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Comment by chikere232 | Hacker News Reader

As trivia, on mac os, the photoanalysisd service will run in the background and look through your photos, even if you never open Apple Photos. It can't be disabled unless you disable SIP (system integrity protection) which requires a complicated dance of reboots and warnings. It will reenable if you turn SIP back on.

It seems Apple are very passionate about analysing your photos for some reason, regardless if you yourself are.

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You may also be shocked to learn that Spotlight looks through every single file on your Mac.

I was. First by the md_worker processes that mysteriously started pinning all of my CPU cores after a git clone. Then by the realization that MacOS had built a full-text index of millions of lines of source code (it only took a few hours of my Mac being too hot to touch).

A lot of Apple's defaults are just plain bizarre. Why the hell is Spotlight seeing source code mimetypes and feeding it to the search index?

For real! When I search for a term the last thing I want is some esoteric plist file but I’ll return dozens of those hits. Is there a way to exclude these I wonder? Limit it to what I have in the default home directory structure lets say and not go into my launch agents.

Look in the Spotlight settings. Not only can you include/exclude default search types. But you can also specify folders not to index.

Why is this even a question, do people not look at the settings at all?

> Why is this even a question, do people not look at the settings at all?

No, I expect defaults that aren't asinine from a company that bills themselves as a premium experience for software developers. It should be common sense, for the purposes of providing software to both ordinary users and software developers, to omit source files that aren't relevant search results. It's one of the most annoying features on Windows too, you'd hope Apple would see the writing on the wall and just fix it.

Harboring hope was my mistake, though. Sold my Mac in 2018 and haven't felt a desire to daily-drive MacOS since.

I love it that it indexes source code. It allows me to find things easily.

I have never once, in all of my years owning a Mac, used Spotlight search to find a source file based on it's text contents. By comparison, I have absolutely wasted probably close to an hour of my life cumulatively mashing the down arrow to find a relevant result that wasn't a Cmake file.

Mad worker.

Local search indexing is somewhat more defendable as a system level service, but yeah, it would be nice if that was also up to me as a user.

Isn’t that running locally on your Mac though?

CSAM could already be part of some local service theoretically. Privacy ended with a requirement to have an account linked to the device (not just icloud). There is no account needed to use a Linux computer.

You don't need to use icloud to use a Mac.

Does it phone home? I don't care about scanning my files. I do care about details of my private data leaving my device.

“It seems Apple are very passionate about analysing your photos for some reason, regardless if you yourself are.”

Isn’t this fragile to pollution from end users?

What if we all ran A local Image generator trained on our own photos… But slightly broken… And just flooded their photo hash collection with garbage?

Now what ?

This would be a very good flushing action. Lot would be learned by seeing who got angry about this and how angry they got…

No. The analysis in question is fully local, used for indexing photos by categories in the Photos app. It is unrelated to any cloud features and not something shared across users.

They are also not using your personal photos to feed the location database, most likely public sources and/or Apple Maps data. If they are relying on GPS-tagged public photos alone, you could probably mess up a system like this by spoofing GPS location en-masse and posting them online for years, but for what purpose?

Like I said, a good candidate for a "flushing action":

https://kozubik.com/items/FlushingAction/

Flood that system with garbage and let's see who gets upset and how they communicate their upset.

If the system is architected as advertised it shouldn't be a problem ...

> for some reason

It's directly tied to features they provide in their photo app. This is hardly obscure.

Why make it extremely hard to disable? Photos is hardly a system level app

A clearly marked option in the settings menu is "extremely hard"?

All kinds of nonsense runs and phones home throughout the os. The thing that annoyed me the most is trying to create an account will phone home to apple, such as setting up a local smtp/imap server on the local network.

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