Comment by JustExAWS
1 month ago
No I am trying to say with a connected device using online services, the service provider is going to have access to your data that you use to interact with them.
To a first approximation, everyone in 2024 expects their data and settings to be transferred across devices.
People aren’t working as if it is 2010 when you had to backup and restore devices via iTunes. If I’m out of town somewhere and my phone gets lost, damaged or stolen, I can buy another iPhone, log into my account and everything gets restored as it was.
Just as I expect my watch progress to work when I use Netflix between my phone, iPad, Roku devices etc.
And that should rightfully be your informed choice. Just like everyone else should have the right to know what data their devices are sending before it happens and be given the informed choice to refuse. People shouldn’t have to learn that from a random blog post shared on a random website.
In what world is Netflix for instance not going to know your watch history?
How many people are going to say in 2024 that they don’t want continuous cloud backup? You want Windows Vista style pop ups and permissions?
How many times are you going to shift the goalposts? This is getting tiresome, so I’ll make it my last reply.
I don’t have Netflix but neither is that relevant to the point, you’re obviously and embarrassingly grasping at straws.
No one is arguing against continuous cloud backups, they’re arguing about sending data without consent. Which, by the way, is something Apple used to understand not to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo
Apple’s OS are already filled with Windows Vista style popups and permissions for inconsequential crap, people have been making fun of them for that for years.
4 replies →
Netflix being unable to know your watch history on their service is exactly the goal of homomorphic encryption. The technology to make that work at that scale does not exist, however for smaller bits of data, eg phone numbers, that's entirely possible!
With PIR, an Apple phone recieving a phone call queries Apple's database with that phone number, but because it's using homomorphic encryption, Apple doesn't know the number that called despite looking it up in their database to provide caller id info, so they can't tie your phone number and the callers phone number together.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry...
As a general principle, I think computers should execute commands that users issue, and then wait for the next command. That's it.
Computers should not be sneakily doing things in the background without my commanding them to do so. But if they insist that the only way they can work is by doing things in the background, then I expect the computer to at the very least obtain my consent before doing those things. And computers should definitely not be exfiltrating anything over to the network without my explicit command to do so. This shit world we are living in where your computer just does whatever the application developer wants it to do rather than what the user wants it to do has to come to an end!