Comment by AshamedCaptain
4 days ago
There is another reason which I dislike this which is that now Apple has reason for "encrypted" data to be sent randomly or at least every time you take a picture. If in the future they silently change the photos app (a real risk that I have really emphasized in the past) they can now silently pass along a hash of the photo and noone would be the wiser.
If an iPhone was not sending any traffic whatsoever to the mothership, at least it would ring alarm bells if it suddenly started doing so.
Isn't this the same argument that they can change any part of the underlying OS and compromise the security by exfiltrating secret data? Why specific to this Photos feature.
No. GP means that if the app was not already phoning home then seeing it phone home would ring alarm bells, but if the app is always phoning home if you use it at all then you can't see "phoning home" as an alarm -- you either accept it or abandon it.
Whereas if the app never phoned home and then upon upgrade it started to then you could decide to kill it and stop using the app / phone.
Of course, realistically <.00001% of users would even check for unexpected phone home, or abandon the platform over any of this. So in a way you're right.
The post also said that now phoning home isn’t an alarm that Apple could subvert the Photos app by passing a hash of the photo (presumably sensitive data). My contention is that Apple could do that for virtually any app that talks to the mothership, and is not unique to Photos.
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And which they silently do, change the applications. Maps has been updated for me via A/B testing. Messaging too.
Any app can do this really, just can’t update the entitlements and a few other things. I would think it unlawful for Apple’s own apps to have access to functionality/apis that others don’t…