Comment by kjreact

Let’s step back and go through the thought process of the team that’s implementing this feature. If they leave the feature disabled by default most likely casual users will never use it because they won’t be able to find the setting buried under all the menus. Thus after adding all their privacy layers the team felt that it should be safe enough to enable by default while remaining true to the company’s ethos of privacy.

Now what would you have done differently if you were in charge of rolling out such a feature? While I don’t like Apple phoning home without my consent, in this case my photos are not being sent to Apple; only anonymized hashes used to match well known landmarks.

The author of the article goes on to show his bias against Apple with phrases like “You don't even have to hypothesize lies, conspiracies, or malicious intentions on the part of Apple to be suspicious of their privacy claims” or “Apple's QA nowadays is atrocious.”

Or this rich quote “I never wanted my iPhone to phone home to Apple.” What smartphone or computing device never communicates back to their company servers? Even when I use open source libraries I have to communicate with repositories to check for dependencies. Does the author hide every online transaction he makes? Never using email or text messages or cloud services which will leak his private information? Unlikely. He just wants to grind his axe against Apple.

So let’s step back and look at it reasonably and see if Apple is trying to erode our privacy with this feature. I personally don’t see this particular feature as being harmful, but I will thank the overzealous author of bringing it to my attention and I’ll be disabling the feature since I don’t need it. This feature is no where near as invasive as the CSAM detection tool that was proposed, which did warrant critical discussion.

Let’s let the team, undoubtedly one of many with the unenviable task of making Apple Intelligence relevant, who rolled out the feature get their yearly bonus and move on to discuss more enlightening topics such as as the merits of keeping tabs on the urination habits of the crew on the ISS via the Mac menubar.