Comment by chikere232

Google's reputation with privacy advocates is absolutely horrible, but that shouldn't have anything to do with Apple's practices. Comparing Apple and Google will indeed tell you a lot of interesting things, but that's not what this is about.

Kind of feels like it should be a crime for a private party to attempt to write terms into a contract that introduce punishments justified in terms of law, where that justification is based on an interpretation of law that's already been legally proven to the author of the contract to be a misinterpretation of said law.

It's sort of the crime of "contempt of court", but after the fact: receiving a judge's prescription about how you must interpret a law during a case, but then going right back to using a different interpretation when you leave court.

> Google refused to return access to his account even after the police cleared him of wrongdoing.

This is why I constantly work to help people reduce their dependence on Google. Screw that. If anyone ever tells you that they rely on Google for anything, show them this article.

> Apple does photo recognition on your device.

> Google, on the other hand, uploads photos to their server and does the analysis there.

The comment you're replying to (and the whole sub-thread in fact) isn't about if how Apple is doing it is the best/worst way, but rather before they do it, they don't ask for permission. Regardless of how they technically do it, the fact that they don't ask beforehand is what is being argued about here.

Google doesn't send your pictures to their servers without your explicit consent. This is exactly what users expect. On Android, you can use your own self-hosted photos server and have it work exactly the same way Google Photos does. Google Photos does not have access to private Google-only APIs like Apple Photos has on iOS.

That's irrelevant if the information they do send is sufficient to deduce "Eiffel tower" or "dog" out of it: that's too much information to send.

FWIW, I work on homomorphic encryption at Google, and Google has all kinds of other (non-FHE) privacy enhancing tech, such as differential privacy, federated learning, and https://github.com/google/private-join-and-compute which are deployed at scale.

Perhaps it's not as visible because Google hasn't defaulted to opt-in for most of these? Or because a lot of it is B2B and Google-internal (e.g., a differential-privacy layer on top of SQL for internal metrics)

[edit]: this link was a very vague press release that doesn't say exactly how Google uses it: https://security.googleblog.com/2019/06/helping-organization...

Well when you are building a feature that can only be appreciated by a subculture of people (privacy advocates), and they complain about the most basic faux pas that you could do in their culture (not asking them before you phone home with data derived from their data)... you have invited these people to criticise you.

Most people I know of wouldn't care about such a feature other than a breathless sort of "Wow, Apple tech!" So they are building something which is intended to win over privacy conscious people, kudos to them, everyone stands to benefit. But the most basic custom in that subculture is consent. So they built something really great and then clumsily failed on the easiest detail because it is so meaningless to everyone except that target audience. To that audience, they don't bother criticising google or microsoft (again) because it goes without saying that those companies are terrible, it doesn't need to be said again.

> just tell people they need a better phone for that feature if it’s too slow. Or do it on their Mac if they own one while that is plugged in.

The issue isn't slowness. Uploading photo library data/metadata is likely always slower than on-device processing. Apparently the issue in this case is that the world locations database is too large to be stored locally.

In other words: don't hate the player hate game, but the point still stands.

Whataboutisms aren't all the great you know. Google and MS also get flak, and they also deserve it.

But now that we're talking about these differences, I'd say that Apple users are notoriously complacent and defend Apple and their practices. So, perhaps in some part it is in an attempt to compensate for that? I'm still surprised how we've now accepted that Apple receives information pretty much every time we run a process (or rather, if it ran more than 12 hours ago, or has been changed).

You can always find someone worse. Does not mean we should not critise people/organizations.

You think Trump is bad? Well, Putin is worse. You think Putin is bad? Kim Jong Un is worse.

Optionally, yes

> If someone demands that you trust them blindly and unconditionally, that's actually a sign you shouldn't trust them.

That's certainly a take, which you're clearly entitled to take. I don't disagree with the point that you make; this ought to have been opt in.

What you should do now is acknowledge this in your original post and then explain why they should have been more careful about how they released this feature. Homomorphic encryption of the data reframes what you wrote somewhat. Even though data is being sent back, Apple never knows what the data is.

You don't trust Apple's and Google's mobile phones. And some bank doesn't trust open source android distros on mobile phones. Those are both fine positions. You are free to move to another bank, just like the bank is free to not accept you as a customer.

I'm curious what functions other than maybe depositing a check requires a banking app?

why use a device by someone you don't trust? honestly don't get it. I'd use an open source android distro

Google loves doing this.

If you dare turn off Play Protect for example, you will be asked to turn it on every time you install or update anything. Never mind that you said no the last thousand times it asked.

It says it's "opt in" but as someone who hasn't opted in, I still get the notifications and I can see a split second preview of all the stuff they're not supposed to have computed before it asks me to opt in. So there's DEFINITELY shenanigans ocurring.

A number of good third-party photo-browsing apps make it non-miserable, even if you never open Google Photos or even uninstall it.

Apple also does the vast majority of photo categorization on device, and has for years over multiple major releases. Foods, drinks, many types of animals including specific breeds, OCRing all text on the image even when massively distorted, etc.

This feature is some new "landmark" detection and it feels like it's a trial balloon or something as it simply makes zero sense unless what they are categorizing as landmarks is enormous. The example is always the Eiffel tower, but the data to identify most of the world's major landmarks is small relative to what the device can already detect, not to mention that such lookups don't even need photo identification and could instead (and actually already do and long have) use simple location data and nearby POIs for such metadata tagging.

The landmarks thing is the beginning, but I feel like they want it to be much more detailed. Like every piece of art, model of car, etc, including as they change with new releases, etc.

Does or doesn't. You can't really tell if and when it does any cataloguing; best I've managed to observe is that you can increase chances of it happening if you keep your phone plugged in to a charger for extended periods of time.

That's the problem with all those implementations: no feedback of any kind. No list of recognized tags. No information of what is or is to be processed. No nothing. Just magic that doesn't work.

"memories" constantly given me notifications about "similar shots" at random, so I'm assuming it is trying to analyse the content of the photos. I managed to disable the notifications, but not the actual analysis

> The "memories" part can be trivially done locally and probably is, it's really just reading the picture's "date taken", so it's conceptually as easy as a "sort by date".

It’s more. It also can create memories “trip to New York in 2020”, “Cityscapes in New York over the years”, or “Peter over the years” (with Peter being a person added to Photos)

Dumb Photo App by Nefarious DataExfiltration Co & Son

Why, install a non-sketchy open-source gallery app from F-Droid.

It's not hypothetical. Plenty of open source software tries to address it. For example, DigiKam does everything I listed 100% right. Problem is, it's desktop-only and geared for local photos. An equivalent solution could exist for phones and handle cloud albums, but the mobile and cloud vendors don't want to do it, and make it hard on purpose for any third party to try.

It’s absolutely not hypothetical.