Apple Turned on 'Discoverable by Others'. You Might Want It Off | Hacker News Reader

Apple Turned on 'Discoverable by Others'. You Might Want It Off

wsj.com

52 pointsfortran7725 comments

It's in Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling Suggestions.

I guess it could be useful to keep enabled for your friends. That is, if they're too lazy to enter "I met with Joe and Mary today" in their journal app.

Wow, that's pretty egregious, especially considering I have lockdown mode enabled, which already disables similar functionality from Messages.app (e.g. it won't share my "focus" status with people who message me). Also, I deleted the "journal" app as soon as I saw it appear on my homescreen, so it's especially annoying to find this hidden toggle enabled and willfully broadcasting my information to anyone nearby with the journal app installed (which is everyone with an iPhone, since Apple force installed the app for everyone).

This is literally my biggest irritation with tech - when chit changes and the User isn’t explicitly made aware.

Even if the user is aware, it can be very annoying when stuff changes.

It's like someone comes into your house and changes the furniture.

Makes me think of “terms of service can change at any time” type stuff. At least we get some email about it and have a paper trail but who can keep up

In this case, this is a new feature for a new app. They didn't change anything. The setting didn't exist before, nor did the app

Installing a new app onto a phone absolutely changes the phone. This app was packaged in an OS update.

They auto-installed the app on everyone's phone, and auto-enabled this feature on everyone's phone. The feature sends my location to someone else when they are nearby and using the app. So even though I deleted the app, other people nearby could still receive information about me because I haven't disabled the default toggle I never opted into in the first place.

It's almost suspiciously malicious that they auto-enabled this feature and auto-installed the app for everyone at the same time.

https://archive.li/VL5t7

These links never work for me because I use Cloudflare VPN (and even just Cloudflare DNS is enough to cause the problem). They don't work because Cloudflare preserves the user's privacy by not sending the originating subnet in eDNS requests to the upstream resolver. [0]

This archive network is also run by an unknown actor with unknown motives but a demonstrated willingness to pay the high infrastructure costs. And this actor refuses to resolve DNS requests unless they include the subnet of the originating IP.

I'm not against posting them, but I wish there were a better option.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDNS_Client_Subnet#Controversy...

Seems it also turned off 24 hour clock. How trust inducing.

This works similar to Covid contact tracing except limited to known contacts. Seems harmless, though it shouldn’t be on by default.

The article doesn’t actually explain why ‘You Might Want It Off’ beyond:

If you don’t want your device to be included in that tally of nearby contacts for others, you can toggle it off. Just remember that leaving it on won’t tell your friends—or Apple—anything about you personally.

> If you don’t want your device to be included in that tally of nearby contacts for others, you can toggle it off. Just remember that leaving it on won’t tell your friends—or Apple—anything about you personally.

That sentence seems like a self-contradiction?

If it didn't tell my friends--or Apple--anything about me, how can it result in my friends getting journaling suggestions that are different based on whether the feature is enabled or not?

Unless the author thinks "knowing who you were with and when" does not count as "knowing anything about you," which I would strongly disagree with, and I'm not even generally a paranoid person like some on HN are (no offense to them, glad they're paying attention)

You can know how many of your friends are nearby without knowing who they are.

The text beneath the toggle is "Allows others to detect you are nearby to help prioritize their suggestions." This implies it's broadcasting some beacons containing my phone number to nearby devices, which can listen for those beacons and compare them with their contacts list.

Yeah, appears that way: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/journaling-sugge....

The caveat is that devices store counts not identities, but it does seem like some notion of identity is broadcasted.

The only way this feature could work is by broadcasting my information to nearby devices. That's enough reason to turn it off, especially given the only claimed benefit is that someone writing in their journaling app can have a marginally faster autocomplete experience when typing a string that is similar to my name.

That’s not a claimed benefit. The article says it only tracks how many people you know are around you, not who they are.

Apple’s usually pretty on top of this kind of thing. For example, there was the privacy-preserving Covid proximity thing, and I believe the Find My network works without allowing others to track you?

Is there some fancy cryptographic algorithm that allows a person to broadcast something that allows others that already know them to recognize that a person they know is broadcasting (perhaps not even a specific person, just one they know) - without allowing people they don’t know to recognize they are the same person if they see them again?

I do wonder how a dinner party host’s device can distinguish which guests are in their contacts from which ones aren’t.

Context is Journalling app.

If we're supplying context, then it seems funny to omit the context that,

* it's a journalling app the user did not seek out and choose to install,

* was not brought to their attention that it was installed,

* with a data-broadcasting setting pre-configured to disregard the users explicitly indicated intentions via the OS lockdown mode setting.

The fact that it's a journalling app seems not to matter at all as far as I can see. The remarkable issue was never that a journalling app wants to record your life.

Doesn’t Microsoft get slammed for this crap every other month here? I’m eager to see how this goes over with the Apple loyalists.

At any rate, this should never happen. This is not good at all.

It's flagged and buried; there's your answer.

Journaling is something I do with a fountain pen and suitable notebook. It's in large part about the sitting down, deliberately taking time to move the nib across the page, seeing the ink go on wet. Why would I want a phone app to log my life as an afterthought?

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