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Comment by mbilal | Hacker News Reader

How to complain: don't buy an iphone next time you need a new phone

Boycotting products to change a company's mind won't work because:

- not enough people even know about this issue, understand the consequences or remember to act on it the next time a new phone is due - not enough alternatives on the market, and we're probably already boycotting them for other reasons - even with lower sales a company might not see the cause-and-effect

There is a general trend in the industry to take all kinds of liberties with user data. There is pressure on companies to do something about bad things happening in their clouds. Machine learning folks want to apply their tools to big data and the corpus of everyone's photos is probably nice to work with.

So we would have to tackle these issues on a larger scale.

That it is. I'm bit fancied of the ignorance of the people, until it is Apple who is doing it. And Apple is minority compared to other platforms.

I haven't heard much of complains about Windows sending all your file hashes and most of the files into their servers, what they have been doing a very long time with Windows Defender. It is literally the same what Apple is doing now, but without restrictions.

Google and other cloud service providers have scanned your photos for very long time, by using PhotoDNA. On top of images, Google scans also your emails. People forget and move on.

I don’t use Windows Defender nor Google Photos nor other cloud service providers to scan my photos. I barely use gmail. I knew that Google was terrible so I have already minimized my use of Google services. Same with Facebook. But Apple!? I guess the dominos have finally gotten to me.

It is not so straightforward to not use Windows Defender if you are using Windows 10. You must edit group policies in quite deep to disable automatic scanning and startup.

Google Drive includes backups of your phone, so it is not limited to Google Photos. Literally everything that is stored unencrypted on Google servers.

Disabling all of Defender is complex, but disabling automatic sample submission is easy. It's an option in the Security settings app, and you're even allowed to disable it during first time set up (or were, last I installed Windows 10).

It nags you once, but you can ask it to stop.

Besides, uploading unseen executable code and scanning photos are far from the same tech. They're very different things.

Every binary is executabale by default. Images are only subcategory. As malware, any file is potential threat. Also, I think disabling automatic sample submission does not disable hash upload, only full files.

Hmm. I wonder if a activism-based shopping platform could be something. Basically, a place where you shop, and as part of your purchase you state why you shopped that thing. Can be anything. "I liked the color". "Needed a bigger screen". "Don't want to use Apple any more".

> Boycotting products to change a company's mind won't work because:

In this case not buying the product is to avoid a viperous feature and protect house of from being spied on. Any boycott effects are tertiary.

I am going to give them a chance to reverse this but I literally just bought an upgrade to my iCloud. I thought it would make my life easier not having to worry about storage so much. Now I am just waiting for this reversal to happen or think I will have to cancel my iCloud subscription to start.

What cloud service are you putting your images on? I would be shocked if google photos hasn’t already been doing this.

You don't need the cloud: syncthing can sync your phone and your computer together without any issues. No nasty cloud provider involved: https://syncthing.net/

And because no one except Apple have access to the private iOS APIs required to run background processes forever, you would have to remember to keep the app in the foreground while it completes syncing on a regular basis.

Also, you can restore an iPhone from what SyncThing can back up. Only an iTunes or equivalent iCloud device backup can. They also can’t back up things like MFA keys / seeds / IVs.

I’m glad ST exists and it’s useful for syncing photos for home use, but it is not a viable iCloud alternative, nor could one be made due to the private iOS API issue.

You can even sync to $nasty_cloud_provider and don't provide the syncthing password. Problem solved!

What? Syncthing is not a backup program, it, as the name suggests, syncs folders and files. There is no password involved.

Syncthing now supports untrusted device sync[0] (i.e. storing an encrypted copy on an untrusted device) in a recent version, though this is still on beta.

[0]: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/untrusted.html

Check out: https://docs.syncthing.net/branch/untrusted/html/users/untru...

Looks like Syncthing doesn’t have support/client for iOS though?

There may be 3rd party apps like https://www.mobiussync.com

For some reason it’s not available in France. Is it limited to the US?

Cloud services doing this isn't the problem and they are already doing it. The problem is your device doing this.

Imagine if your Tesla reported back to Tesla who was in your car and sent that to the authorities if they thought someone in your car was "illegal".

You honestly can't know if it does that already or not.

Actually Tesla's do client side machine learning. When tesla needs training data of a bike for example, they can remotely "query" all the cars on the road and have the cars do client side detection of the stored footage and driving data and send over only the data that contains bikes.

Coming in the not-so-far-future.

Cloud is other people's computers. So, get your own server, or use someone's you trust. or use e2e encryption.

That would be great if I could run an iCloud back-end on my home servers. Unfortunately, I can’t, and no software other than iCloud can do what iCloud does on iOS due to Apple’s usage of private iOS APIs to accomplish things like persistent background sync or syncing parts of the OS which would be required to do a full device restore that aren’t accessible to user space apps.

Why do you need to put your images on a cloud service at all? Just use a spare disk.

I’m saying it because apple is scanning iCloud photos here. Unless I am mistaken, local only photos are not scanned.

It's just a matter of time till they start scanning all image files on the SSD. Then documents (country-specific probably)

There is hardly any mention of a boycott. Cynicism prevails; Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.

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