Apple Is Normalising Surveillance
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The 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.
I was actually expecting Apple to be doing something like this in 2018 timeframe the moment they dip their toe into App Store Ads. But then the whole privacy thing blow up.
Probably worth linking to Benedict Evans blog post again.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads...
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/8/27/understand...
> 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.
So they want Apple to manufacture the Librem 5?[1]
Librem 5 has a microphone/camera hardware kill switch.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703983704576277...
In iOS Books all your interaction and content meta data gets sent to Apple and there is no way to turn it off. They just say “we do it while safeguarding user privacy and to create better user experience”.
Now that is surely Normalising Surveillance not to mention 24x7 connection between iDevices & Apple servers.
https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...
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.
They all seem to have embraced methods and techniques that seem questionable at best.
Netflix maybe getting a bit of a pass by virtue of not truely being in the personal info game
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.
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?
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...
That surprises me, and makes me think that this simple article showing up in Wired UK is potentially very impactful -- so it is being attacked very forcefully, with lots of handwaving.
Apple's new Citizen Surveillance and Management (CSAM) technology is serious -- the article refers to it specifically -- the privacy concerns are not new. The tech is a legalized version of terrorist technology provider NSO Group's Pegasus software.
We already have a group of people, QAnon, terrorizing the world in order to 'save the children' -- we don't need to add another group in the form of a global $2.5T company.
- 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!
But not for websites... Google... etc.
This ignores two big things we have to address when thinking about mass data collection.
1. The ability to collect data at scale unlocks capabilities that simply weren't possible before. There are lots of positive outcomes that can come out of this. Focusing on only the negative can lead one to a sort of primitivist mindset, and it convinces no one who feels the positive effects of it.
2. Apple could very well offer a phone with no facial recognition, rock solid encryption, an easily coverable camera, and it would affect close to nothing. The entire point of mass data collection is the "mass" part of it, and as long as people observe the benefits of being tracked (i.e. using maps, social media, finding their lost things, getting notified when their heart rate is up, counting their steps, tracking their sleep, getting notifications, seamlessly backing up their contacts and photos, dictating messages, etc.) then they will continue to be able to collect mass amounts of information regardless if some individuals choose to abdicate completely.
Other people are pointing these things out in the comments because it's the natural antithesis to what the article offers.
Salome Viljoen[0] talks about this thesis/antithesis in her research on data privacy and ways to treat data from a legal perspective. She explores an alternative to the "I'll just take my data elsewhere" and "I'll just not let my data be collected at all" approaches: democratic data governance[1].
> One path forward reconceives data about people as a democratic resource. Such proposals view data not as an expression of an inner self subject to private ordering and the individual will, but as a collective resource subject to democratic ordering. Democratic data governance schemes consider the relational nature of data: information about one individual is useful (or harmful) precisely because it can be used to infer features about—and thus make decisions affecting—others.
The problem is not necessarily that Apple (or Google, or anyone else) is collecting data. The problem is that we have very little say in what data they collect, or what they do with it afterwards, because the data is captured by corporations that act as data fiefdoms without any sort of democratic control.
Unfortunately, the massive valuations of these companies are essentially based on the amount of control they have over the data they collected, because it gives them incredible abilities to extract more value out of it. Any loss of unilateral control would be seen as a threat to the value of the companies, which in America makes it very politically distasteful right now. Perhaps that can change.
0: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rH63p3sAAAAJ&hl=en 1: https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/data-as-property
> Wired
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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.
They also aren't doing that.
> Thanks to Apple, physical shops can track us through our phones
Is this referring to Wifi or even 3/4g? I can't see how they can call this "Thanks to Apple", maybe it's something else?
> 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.
I don't think many people would call something "surveillance" if it never leaves the phone, which is the case for almost everything Apple does in this regard. Yes, your phone known where you are at all times, but as long as Apple doesn't, is that an issue?