Not trying to justify this but rather state it plainly for those still scratching their heads over such behavior.
Is this actually a surprise, or even news, really, to anyone here?
Ownership is a thing of the past. It doesn't have to be but when I suggest alternatives people say it's "impractical" for them but then act all surprised pikachu when it turns out they're totally beholden to what some billionaire thinks is best...
Oh well.
Whatever that word is, people need to do less of it, I don't think it ever really contributes anything
I'm quite tired of all this "Leopards keep eating my face and I Don't Know Why!". This sort of message board has been rife with this sort of sentiment since the 90's (and probably earlier; I'm young-ish) and these organizations have only gotten stronger since then. You're playing their game to their benefit. I hope that clears things up some, and I'm glad to know this sort of sentiment (the "This is what happens when you build your castle in a hostile kingdom") comes up often, as it implies more people are getting over it.
I would be embarrassed if this specifically happened to me, as I am embarrassed when similar things happen to me in other hostile ecosystems. It drives me to improve and pursue autonomy, digital or otherwise. How else can we move forward, and I mean, for good? There are so many things I do on computers that are not, in fact, constant uphill battles. It's possible!
Yes, it's literally news, all over the tech news sites, including Hacker News.
And yes, it's actually a surprise. Noted cryptograph Matthew Green said, "It’s very frustrating when you learn about a service two days before New Years and you find that it’s already been enabled on your phone." https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3lef...
Please show me where you, anonymous HN commenter, predicted that Apple would add Enhanced Visual Search in iOS 18.1 and silently opt everyone in.
> when I suggest alternatives people say it's "impractical" for them
So are you just choosing to ignore the practical concerns of people? Life is a series of tradeoffs. There is no perfect tech. If your alternatives are so indisputably superior, then why aren't they winning the market? Every time there's bad news about a big tech company, some commenters come out of the woodwork to provide condescending lectures for us unwashed masses, but these commenters invariably fail to acknowledge the many ways in which their alternatives are actually worse for most people, less useful, less practical, lacking in features, indeed more annoying than whatever bad news happens to be currently under discussion. The reason that the products of big tech companies are so popular is that those products are good and useful in many ways, despite the downsides. How about a discussion about what people have to give up exactly in order to switch to the alternatives, a discussion of the very real downsides to the alternatives?
Oh well.
> act all surprised pikachu when it turns out they're totally beholden to what some billionaire thinks is best...
You're equivocating on the notion of surprise. On the one hand, nobody is surprised that tech CEOs have a lot of power over the users of their tech. That's an extremely vague, general notion. On the other hand, yes, people are surprised about some of the specific things that tech companies do, especially when those specific things are against the tech company's stated values. Are you claiming that nobody should talk about, complain about, or report in the news about the specific things that tech companies and billionaires do? Should we have complete silence about things happening with products used by billions of people?
Not sure why. Apple has presumably had AI scanning your photos for years now.
It's how they power the Faces feature.
"On-device performance is especially important as the end-to-end process runs entirely locally, on the users device, keeping the recognition processing private." https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-peopl...
There is a debate that could be had about opt in vs opt out if services but the idea that apple tried to sneak the feature in or hid how it works doesn’t hold up in my opinion.
I believe you're mistaken. At the 55 minute mark in the stream, Craig Federighi announced Visual Intelligence, exclusively for iPhone 16. That's not the same as Enhanced Visual Search, which appears to be available not only for all iPhone and iPad models but also for Mac.
"Note: Visual intelligence with Camera Control requires Apple Intelligence and is available in iOS 18.2 or later on all iPhone 16 models." https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-visual-intelligen...
Moreover, Apple Intelligence, and thus Visual Intelligence, is opt-in rather than opt-out.
> Then there’s the blog post that describes the privacy features fairly detailed from October 24 (Combining Machine Learning and Homomorphic Encryption in the Apple Ecosystem).
How many people read Apple's machine learning blog? I certainly don't.
> I think the feature went live in iOS 18.1
That's what we're speculating, based on some vague evidence, but I'm not sure anybody knows for certain.
> There’s even a post on Reddit from five months ago noting the toggle appearing in the beta.
You're seriously citing a single obscure Reddit post as evidence that this wasn't a surprise to the general public?
How would you have liked to have received information about this feature? We might disagree wether the technical blog post is not good enough and, let’s face it, no one probably read the legal notice for Photos & privacy.
This is not a difficult question. Obviously, from an Apple announcement directed to all Apple users, for example in a keynote event, a press release, or an in-app announcement of the new feature, giving the user an explicit option.
> no one probably read the legal notice for Photos & privacy
I did read the legal notice, which is how I became concerned in the first place, but the notice was at the bottom of the Photos Settings, alongside the toggle to turn off Enhanced Visual Search, neither of which I discovered except by chance last week.