black Mirror episode in the making.
There's always been a good bit of tension here between the YC founders and the people who work in the industry. I was banned for comments about PG ten years ago. Neither VC nor workers here are unaware of the consequences of widespread apathy. My disappointment is with one side of that argument capitulating or acting as if the principle is lost, or perhaps being too uneducated and ignorant to state the case.
The VC around here loses more than we do if HN ceases to be a useful barometer.
> I was banned for comments about PG ten years ago.
Where was that? I'd like to see a link, because this doesn't sound right to me. I was running HN 10 years ago, and it has never been a practice to ban people "for comments about PG".
It's no less true, though. I'm sure there is a cohort of HN folks who don't have or maintain a social media account (either any more, or ever), there are likely many more that do.
> given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life.
Does it know this based on something other than you told it a name for a face at some point? I have plenty of people where Photos sees an unidentified person, and they remain unidentified as I have not named them. It also knows my pets because I've also named them. Until I manually set the name, Photos did not "know" them.
> I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends."
I got inspired by the automatic “memories” videos/slideshows that Photo makes, and applied it to a video game of AI creatures. The creatures accumulate memories about their experiences, and then the game builds reels with little images or replays of their memories as they happened, with comments about their feelings. It’s pretty fun to watch
On a side note, every few times I open Google's photo gallery on my android phone, it pops up a dark pattern "backup your photos" toast with a pre-selected radio box saying yes, and two or three delicate manual steps to AVOID having it start uploading all my photos right then.
And yet if I ask Siri “read me the most recent text message from Matt Wells” it fails saying “I couldn’t find any messages…” even though it’s right there.
I'm not sure if it's OP's software not being compatible with macOS 15, or if it's my habits and "cyber hygiene", but I get pretty much zeroes all across the board when digging through my data. Anyone else on "old" macOS seeing the same?
Which of course we developers give to our tools and terminal emulators so they are not annoying to use! One npm install away from mining this sweet data via a postinstall script!
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 56.4 ms ] threadIt's just a tuned FreeBSD distro using Mate.
I also see it defaults to the growing pile of bugs known as XLibre.
A typical Linux user will be used to GNU conventions and probably have a lot of annoyances.
GhostBSD is simply a beginner friendly distro of FreeBSD.
In one line both MacOS users and BSD broadly will squirm at the likes of things like `ls src/ -la`
But honestly, I was interdicting in the idea that Linux is the only alternative really.
In the meantime the German government probably uses that info.
It'll be interesting to see if anybody goes after Apple for this.
Anyway, it’s a shame, this could have been excellent work. Instead, I find reading it unpleasant and part of my attention rots away wondering if you even checked what the LLM wrote for you. You probably did, and I could also do it myself, but still…
One example: "323 people, 122 events and other records, 200 employers and 1 stored group — as the store on this Mac links them. Read live just now. Colour is what each node is to you: the stored group in red, family and closeness by iKnow’s rules on the kinship scorecard. Size is how many rows in the store name it."
Claude etc. can be prompted to produce clearer explanations than that.
> Every node as a list — the graph is not the only way in
> Family, as the scorecard has it
> Reachable, exactly as stored
Oh good I was worried it was going to show me something altered
> WHY RESOLVABLE MATTERS
Oh fuck off. This isn't Axios! I hate these pathetic brainrot stupid phrases Why it matters What Happened What Changed, how patronizing. Instaclosed, instakilled python, what a fucking waste of my time and a waste of an article too
That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protected. What does that even mean? Why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? I don't care that there's 51 database files and 181 other things and 278 doodads. Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and like you said, your eyes start to glaze over because there's so much irrelevant information. Slop.
A human would've said something like "It's a database in Library/IntelligencePlatform with three columns" and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.
I found the topic fascinating, but eventually I started skimming and then gave up on it.
A lot of these statistics aren't very useful for mining insights from the graph, from a technical standpoint of how the graph works or from a personal standpoint of how the graph is interacting with my personal data.
(I hate that a discussion on the OP has been hijacked by a discussion on AI writing; the substantive questions are all at the bottom. I wish mods would 'detatch and move' the AI subthread.)
The data I see from iKnow is a sloppy clusterfuck, I suspect from botched syncs and lazy bookkeeping on my part, and the fluctuating quality of Apple's "services" over the years. My Mac settings probably go back to the 1990s and Apple periodically did a bad job. Pain points I remember: Google contacts being separated and then with a new phone not syncing correctly, Mac address book burping on contact avatar images, importing lists of contacts from short-lived 3rd party apps, shared Photos fucking shit up, the iPhotos upgrade fiascos, transient contact info for my kids, moving onto/off of Gmail, etc.
If the FBI got ahold of my (and others'?) iKnow data, a lot of people might end up in a sloppy jail with a sloppy judge sloppily applying a sloppy law...
So my questions regarding security implications of running your code, my LLM friend reviewed the code and expressed possible concerns over (a) malicious browser extensions now get to see what they couldn't before; (b) you are not using https. There was bunch more but they can all be addressed on my end. Your thoughts?
That is certainly true, and it is equally true that that possibility places a responsibility on you to put that in a section in your readme.
So yeah, I may have a bad extension but that thing never had access to the possibly aptly named 'IntelligencePlatform' that's keeping tabs on my digital activities, until I ran your code. Correct?
My evil extension|browser may know what porn I watch or which sites I am visiting or possibly lift some bits it is not supposed to have. But it does not have access to Apple's comprehensive graph of my digital activities on their devices. Only Apple Inc. has that access.
So in fact the OP needs to put in the readme that "malicious browser extensions are a potential attack surface."
As a matter of fact, one could argue that a posting like this on Hackernews could potentially be a very sophisticated 'human engineering' effort by parties that have backdoors to browsers but have been defeated by Apple's security features.
You acknowledge the threat is real yet say it is "niche".
And frankly, given that Apple can not possibly 'iKnow' more about me than myself, it seems running your 'niche critical but whocares' python server can only be informative to potential 3rd parties locked out of my Apple machine because they do NOT have been give permission by me to have "Full Disk Access".
This is akin to some medicine saying that if paired with another specific medicine, you won't get desired results, and you are upset that it doesn't include a warning against combining the medicine with cyanide because you might die. The pairing with cyanide is irrelevant to the medicine and is just a side effect of cyanide.
It's a shame because I really appreciate your work here. Could be resolved as trivially as providing a copy of your writing style and having it adapt to that.
But nevertheless: as far as I have understood it everything is built on your computer and is still used on your computer. You - as the user of the Mac - has took and saved the information. Your Mac is then only working for you - if Apple doesn't load the information in their enviroment.
If we are overriding federal laws, might as well make people immortal too.
I'm saying that because I wish the GDPR also covered the software providers who perform Data Processing against the will of all parties, but it isn't the case. Lastly, they're a person and not a business.
It is however clear that building a database of people which may contain race, religion or political opinions is illegal, even if it's just a person doing it.
If you send a friend an email, they may add you to their address book and set a reminder for your birthday while they're at it. They don't need your permission to do that, so why would a device acting on their behalf?
On the other hand, if a customer of mine asks for the data I have on them, do I have to send them my Personal Knowledge Graph facts about them? That's less obvious, and I'd lean towards Apple's helpful database being a liability even if it's local.
For example, purpose limitation allows for compatible processing, and parsing calendar events to allow for queries like “when does mom’s flight land” is absolutely covered under that.
And, of course, GDPR doesn’t require consent. Performance of a contract is a perfectly valid legal basis other than explicit consent, and the operating system terms of service you agree to when upgrading or setting up a new device will cover this.
On a side note, you don’t want GDPR to work the way you think it works unless you really want cookie consent banners dialed up to a million.
None of this should be construed to mean that I like this feature in macOS or am defending it. I’m merely pointing out that this interpretation of GDPR does not match reality.
Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.
⁽¹⁾ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
⁽²⁾ https://github.com/pdelfino/karabiner-config
I failed.
I just haven't bothered to remove and clean up again.
I can find some pretty cool linux laptops from framework or tuxedo, but they have fans and they get hot.
Wait until you discover that macOS entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings, before every bootup, to reach out to security.apple.com.
Have a network-wide PiHole (allegedly) blocking the entire *.apple.com domain? No you don't, (at least) not at bootup, because APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use any network-discoverable DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings) to [attempt a] phone-home.
----
I finally made the full switch to Linux earlier this year. Been a (primarily) Apple user since 1992.
TLS inspection is starting to reach general availability but it's pricey. You could probably set something up if you own your router. The only vendor I know offering it OOTB is Ubiquiti/UniFi and only on their more expensive enterprise units that advertise "NeXT AI Cybersecurity". I have a hunch there is no actual AI or even ML involved, but this is the world we live in now.
PiHole is not and never has been a reliable way to guarantee anything, regardless of how you configure it - just gets the low-hanging fruit. Plenty of devices hard-code their own DNS servers ("smart" TVs are a good example) and will happily ignore whatever DHCP gives them if they have a route to the internet.
Think I need a per-host approval mechanism for DNS as well. There are fewer domains I want my computer talking to than not.
is that for real? wow
And why would you expect the pre-boot environment to respect OS network configuration?
Just like every non-Apple system I’ve ever seen with pre-boot network support, it has its own configuration, which defaults to DHCP.
I’d honestly be more suspicious if the firmware tried to grovel through OS data to find a working network configuration you may not want it to use.
Not that it would have very good luck doing so on a security-conscious user’s system, given that, on most systems at least, pre-boot networking is configured long before encrypted boot volumes are unlocked, since at that point you’re already well on your way to booting a specific OS with its own network stack and the pre-boot networking environment is no longer required.
Good! I sure hope when I disable my stolen laptop that you can't defeat it with a simple DNS server.
don't wait
your impulse will be gone in a day or two if you wait, miraged away into "eh, doesn't matter"
do. not. wait.
that's a trap
switch now
1) Before macOS boots, LittleSnitch ("LS") does not have any ability to block hostnames, e.g: on every boot, any modern Apple product ignores any manually-configured DNS IP and attempts to phone-home
2) Allegedly, this user profile information is stored locally (so LS wouldn't see any outgoing connection attempt to Apple servers)
3) LS does not block DNS-resolution, only IP-connection (i.e. your ISP sees all DNS queries, whether you click `ACCEPT` or `DENY` when LS popup asks)
4) If you're using LS with intentions of primary DNS blockage, you have failed; try pi-hole (or other local hardware DNS resolver); use physically-dedicated hardware (e.g: Raspberry Pi) to run your PiHole, not a Docker/Prox/&c
5) I am investigating another user's comment on using TLS certs to DENY-all DNS, but need to research further on this (new info to me!)
A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern.
If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat relentless transcription.
With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401
I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.
The plausibility in plausible deniability evaporates instantly with device/service/software provider's accessibility.
But faux plausible deniability seems to be just as effective of a fig leaf.
I have always been leery of data collection, but I have my own parallel: there was a lot of optimism about the benefits of personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course, that was pushed by the industry itself. I have since realized that what was happening then was not all that different from what is happening today. The outcomes were different because the tools were different, but it basically reduced/reduces to a bunch of people trying to enrich themselves by promising one thing and delivering another.
I guess that those days are soon over.
Typos have just graduated from misspellings to sentences randomly being nonsensical.
https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_Y...
It’s like going to the 1962 world fair but, instead of optimism, everyone just wants to tell you why everything in the future sucks.
I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.
An entire generation thereby grew up with personal computing represented by vendor-controlled handheld appliances, and naturally regarded actual PCs in the same manner.
And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
When I buy a table saw, I don't expect DeWalt to hang around my workshop telling me what I can and can't cut, watching and logging what wood I use and when I use it, what my finished product looks like, changing the features and buttons on the saw in the middle of the night. Why the fuck do we tolerate this from software??
It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions! Some of them are letting telemetry and metrics and A/B testing creep in. And some third part Linux software is just as intrusive and demanding as commercial Windows/Mac software.
There’s an invite link there to the chat group, though I need to update it.
This is precisely it.
When I buy a screwdriver, I just want to use it when I need it. I don't want to have an account with Craftsman and give them any PII, etc. No, I just want to use the product I purchased.
It is really the same with any tech product. I bought it, I want to use it. I want zero contact with the manufacturer (even if I like them).
As much as I've loved Linux for over 30 years, even Linux is becoming suboptimal. I'm mostly installing FreeBSD or OpenBSD these days.
> And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
They never built those skills. I know that a lot of us cheered the computer revolution, thinking that everyone born after would understand the things that older generations didn't get, but most didn't care and didn't learn.
When we connected them to the internet.
Today, even free software can have telemetry and ulterior motives.
We should be removing those incentives at every level: legislative, societal, government and private.
You have choices. Make them.
Campaign for privacy laws, open standards, right to repair, interoperability requirements etc.
Evidence sample of native Claudish: “The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half.”
Your friend's Mac creating a knowledge graph is totally different because they control it. It gives them power to remember more about their interactions with you, but they would have to actively abuse it to hurt you in any way. If you can't trust someone with information then don't give it to them in the first place expecting them to forget it.
The problem is what happens if you get hacked or Apple decides to sell you out/work with law enforcement. I would only trust code like that if it was fully transparent about what it's doing, open source and strictly opt in. Apple is doing it in the background and that makes it instantly suspicious.
I’m seeing it with polished websites. A polished site used to be a signal that a product was somewhat well thought out—at least it was worth the creators time to polish its marketing page. While now that AI products spit those out with AI speak that signal is lost.
I wonder if we’ll find out that the signal itself was more important than the means of sending the signal.
As this becomes normalized, people will retreat to a safer persona even in private conversations. This does not solve the problem at all; a great many mental illnesses and dynamics around pathological abuse are tied to the details of how each of us has a private and public-facing persona.
Already I see Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are heavily resenting the demands placed on them to be always in 'branding'/'self-marketing' modes, and are seeking ways to retreat from the relentless expectations of being always in 'public persona', and are suspicious that this way of living is harmful.
People change over time, and those I care about will be part of the journey. We don’t remember each other’s mistakes all the time.
And then, of course, there is the effort we put into these relationships. I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises than their LLM of choice automatically sends me a carefully crafted messaged based on our interactions.
Maybe we’re the weird ones.
Do most people really remember all the birthdays they acknowledge? For me they must be diarised, or beyond immediate family there's no chance.
I used to think it was artificial and pointless to wish people happy birthday after being reminded by google calendar. I now know enough adults who have taken (mostly minor) offence to being forgotten, that I play the game.
Likewise, you could say “Tell my boss I’m not coming in tomorrow” and it would have to know who your boss is.
We could get super angry about this, but seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device, it really doesn’t seem like a big deal. Is it much different to your car remembering who you call and where you go at what times for navigation purposes?
>>"Because. he. can..."
----
We let them behave this way. Whether this is past tense or future tense is up. to. us.
My brother is a (soon-to-be-former) politician. This is their mentality, "Prosecutor's Disease".
Very happy for my homestate, after these midterms... perhaps we can bump ya'll up from "[L]one-star state" to 2-stars?
This is the turnkey tyranny we were warned about.
The spying has no excuse and in the 2000s we would’ve called this malware and spyware, appropriately.
I can't imagine how much sleuthing is needed to infer who's would be someone's divorced mother if it wasn't explicitely labelled, but it's completely unneeded until the day they actually try to use that info through some Apple service. Then, they'll be in for a surprise the day it infers it's their boss instead.
That's the other side of whimsy and "magic".
Running the tool on my Macbook (which I don't really use, but which is logged into my iCloud) shows tons of activity/names/contacts that's shared ("donated" in the system's terms) over from my iPhone, which I wouldn't have expected to synchronize to this laptop. The apps aren't installed on the laptop, I don't get notifications there or have any interaction with those people. I can even see some stats showing volume of activity on work apps installed on my phone inside a managed work profile, but it does seem to have filtered the actual contacts out.
this is a class action lawsuit in the making
If you use iCloud, all the data in this db can be derived from other data already stored (messages, logs, etc).
Is how I'm generally greeted when I ask this sort of question.
Turn off your Mac and use a different operating system. Because it doesn't matter how you disable this feature in isolation. It is merely the current projection of Apple's opinion of its relationship with you. It's a hydra and you are going to lose the fight.
Disable the daemons, delete the directory, lock down permissions to the database files / directory, lock down the daemons' permissions, delete the daemons, ...
I'm not recommending those things - I don't know what the consequence is for the system - but that's where I'd start.
do i see that right - the data in unencrypted, the profile is built by an undocumented background profiler without consent or an option of opting out, it is consumed by cloud connected platforms like siri and apple intelligence and ANY application on my mac can access it?
None of this shit is legal, but the laws are toothless anyway: Apple can get "fined" a couple million and that's it. The fallout from the press would be a harder hit for them.
Apple makes money of your data as does anyone else. The just use your compute and energy for it too and convinced everyone that was privacy.
When you do that, it's quite hard for it not to sound creepy. And most people would probably say no.
But I don't think it should be prohibited by regulation. Some people might want it, or genuinely find it useful.
And if they know, they cheer it on. Just read this thread.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends." And Calendar and Reminders knows where I go. And so forth.
The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.
I was talking about the data you collect. Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed? You're agreeing, and it has to be an unambiguous. Sending the data outsids the EU? Explicit checkbox.
Is it absurd? Yes
Ok, but that seems to contradict your original assertion that it doesn't matter where the data is processed. The processes we're talking about run on your computer, processing data about you so that the services your OS provides can use that data to make the services work. That sounds a lot to me like "your own data processed on your device"
It absolutely matters who collects or processes for who must be GDPR compliant.
Next, Google will be downloading a database of 2 billion ads to your PC to check against all your private data and decide which ad to show you for anything you search in the future.
And because its all on your PC, no GDPR issues - you are processing your own data.
If you have full sovereignty over your data and your computer and you decide to use software that downloads ads and blasts them to you, at some point even in the best jurisdiction you're responsible for what you install
iCloud Backup, on by default, is not end to end encrypted and uploads almost the entire contents of your device to Apple’s servers every night in a format they can read (effectively unencrypted). This includes your entire message history over SMS and iMessage and all attachments thereto.
It is safe to assume that the data collected and assembled by these daemons is part of the iCloud Backup, which you never have to explicitly enable; it happens when you log in to iCloud on the device, usually within minutes of first powering it on for most people.
iCloud is not on by default with macOS. For starters, you have to create an iCloud account!
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651#advanced
It's an eternal balancing act because every time Apple implements some new restriction in their OS that prevents apps from doing whatever they want, whenever they want, people get mad at them. But without those restrictions, the ever increasing amount of personal data that is stored on your computer is exposed to the ever increasing number of data slurping applications that you run.
That not being the case is the whole purpose of the per-app sandboxes which macOS has along with TCC. We're not discussing plain Unix permissions alone.
I assume you mean 'many' and not 'make'—this is untrue; you only need to grant FDA if you're trying to access protected areas, like the knowledge graph store.
Granting full disk access to an app that you don't trust not to surreptitiously exfiltrate your data is the kind of user error where the buck stops with PEBCAK.
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=p6zjojqw
Agreed. None of this is magic, and the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free. Many HN people even _build_ those platforms.
Would I like to see more controls around this? Yes, absolutely. Having some random app be able to read this data with only a single permission barrier is room for improvement. I would also like to see more tooling included to inspect and correct this data. Something like a Monica[1], but local and built on local data. Suddenly address book data is no longer a list of names and numbers, but a part of a data structure that you can use to surface information, like friend's preferences or vacation photos together. Not everything that collects data is insidious and a Black Mirror episode in the making.
[1]: https://www.monicahq.com/en/
This is truly disappointing to hear on HN.
The VC around here loses more than we do if HN ceases to be a useful barometer.
Where was that? I'd like to see a link, because this doesn't sound right to me. I was running HN 10 years ago, and it has never been a practice to ban people "for comments about PG".
Does it know this based on something other than you told it a name for a face at some point? I have plenty of people where Photos sees an unidentified person, and they remain unidentified as I have not named them. It also knows my pets because I've also named them. Until I manually set the name, Photos did not "know" them.
I got inspired by the automatic “memories” videos/slideshows that Photo makes, and applied it to a video game of AI creatures. The creatures accumulate memories about their experiences, and then the game builds reels with little images or replays of their memories as they happened, with comments about their feelings. It’s pretty fun to watch
Unbelievably invasive and offensive.
This is exactly why we should not have closed source anything at the bottom.
Which of course we developers give to our tools and terminal emulators so they are not annoying to use! One npm install away from mining this sweet data via a postinstall script!