Comment by mgraczyk
1 month ago
Would you mind giving an example of something bad that could happen to somebody as a result of Apple sending this data to itself? Something concrete, where the harm would be realized, for example somebody being hurt physically, emotionally, psychologically, economically, etc
Once upon a time, I worked for a pretty big company (fortune 500ish) and had access to production data. When a colleague didn't show up at work as they were expected, I looked up their location in our tracking database. They were in the wrong country -- but I can't finish this story here.
Needless to say, if an Apple employee wanted to stalk someone (say an abusive partner, creep, whatever), the fact that this stuff phones home means that the employee can deduce where they are located. I've heard stories from the early days of Facebook about employees reading partner's Facebook messages, back before they took that kind of stuff seriously.
People work at these places, and not all people are good.
Your first story sounds like a good outcome.
I doubt Apple employees could deduce location from the uploaded data. Having worked at FB I know that doing something like that would very quickly get you fired post 2016
network topologies don't lie (usually). What I mean is, there are many ways to locate someone if you have enough visibility.
It depends on your position.
Easy, consider a parent taking pictures of their kid's genitals to send to their doctor to investigate a medical condition, the pictures getting flagged and reported to the authorities as being child pornography by an automated enforcement algorithm, leading to a 10-month criminal investigation of the parent. This exact thing happened with Google's algorithm using AI to hunt for CP[1], so it isn't hard to imagine that it could happen with Apple software, too.
[1] https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-da...
Good example. I think this is worth the tradeoff