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Comment by kemayo

1 month ago

I'm not sure I agree -- asking users about every single minor feature is (a) incredibly annoying, and (b) quickly causes request-blindness in even reasonably security-conscious users. So restraining the nagging for only risky or particularly invasive things makes sense to me.

Maybe they should lump its default state into something that already exists? E.g. assume that if you already have location access enabled for Photos (it does ask!), you've already indicated that you're okay with something about this identifying being sent to Apple whenever you take a picture.

My understanding is that Location Services will, among other things, send a hash of local WiFi network SSIDs and signal strengths to a database Apple maintains, and use that to triangulate a possible position for you. This seems loosely analogous to what's going on here with the compute-a-vector thing.

> Maybe they should lump its default state into something that already exists?

It could be tied to iCloud Photos, perhaps, because then you already know that your photos are getting uploaded to Apple.

  • Insofar as the photos aren't getting uploaded to Apple for this, that seems a bit extreme.

    (We could argue about it, but personally I think some kind of hash doesn't qualify.)

    • What's the Venn diagram of people who both (1) deliberately refrain from enabling iCloud Photos but nonetheless (2) want the Photos app to phone home to Apple in order to identify landmarks in locally stored photos?

      8 replies →

"asking users about every single minor feature is (a) incredibly annoying"

Then why lie and mislead customers that your data stays local?

> asking users about every single minor feature

Then perhaps the system is of poor design and needs further work before being unleashed on users…

Especially for a company which heavily markets about how privacy-focused it is,

1)sending my personal data to them in any way is not a "feature." It's especially not a feature because what it sets out to do is rather unnecessary because every photo has geotagging, time-based grouping, and AI/ML/whatever on-device keyword assignments and OCR. I can open up my phone right now and search for every picture that has grass in it. I can search for "washington" and if I took a picture of a statue of george washington that shows the plaque, my iPhone already OCR'd that and will show the photo.

2)"minor" is not how I would ever describe sending data based off my photos to them, regardless of how much it's been stuffed through a mathematical meat grinder.

3)Apple is usually very upfront about this sort of thing, and also loves to mention the most minor, insignificant, who-gives-a-fuck feature addition in the changenotes for "point" system updates. We're talking things like "Numbers now supports setting font size in chart legends" (I'm making that up but you get the point.)

This was very clearly an "ask for forgiveness because the data we want is absolutely priceless and we'll get lots of it by the time people notice / word gets out." It's along the lines of Niantic using the massive trove of photos from the pokemon games to create 3d maps of everywhere.

I specifically use iOS because I value my privacy (and don't want my cell phone data plan, battery power, etc to be a data collection device for Google.) Sending data based off my photos is a hard, do-not-pass-go-fuck-off-and-die line in the sand for me.

It's especially shitty because they've gated a huge amount of their AI shit behind owning the current iPhone model....but apparently my several generation old iPhone is more than good enough to do some AI analysis on all my photos, to upload data for them?

Fuck everyone Apple who was involved in this.

  • > This was very clearly an "ask for forgiveness because the data we want is absolutely priceless and we'll get lots of it by the time people notice / word gets out.

    It's very clearly not, since they've gone to huge lengths to make sure they can't actually see the data themselves see the grandparent post.

  • > It's especially shitty because they've gated a huge amount of their AI shit behind owning the current iPhone model....but apparently my several generation old iPhone is more than good enough to do some AI analysis on all my photos

    Hear hear. As if they can do this but not Visual Intelligence, which is just sending a photo to their servers for analysis. Apple has always had artificial limitations but they've been getting more egregious of late.