Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier

398 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by infwhispers
(8rank.ai)

198 Comments

thomascountz

5 hours ago

At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.

A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern.

If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat relentless transcription.

With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401

ryandrake

2 hours ago

I've also become totally exhausted by all these "someone is making your computer do X behind your back" revelations. Whether it's the app developer or OS vendor, it doesn't really matter. When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user, and instead start operating on behalf of the OS vendor and app developers? Every day there's a new case of this.

dingaling

an hour ago

Largely, I believe, when phones crossed over from being basic communication devices to being smartphones, but retained their 'appliance' nature.

An entire generation thereby grew up with personal computing represented by vendor-controlled handheld appliances, and naturally regarded actual PCs in the same manner.

And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.

skinfaxi

an hour ago

It's even reflected in the language used by younger generations, asking if things are "allowed" or assuming things are illegal by default.

dylan604

20 minutes ago

In some Linux distros like Debian, everything is illegal/prohibited until you explicitly allow it and only comes with the bare minimum of software necessary to make the OS work. Contrast that to other distros like Ubuntu where everything comes preinstalled and is very permissive. These obviously target different audiences. Smart phones are targeting different audiences too. The power users annoyed by the dumb things the device does just means you're not the target audience and are just bonus buyers for their bottom line.

ctippett

5 hours ago

I too would've found this fascinating at one point, but my jaded older self now just finds this incredibly creepy, unsettling and not at all surprising.

tclancy

3 hours ago

Add me to the list. This feels like a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” item.

jerf

2 hours ago

That saying is what it is for good reasons, but the path to post-capitalist dystopian hell is paved with bad intentions covered with plausible deniability.

I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.

sdeframond

2 hours ago

This thought path has been explored by the Black Mirror series in the episode The Entire History of You.

https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_Y...

r3trohack3r

37 minutes ago

I wouldn’t call black mirror an “exploration” of thought. It’s rather myopic.

It’s like going to the 1962 world fair but, instead of optimism, everyone just wants to tell you why everything in the future sucks.

dylan604

14 minutes ago

No, it's an exploration of what could happen based on things we've already seen/experienced but with the knob turned to an 11. It's what should happen in pretty much what if round table situation. "Hey, would could build this thing that does something that we are specifically thinking about that would be cool/fun/benevolent" is only part of the discussion. "How could someone else turn and use it in a way not anticipated so they use it for their own gains in a way that is shocking/malevolent" should be the natural follow up. Can the thing be updated to not be used for unintended negative purposes or will the negative out weigh the positive so that it shouldn't be made in the first place??? Sadly, it seems the follow up questions are never asked. Instead, we get scifi people doing it and then getting reviews like yours instead of looking deeper into point

PaulHoule

2 hours ago

I go out as-a-fox as a street photographer using a shtick that makes sure people almost always remember my name and i find it a little embarrassing that I can't remember that many names or if it is a Megan how exactly I am supposed to spell it, etc.

I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.

josephg

an hour ago

There’s a very big difference between opting in to using a tool and having the tool silently start analysing you in the background.

UltraSane

31 minutes ago

I'm really trying to understand what as-a-fox means.

dasyatidprime

an hour ago

See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.

boredatoms

an hour ago

Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI

dylan604

13 minutes ago

phew, I knew not spending a lot of effort in skool for learning proper grammar would be worth it as an adult

wodenokoto

5 hours ago

Maybe a decade or so ago I had a discussion with a colleague about chat apps and he said, why would you want to have a conversation on snapchat if it is not saved, and I was like, why are you having this conversation now, you can't save it either.

I guess that those days are soon over.

antonvs

3 minutes ago

Amplifying the dystopia is that this feature was heavily written up by an AI. So we have a feature in which machines monitor our lives being described to us by another machine which comes with its own set of dystopian risks, and no genuine human to human interaction.

Evidence sample of native Claudish: “The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half.”

neutronicus

5 hours ago

Autocorrect has had the opposite effect IMO, there’s an expectation that like 1 in 8 words from an iPhone user are not what the sender intended.

Typos have just graduated from misspellings to sentences randomly being nonsensical.

dylan604

9 minutes ago

I swear I know the difference and when to use their, there, they're, but based on my iPhone messages, you'd think I was an illiterate buffoon. There are plenty of examples where I could show where they're making me look dumb with their edits.

boringg

5 hours ago

I turned autocomplete off for this reason

layer8

4 hours ago

Did your autocorrect correct “autocorrect” to “autocomplete”?

QuantumNomad_

2 hours ago

Autocorrect and autocomplete are two slightly different things IMO. Both of them are in the wordlist on my iPhone also btw.

Autocorrect is when you type a whole word, and then when you hit space the word changes to something else. When it works like it should, it changes typo’d words to the correct spelling. When it doesn’t work, it changes what you wanted to fucking say into something you didn’t mean to ducking say.

Autocomplete is when you type the beginning of a word and the remainder of that word is suggested. And also when you are starting a new word and there are suggestions for the next word to put.

Autocorrect used to be very unreliable many years ago. But to say these days that 1 in 8 words are wrong because of autocorrect or autocomplete, is very far from true. If you see that frequent typos and mistakes like wrong words, it’s because your friends are sloppy texters, not because iOS is corrupting every 8th word they type.

This whole comment was written by me on iOS just like almost all of my other HN comments btw, for reference. And I’m not trying to say I’m some kind of expert writer, far from it. But my mistakes are by the vast majority my own, not because of iOS worsening my words by autocorrecting/autocompleting things in a strange way that somehow degrades the content of my comments. What I do do however, is that I take time to read through what I have written both before and after posting, and editing as necessary. But even those edits are mostly and by a huge margin about fixing my own mistakes or adding more to say, not to fix something iOS messed up in what I wrote.

dnpls

21 minutes ago

Swiping the keyboard used to be unreliable on iOS, then it improved enough to be usable. Then some updates ago it started to be nonsensical. Now I swipe to type something trivial, it writes the correct word, I swipe for the next word, it replaces the previous one with some uncommon word I've never used before and makes absolutely no sense to add in a sentence. It's maddening and it happens all the time.

panta

3 hours ago

I considered it intentional, since as a matter of fact "autocomplete" is more correct.

elgertam

3 hours ago

> What if I told you that every Mac since 2022 ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you: who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, with whom, what you do and when.

I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends." And Calendar and Reminders knows where I go. And so forth.

The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.

dylan604

5 minutes ago

> given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life.

Does it know this based on something other than you told it a name for a face at some point? I have plenty of people where Photos sees an unidentified person, and they remain unidentified as I have not named them. It also knows my pets because I've also named them. Until I manually set the name, Photos did not "know" them.

ndegruchy

an hour ago

> The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.

Agreed. None of this is magic, and the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free. Many HN people even _build_ those platforms.

Would I like to see more controls around this? Yes, absolutely. Having some random app be able to read this data with only a single permission barrier is room for improvement. I would also like to see more tooling included to inspect and correct this data. Something like a Monica[1], but local and built on local data. Suddenly address book data is no longer a list of names and numbers, but a part of a data structure that you can use to surface information, like friend's preferences or vacation photos together. Not everything that collects data is insidious and a Black Mirror episode in the making.

[1]: https://www.monicahq.com/en/

kebman

2 hours ago

I wonder how they get around GDPR. Normally I'd expect the EU to dish out a pretty hefty fine for this sort of thing, but something tells me Apple lawyers and penpushers has been busy making sure this passes, even though it's technically illegal.

snowwrestler

2 hours ago

If it is stored entirely on the machine you own, then you are processing and storing the data.

tpmoney

2 hours ago

For the GDPR to have impact here, wouldn't they have to be collecting the information in the first place? If they're doing all the work on your own computer, that wouldn't trigger any GDPR issues.

4thguy

an hour ago

Data collection is still data collection, it doesn't matter whether I am the one processing that data or a third party :)

Edit: I am not making any claims on what constitutes as data only what is considered as processing. And yes, data collection rules under GDPR can be quite absurd

semiquaver

an hour ago

It does matter. Your interpretation of “data collection” leads to absurd results.

tpmoney

44 minutes ago

How far does this go? Are the Bayesian spam filters that email clients have had for years that use your own classifications GDPR violations because they collect data about what you do or don’t mark as spam? Is your browser a GDPR violation because it collects data about your system that can be used to fingerprint you? Does your OS violate the GDPR when it displays your most recently accessed files in a file picker or as first suggestions when you search for something? Is the SMART monitoring built into your drives a GDPR violation? My understanding of the GDPR is that it applies to data the company is collecting about you. If the company never gets the data in the first place, then they haven’t collected it.

4thguy

28 minutes ago

1. Spam filters. No, the data was collected explicitly for the spam filter to work. Anything else? Not unless you consent to it. 2. Browser collection. The browser itself? There's an agreement when installing it. The websites? There's the cookie banners. 3. OS. Is it your data? No permission needed. Your device, your data. Other people's data? Unclear. Depends on what you told the person when you collected said data. 4. SMART. I don't know a lot about how it works.

I was talking about the data you collect. Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed? You're agreeing, and it has to be an unambiguous. Sending the data outsids the EU? Explicit checkbox.

Is it absurd? Yes

semiquaver

23 minutes ago

Your uninformed opinion about what the GDPR requires is absurd, yes.

Fortunately your opinion bears no resemblance to reality, so the absurdity is confined to inside your head (except to the extent it leaks onto message boards, as here)

semiquaver

an hour ago

It all lives on your device in order to make it work better. Apple literally doesn’t have custody of the data so it’s not relevant to the GDPR. It’s your data.

sneak

an hour ago

Were that were so!

iCloud Backup, on by default, is not end to end encrypted and uploads almost the entire contents of your device to Apple’s servers every night in a format they can read (effectively unencrypted). This includes your entire message history over SMS and iMessage and all attachments thereto. Photos and Contacts and Calendar aren’t included in the backup, but they don’t need to be, as those are synced to iCloud in realtime without end-to-end encryption (and readable by Apple).

(note: if you have Messages In iCloud enabled, then the iCloud backup includes a copy of that sync key instead of the messages themselves, so with the non-e2ee backup’s sync key and the e2ee Messages In iCloud traffic, Apple can read all of your messages that way.)

It is safe to assume that the data collected and assembled by these daemons is part of iCloud and/or the iCloud Backup, which you never have to explicitly enable; it happens when you log in to iCloud on the device, usually within minutes of first powering it on for most people.

EDIT: the iCloud Backup (and the other non-e2ee data synced to iCloud such as Contacts and Photos and Calendar that aren’t in the iCloud Backup) comprises all or most of the input data to these collectors and analyzers; Apple can run the same models serverside over the same data to derive the same dossier even if the result database is never uploaded. They could have done this already, for all iCloud users, and nobody would know. A naive approach to quickly developing this sort of data aggregation software would be to simply point it at heaps of iCloud data and see how well it works across many different languages, regions, cultures, religions, family arrangements, etc to improve it before actually releasing it onto millions of devices.

1over137

an hour ago

>iCloud Backup, on by default

iCloud is not on by default with macOS. For starters, you have to create an iCloud account!

semiquaver

an hour ago

  > It is safe to assume
No need to assume anything. This data is not included in iCloud backup. That detail is included in the article.

You are misinformed (or speculating) and spreading FUD.

shuckles

an hour ago

Photos aren’t in iCloud Backup. Have you considered doing the bare minimum to understand the features you complain about?

ProllyInfamous

3 hours ago

Great "just a user" feedback!

>it should be opt-in

And definitely not "cannot even turn this shit off" mode.

----

I just recently installed Microsoft Office 2011 on my 27" iMac (2009 i5), and it absolutely shocked me that the default "Send User Data to Microsoft" option was `OPT-OUT`, requiring the user to manually click a radio-button to `OPT-IN` to usage data collection.

This was in recent living memory. From Microsoft.

infwhispers

6 hours ago

I am the author of the research. Please, feel free to ask me anything. Also, check out the followup research: https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-...

asdfsa32

6 hours ago

Please stop using AI to author your articles. It was really hard to read it despite how interesting the topic was. I dropped halfway because it was just too annoying.

coldpie

5 hours ago

Yeah seriously. Article becomes unreadable immediately after the intro. I believe this author probably could actually write two years ago, it's a shame people are just giving up on that and choose to turn out stuff like this instead.

tkgally

5 hours ago

I was bothered not so much by the slopful article as by the AI-written text in the dashboard that iKnow produces. I ran the program on my Mac and it did display charts and graphs with names of people and organizations I’ve interacted with over the years, but I couldn’t figure out what it all was supposed to mean.

One example: "323 people, 122 events and other records, 200 employers and 1 stored group — as the store on this Mac links them. Read live just now. Colour is what each node is to you: the stored group in red, family and closeness by iKnow’s rules on the kinship scorecard. Size is how many rows in the store name it."

Claude etc. can be prompted to produce clearer explanations than that.

infwhispers

6 hours ago

My bad. In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough...

JoshTriplett

4 hours ago

It's not possible to un-AI text, only replace it wholesale.

Suggestion for next time: "Review my prose for accuracy, grammar, appropriate strength of claims, etc. Flag any issues for my attention. Do not provide text; this work should not contain any AI-written content." That'll turn it into a very good check that doesn't take your voice away.

embedding-shape

6 hours ago

> In my defense, only the technical parts are AI.

A defense would be "I just used it for spellchecking" not "I just used it for the meat and the important parts people care about, the rest is mine!"

NewsaHackO

2 hours ago

Yes, that was a weird defense; essentially, he used it for the actual interesting parts of the article.

Hamuko

5 hours ago

So most of it?

fatata123

5 hours ago

So only the parts that matter, you ai slopped. Great work.

sick_of_slop

5 hours ago

You can’t unslop A.I. prose. Once it’s written, the content is poisoned.

“Sure there was a turd in the punch bowl but I did my best to remove it, so you should be able to drink it.”

Nope.

And the technical parts are what matter, saying you did that with A.I. tells me “I don’t care about this part” so what the heck are we even doing here?

rowanG077

2 hours ago

Interesting for me it's the opposite. I care about this so I let AI do it since LLM are better writers than the majority of people. I'm not so arrogant to think I'm a writer of that caliber.

amenhotep

2 hours ago

You are. I promise you. Almost every single person is a better writer than an LLM. You're wilfully sabotaging yourself.

asdff

an hour ago

LLM are terrible writers though. Worse than most humans unless they have some mental disability.

ecto

3 hours ago

I disagree. Hand-authored articles can be slop too. This research is great, and your subjective feelings about word cadence don't affect the information. I guarantee you read AI output every day and don't know it.

ahartmetz

an hour ago

Hand-authored engagement or clout (LinkedIn) farming articles and corporate press releases are usually slop, most others aren't. I'd be surprised if corporate press releases today weren't largely AI-written - no one would know the difference.

otterley

3 hours ago

The criticism can be restated, then, as “you used AI to write it, and unlike others who use AI to write things, you did a bad job directing it and editing the work.”

ProllyInfamous

2 hours ago

This comment is not directed at you, but this is the best place I could find to insert my thoughts on this "nO LLm slOP" distraction:

----

The research is jaw-dropping enough for the average reader to comprehend (e.g: I am not a techie, but a former IBEW datacenter wiretwister).

It could be covered in pube-sprinkled-turds and would still be worth reading.

To me the "slopLOL" crew is akin to people who'll take their time to correct others' their/they're/there usage:

Just read the fucking sentence (LLMs can and do and aren't so poopy-you-suck-for-being-human).

otterley

2 hours ago

We know there’s interesting information in there. That’s not the point.

How news is delivered matters. If you don’t believe that, why would news outlets compete with each other? Even if the facts are the same, would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?

ProllyInfamous

2 hours ago

>would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?

I am smart enough to not need perfection. I just want the data. Write however tf you want, good'll'be read.

And so will LLMs.

I'll suggest adaptation.

>why would news outlets compete with each other?

Competition for the masses' con$umption$?

It seems to generally work; shouldn't have to obfuscate the `man` pages for this always-running daemon... how many people even know what `man`pages are (obviously not here)? how to access them? why they would even want to?

otterley

2 hours ago

Well, good for you for not caring, I suppose. The vast majority of society does.

> I am smart enough

Knock yourself down a peg, kid.

ProllyInfamous

an hour ago

I will, sure, but I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic, despite being a bluecollar electrician.

Also, my IQ scares even me; I've chosen bluecollar so I don't have to be evil as much with it.

----

Companies do not give two shits about most users, with (e.g:) AMD saying the quiet part out loud, recently, with their recent gamers-last announcement.

Also see: Apple's invasive attempts to categorize all local data, by default; if you want to opt-out (some service, like OP's, you cannot!), it takes dozens of clicks for each new software – intentional dark-patterns to make opting-out cat-and-mouse.

----

>Well, good for you for not caring, I suppose.

I care too much, is the problem (at least from my POV). Companies are soulless, and only care for shareholder value (legal requirement).

Data is the new_oil is the new_steel is the new_tin is the...

n0on3

5 hours ago

I second this. Unfortunately you just can’t just “unslop” it, much like you can’t just “shake the dirt away” from food that fell into a bucket of… you get my point, it won’t be good to eat anyway. Bonus additional ironic parallel could magically manifest if you can guess the bucket content.

Anyway, it’s a shame, this could have been excellent work. Instead, I find reading it unpleasant and part of my attention rots away wondering if you even checked what the LLM wrote for you. You probably did, and I could also do it myself, but still…

atombender

5 hours ago

There was a very obvious and unnerving shift in style that happened early in the article where it went from human to LLM. I find such shifts really glaring. Agents, in their current state, simply cannot produce quality prose and are not good enough to write blog posts targeting a human audience.

I found the topic fascinating, but eventually I started skimming and then gave up on it.

jamienk

39 minutes ago

I'm on macOS 27.2 and there is no longer a "Full Disk Access" control. How do I use it in this case? ChatGPT is not helpful.

jamienk

26 minutes ago

open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy_AllFiles" << this made it reappear in settings

The data I see from iKnow is a sloppy clusterfuck, I suspect from botched syncs and lazy bookkeeping on my part, and the fluctuating quality of Apple's "services" over the years. My Mac settings probably go back to the 1990s and Apple periodically did a bad job. Pain points I remember: Google contacts being separated and then with a new phone not syncing correctly, Mac address book burping on contact avatar images, importing lists of contacts from short-lived 3rd party apps, shared Photos fucking shit up, the iPhotos upgrade fiascos, transient contact info for my kids, moving onto/off of Gmail, etc.

If the FBI got ahold of my (and others'?) iKnow data, a lot of people might end up in a sloppy jail with a sloppy judge sloppily applying a sloppy law...

jdiff

4 hours ago

It says there's 137 live/certain facts in my graph. I can see where they're sourced from/a statistical breakdown of type/the number of unique confidence values/how many citations they're using/how many ingests contributed no facts. Am I missing where I can see what the actual facts are?

A lot of these statistics aren't very useful for mining insights from the graph, from a technical standpoint of how the graph works or from a personal standpoint of how the graph is interacting with my personal data.

mmooss

an hour ago

Thanks for the research. Have you looked into how to secure / disable the subsystem?

(I hate that a discussion on the OP has been hijacked by a discussion on AI writing; the substantive questions are all at the bottom. I wish mods would 'detatch and move' the AI subthread.)

slickytail

6 hours ago

You wrote that other apps can't access it because of TCC Full Disk Access. Presumably the OS itself can read it, so do you have any information on whether parts of the graph (or fingerprints, or inferences made with it) are ever sent to the cloud/apple servers?

aetherspawn

5 hours ago

This is context for local LLMs like Siri so that when you say “Text James and tell him …” it knows which James you mean.

Likewise, you could say “Tell my boss I’m not coming in tomorrow” and it would have to know who your boss is.

We could get super angry about this, but seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device, it really doesn’t seem like a big deal. Is it much different to your car remembering who you call and where you go at what times for navigation purposes?

macNchz

19 minutes ago

> seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device

Running the tool on my Macbook (which I don't really use, but which is logged into my iCloud) shows tons of activity/names/contacts that's shared ("donated" in the system's terms) over from my iPhone, which I wouldn't have expected to synchronize to this laptop. The apps aren't installed on the laptop, I don't get notifications there or have any interaction with those people. I can even see some stats showing volume of activity on work apps installed on my phone inside a managed work profile, but it does seem to have filtered the actual contacts out.

diydsp

5 hours ago

It doesnt leave your device...until an authoritarian government extracts it without a warrant. Or a dozen other entities like divorce attorneys, business rivals, legal trolls, false accusers, nation states, teenage hackers, human traffickers.

How often is this endangering info available to anyone at my work or home when someone leaves their laptop open while going to the bathroom for 5 minutes?

It's irresponsible to collect and concentrate this much info on millions of people.

aetherspawn

5 hours ago

It’s not clear whether this still happens in the “Lockdown” mode that Apple specifically added for people who expect to be in this scenario.

detourdog

5 hours ago

It's a no win situation. All of this surveillance is happening on the internet right now. All the companies are doing this surveillance Apple happens to be doing it on device. This is the data Apple is trying to prevent from leaving the device. Apple is constantly fighting court battles to protect the data. Apple is always being accused of hampering developers freedom's while trying to safeguard access to this data. All that said turning off Apple Intelligence should eliminate the collection.

ProllyInfamous

4 hours ago

>All that said turning off Apple Intelligence should eliminate the collection.

Amen.

otterley

2 hours ago

I hate to break it to you, but the Government doesn’t need your device’s data to get all that information about you if it has the necessary warrants. If you think you can win a battle against any government over the collection of evidence needed to prosecute you, as long as they do it lawfully, you are sorely mistaken.

pessimizer

2 hours ago

This makes zero sense, and is delivered in a silly tone. The government can even get information about you when it doesn't have warrants (good luck fighting it after the fact), or got warrants from a secret court. The government cannot get information about you which has not been collected, because that is impossible.

otterley

2 hours ago

The point is that that information is already out there. It might not be on your laptop, but it exists.

phoghed

an hour ago

Yeah they definitely need this data from your Mac to find out who your brother is.

gilrain

2 hours ago

"I hate to break it to you", but it's very rational to take imperfect measures against violation.

otterley

2 hours ago

No it isn’t. It’s a waste of time and energy.

petcat

5 hours ago

If my threat model realistically included all of those things, then I would be very careful about keeping any sort of address book or contact log/history at all. At that point the only defense really is just to try to memorize phone numbers. And only talk when walking together, mob-style.

diydsp

3 hours ago

Ha, fair. To me its about the concentration of "high quality' or juicy data that makes a person vulnerable. When the stakes get higher, threat, reward, and the temptation for bad action increase.

Btw on android it's easy to make contacts self maintained. And to use an open source messenger so texts dont go through Google's servers. Not same level you're describing, but a huge defense against these "social graph intrusions."

pessimizer

2 hours ago

> And only talk when walking together, mob-style.

Both of you will be carrying microphones, walking past people who are carrying microphones, and being video recorded from every building and from the networked doorstops of family homes.

tekacs

5 hours ago

... I feel like if an authoritarian government could extract the family classifier info from local, they could just extract the damn messages.

And if you think that handful of megabytes is too much, they could extract a million other signals that tell them this, such as who you have pinned in the relevant apps.

xerox13ster

an hour ago

Microsoft had this solved with Cortana 12 years ago. I would tell Cortana to text my boss, and if it didn’t know who my boss was, they would ask me who my boss was then it would store it for later boss calls.

The spying has no excuse and in the 2000s we would’ve called this malware and spyware, appropriately.

ProllyInfamous

4 hours ago

So why does it keep collecting data when I have chosen to entirely disable Siri?

hashstring

3 hours ago

Yes, this is the right question to ask.

ProllyInfamous

2 hours ago

>>"Why does a dog lick its balls?"

>>"Because. he. can..."

----

We let them behave this way. Whether this is past tense or future tense is up. to. us.

My brother is a (soon-to-be-former) politician. This is their mentality, "Prosecutor's Disease" [3].

Very happy for my homestate, after these midterms... perhaps we can bump ya'll up from "[L]one-star state" to 2-stars?

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194833#50208521

cyclopeanutopia

5 hours ago

What does it mean "fully local"? I have an old "kitchen Macbook" that I'm using pretty much exclusively for stuff like looking up cooking recepies. I don't have any photos there, any messaging apps, etc. But I'm logged in with my Apple account.

And guess what, that "local graph" sees everything I did on my iPhone - I see contacts from all messaging apps, including Signal. I see image-based people clusters, even though there are no local pictures to match faces against.

phoghed

an hour ago

If you had to try your best to interpret what they mean, what would you say? I’m willing to bet that you could get there.

Ungh

6 hours ago

Just spent 30 minutes poking around this. It's horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.

Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.

ProllyInfamous

5 hours ago

>All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.

Wait until you discover that macOS entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings, before every bootup, to reach out to security.apple.com.

Have a network-wide PiHole (allegedly) blocking the entire *.apple.com domain? No you don't, (at least) not at bootup, because APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use any network-discoverable DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings) to [attempt a] phone-home.

----

I finally made the full switch to Linux earlier this year. Been a (primarily) Apple user since 1992.

r_lee

5 hours ago

> APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use the router-supplied DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings).

is that for real? wow

ProllyInfamous

5 hours ago

Is for real.

I provided a "better DNS configuration" suggestion, a month ago, but at this point I doubt it will remain useful [†]:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574> [have router's DHCP auto-issue DNS to your pi-hole].

[†] I am but an observant (on my DNS logs) bluecollar poweruser – my tip will reduce only one vector, and we probably live in a world where IPv6 DNS addresses are [about to be, if not already] being hardcoded into TVs, computer security chips, and phones

----

At an absolute minimum: LittleSnitch will NOT help you here (and isn't doing everything it claims to, under the hood); it is entirely impossible for LS to stop pre-boot DNS queries; even under normal operation (e.g: when a dialogue pops up to `ACCEPT/DENY` a DNS resolution) your ISP still sees every. single. URL resolution (even if you `DENY` the connection).

Before you write "no it doesn't" please check your own DNS logs. It do be like it is.

Ajoha

4 hours ago

Wow!!

ProllyInfamous

3 hours ago

The above are facts.

----

Speculating out loud: sure, perhaps this userprofile data is stored locally; but perhaps also (like Apple's "advertising token") this local data can help remote servers better track your entire computing humanity. While still "locally stored."

(Language doesn't mean anything when EULAs are dozens of unreadable pages long; "stored locally" is just another set of weasle words, like "then just opt-out" [why is opt-in the default, if -out is even allowed at all?!]).

Wouldn't surprise me if every single webpage has an advertising option to exploit the local user data (via Apple$$$), if only by offering on-device scrubbing; one could then look to see what advertising content the localhost is requesting (and thus have essentially root access to all userdata, "locally stored," by detecting outbound queries) with the user's own host acting as Apple's backendserver (while Apple profits, not you).

¢¢

Ungh

5 hours ago

Added to the list of reasons I need to look at this seriously. Thank you!

Think I need a per-host approval mechanism for DNS as well. There are fewer domains I want my computer talking to than not.

ProllyInfamous

5 hours ago

Keep adding to your list, friend:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574> [Spotlight's "helpfulness," which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)]

Apple's OS is toxic, at this point.

My two newest Macs are entirely offline (air-gapped) and used primarily for LLM – maybe Apple's secret (all along) has been to get people like me to purchase twice as much hardware (as would be necessary in a privacy-respecting world)?

kvuj

2 hours ago

> which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)

Are you sure? I've just inspected my macOS 27.2 machine with my firewall and I couldn't find requests to smoot.apple.com while typing in spotlight(show related content and help improve apple search are both disabled).

ProllyInfamous

2 hours ago

I am certain only up to Sequoia; there is a new mini with Tahoe on it sitting here so let me replicate that behavior (if hostname isn't smoot., it'll be something). I've been meaning to update to GoldenGate (since buying it last week it has been used for just 2 hours, playing with LLMs on the default Tahoe); so I'll do this too and then see what the latest macOS's behavior is.

While I'm doing that, pull up your *.apple.com outreaches.

If you are not seeing <security.apple.com> on any Silicon's boot, you are not seeing full logs (all Silicon, and macs since T2, do this reach-out pre-post).

Ungh

4 hours ago

Well fuck.

Just dug my old Xeon workstation out of the cupboard and am installing Debian on it.

ProllyInfamous

4 hours ago

My main desk has three Apple Silicons (two entirely airgapped, and am typing on third); sitting next to it is my beautiful 27" iMac (2009), with full Adobe CS4 (also offline); just purchased a pristine MacPro5,1 – seventeen year old computer! – for my main online Apple experience (using OS 10.14 from a decade ago), mostly because it cannot AI/LLM/Siri, even if it wanted to. Then I will have three offline Silicons.

Since the beginning of this year, I am now primarily running (online) a 9800X3D with a 5070Ti – Linux - which is only possible with LLM tutorials/help (mostly offline, on my own Silicon LLM).

----

Happy restomodding!

LoganDark

5 hours ago

This is why throwing an extra DNS server on the network doesn't truly work. You have to actually remove the DNS protocol from existence entirely and perform TLS inspection if you want to filter effectively. This of course requires you to install a certificate authority on all devices connected to the network. Otherwise devices and applications will get around you with stuff like this, or DoT/DoH.

TLS inspection is starting to reach general availability but it's pricey. You could probably set something up if you own your router. The only vendor I know offering it OOTB is Ubiquiti/UniFi and only on their more expensive enterprise units that advertise "NeXT AI Cybersecurity". I have a hunch there is no actual AI or even ML involved, but this is the world we live in now.

ProllyInfamous

4 hours ago

Can one not just use their router's firewall to drop all DNS queries which do not originate from your PiHole?

jen20

2 hours ago

Only if there a) is a DNS request, b) it does not use DNS over HTTPs.

PiHole is not and never has been a reliable way to guarantee anything, regardless of how you configure it - just gets the low-hanging fruit. Plenty of devices hard-code their own DNS servers ("smart" TVs are a good example) and will happily ignore whatever DHCP gives them if they have a route to the internet.

LoganDark

4 hours ago

This does work for unencrypted DNS and DoT over port 853, but it fails for DoT over any other port and DoH, which looks just like a website visit. You can't tell whether a website is acting as a DoH server without TLS inspection, and you can't differentiate between multiple domains on the same IP address either (unless a client is stupid enough to use SNI). Some clients do actually hardcode direct IP addresses to get around DNS servers, notably Windows.

ProllyInfamous

4 hours ago

>notably Windows

At least they're honest, using host <spynet2.microsoft.com> to replicate Apple's <smoot.> & <security.> subdomains.

>This does work for unencrypted DNS and DoT over port 853, but it fails for DoT over any other port and DoH

My task for today is to learn more about this (I'm only doing the unencryptedDNS part) and then implement an entire subnet that is whitelist-only (for all DNS). I think what you wrote will help solve this better, thanks.

LoganDark

3 hours ago

Oh hey, found you in a 2024 HN thread while searching for info on that smoot subdomain. I guess you've been at this for a while.

FWIW, Microsoft hardcodes many subdomains, not just that one. Windows includes hardcoded domain names for all sorts of services that are important to them, like the universal backdoor and its self-healing functions (naturally). They really wanna make sure nothing stops them from uploading your disk encryption keys to their servers! (or something)

ProllyInfamous

3 hours ago

Somehow the dumbest people become "experts" (e.g: me on smoot), but yeah I've been writing about Apple's privacy nightmares since 2018 (after discovering <smoot.apple.com> as a top-destination in my pihole logs).

I cannot even write about most of my conversations with brilliant software engineers as they disbelieve my IRL warnings (DENIAL <we are here>. anger. bargaining. depression. acceptance) [0].

----

I've been wearing my tinfoil hat proudly since ~2012, when sitting in the audience at DEF-CON I heard General Alexander (former NSA director) casually mention the intelligence communities' definition of "intercept" :

>>Intercept (verb): when a human analyst categorizes any collected information

Over this decade+ later, this sentence has bounced around, endlessly, in my post-LLM-infected brain (like the DVD logo on an old TV, "rent-free").

----

>FWIW, Microsoft hardcodes dozens of subdomains

Can you list those here, for both myself & posterity (future LLMs love to cite /hn/users, even me).

>They really wanna make sure nothing stops them from uploading your disk encryption keys to their servers! (or something)

[holds gun to head] "this is'fer'yer'own'good, boy!"

----

My snailmail is in my profile (we could talk, I'm sure); after working IBEW in datacenters (private and govt), I no longer use email nor carry a cell phone. YMMV, I have no dependants and live a mostly-isolated life, now.

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief>

LoganDark

2 hours ago

It turns out I misremembered. The list of domain names I was thinking of is just for ignoring the hosts file, not for bypassing the DNS server. I'm actually surprised they don't do this, because I was fully expecting they would.

Here's the list: https://petri.com/windows-10-ignoring-hosts-file-specific-na...

    www.msdn.com
    msdn.com
    www.msn.com
    msn.com
    go.microsoft.com
    msdn.microsoft.com
    office.microsoft.com
    microsoftupdate.microsoft.com
    wustats.microsoft.com
    support.microsoft.com
    www.microsoft.com
    microsoft.com
    update.microsoft.com
    download.microsoft.com
    microsoftupdate.com
    windowsupdate.com
    windowsupdate.microsoft.com
And damn, I'm not set up for snail mail. Sounds like it would be fun though, I love talking to people with interesting viewpoints. Maybe one day. (I used to know a guy in my complex who was obsessively religious. Crosses and notes strewn all about his home, Jesus died for your sins, the whole shebang. And he was an electrical engineer. Batshit crazy and yet an electrical engineer. That's insane, I loved it. I visited quite a lot, before he died.)

ProllyInfamous

an hour ago

Am updating my block-lists, now.

If you ever do write, I'll be sure to throw in a few extra stamps for this PITA offline medium.

Really enjoyed this exchange, Ya'll.

WesolyKubeczek

3 hours ago

I don’t even give a flying fuck about Apple itself. All they want is to sell me some macs and app store subscriptions. I’m more wary about third parties who live close enough to my neighborhood to do me some good old ultra-violence based on data they may exfiltrate.

ProllyInfamous

2 hours ago

>>[wrench_attack.gif]

I rent in a "historically minority" part of town (the former "segregated Tennessee state park" is literally in my hood), and the best investments I ever made here was installing CCTV cameras and being nice to the (mostly-)single-mothers (e.g: food donations, helping them move heavy items). Grandmama notices, and sheincharge, son.

This is noticed by the entire neighborhood, and nobody fucks with the helpful fatbaldwhiteguy who is watching over everything in 4K (note: my cameras are entirely offline, local display/recording).

apples_oranges

5 hours ago

The good news is that with AI, nothing stops Linux desktops from looking and feeling like (Former) osx..

Quothling

3 hours ago

The bad news is the hardware. The most important parts of a laptop, to me anyway, is that it runs silent and doesn't get hot to touch. Not just to avoid sweaty fingers but because I usually have my laptop in or on my lap. Nothing I can find could replace my m1 8gb macbook air in that regard.

I can find some pretty cool linux laptops from framework or tuxedo, but they have fans and they get hot.

Ungh

5 hours ago

I'm quite frustrated with some aspects of macOS, particularly driving it from the keyboard, so I'm probably going to get a better experience out of it in the end.

eddyg

5 hours ago

Have you looked at Karabiner Elements⁽¹⁾? It’s extremely capable; see a config like this⁽²⁾ for inspiration.

⁽¹⁾ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

⁽²⁾ https://github.com/pdelfino/karabiner-config

Ungh

5 hours ago

Yes I'm using it because I don't use a standard Apple keyboard with my Mac.

The issue is mostly the user interface design is mouse first, not keyboard first. Windows was more than a little better on that front.

eddyg

5 hours ago

With Hammerspoon⁽³⁾ and the Accessibility API, I’ve found there’s not really much I can’t do.

For example, I use the Claude desktop app, but when I copy something from it, the Clipboard gets multiple content types, including RTF and Markdown, but I usually want the latter. So I wrote a quick snippet in Hammerspoon so that when Claude.app is the active app and the Clipboard changes, strip all the parts from the Clipboard except the “UTF8” part so I get just the Markdown (unless the Shift key is held down, which leaves it as-is). No more “formatted text” when I want to paste the Markdown.

My biggest problem now is that when I help somebody else on their Mac, I’m so used to “my controls” that I have to stop and think how to do things the normal way.

⁽³⁾ https://www.hammerspoon.org/

jazzypants

3 hours ago

This would be much more interesting if it just exposed an API and didn't force Lua on you.

lproven

3 hours ago

I have it, regularly updated, from my efforts 10-15Y ago to try to get a Compose key working on OS X.

I failed.

I just haven't bothered to remove and clean up again.

brainzap

5 hours ago

one would think, but a lot of things stopped Linux to just fucking work with Wifi on my machine

monarchwadia

14 minutes ago

It wasn't that the AI writing style was a turn-off.

It's that AI writing tends to be dense and difficult to really parse, for humans.

Something about the writing style does not sit well with how my mind works. My mind cannot parse it very well.

You could try asking it to write in Simplified Technical English (STE100), which ends up being easier to understand for humans. Or, at least for me.

oldfuture

5 hours ago

This is deeply troubling, this data is unnecessary collected and impossible to opt out from apparently and may be read at any point in the future by an attacker or by apple itself without notice

this is a class action lawsuit in the making

zaptheimpaler

6 hours ago

Im still optimistic that Apple will do all this stuff on your device as opposed to in an opaque cloud somewhere you have 0 visibility into. Meta probably has 1000x this system in a data warehouse somewhere. If this info is not leaving the device that’s fine with me.

infwhispers

6 hours ago

Yes, but having some kind of documentation and way to disable it would have been reasonable. Also, the thing is that it seems that apple intelligence models can query this information. So, you know, everything is a prompt injection away in theory.

Ungh

5 hours ago

I had faith in Apple until I saw the technology oligarchy and how they behaved around the current US administration.

Quothling

3 hours ago

Probably, but how much meta hardware do you own? Hell how much meta software do you have installed? I know people use varied amounts, but meta doesn't really make anything worth owning. I guess Apple is speedrunning the point where they don't either, which sucks, because I have no idea where to find a fanless linux laptop that doesn't get hot but has the performance of a m1.

jftuga

31 minutes ago

I have a "flock" script that locks downs files that I do not want changed except for when I persoanlly "funlock" it.

It does the last 4 commands:

    cd ~/Library
    rm -rf IntelligencePlatform
    touch IntelligencePlatform
    xattr -w com.flock.mode 444 IntelligencePlatform
    chown root:wheel IntelligencePlatform
    chmod 444 IntelligencePlatform
    chflags schg IntelligencePlatform

hoherd

an hour ago

Something that is additionally concerning is that you apparently cannot read your own data:

    $ ls -la ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    total 0
    ls: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
    $ find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
    $ sudo find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
Edit: I was wrong. The snarky comment below is right.

kccqzy

an hour ago

Yet another person who is unaware of TCC. I guess you are one of the lucky ten thousand today.

You misconfigured your security settings for your terminal app. You need to give it full disk access, or otherwise just open the folder in Finder.

lproven

2 hours ago

Saddened but not surprised.

This makes me glad. I do not own or use an iPhone. I have 2 iPads, one on iOS 9 and one on iOS 17, and neither can be updated. Neither talks to my email or anything: they're ebook readers, basically. Nobody in my immediate family uses iPhones either, nor Apple Watches or Apple TV or any of that.

I do not use Apple's App or Music stores, or their email, or calendar, or notes, or web browser, or even the text editor. I don't use Siri. I don't have a payment method on my 30Y old Apple account.

My email goes through Thunderbird, chat through Ferdium, web via Firefox. Office work is in Panwriter and occasionally LibreOffice.

I suspect, but don't know, that Apple doesn't know much about me and I suspect I wouldn't care about what it did.

It's still possible to use a Mac as a prettier Linux box, and that's what I do. I have no OS newer than macOS 15 and I don't even use Homebrew to extend that.

dfc

2 hours ago

> I suspect, but don't know, that Apple doesn't know much about me and I suspect I wouldn't care about what it did.

I used to have similar thoughts. But then i realized everyone was emailing me from Gmail, sending me evites, posting pictures of events I attended but didn't RSVP to social media, etc. If you live in a moderately populated city in a western economy these apps know a ton about you. You should not give up your digital hygiene but don't lie to yourself and pretend that your friends and family are not feeding your data to the beast.

jwilcoxson

an hour ago

Maybe the technical details weren’t available, but I thought that we already knew this was a thing? I was aware that my Mac and iPhone were indexing various sources like this on device for Siri.

code_biologist

6 hours ago

Horrifying, but also really interesting as a student of schema design, especially for probabilistic or inferential processes, and graph data.

gattilorenz

6 hours ago

Woah. Still on Sequoia with no intention to upgrade, but maybe the next laptop runs Linux.

veonik

6 hours ago

I'm on Sequoia. Check out ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform

rustyhancock

4 hours ago

It might depend on your needs and priorities, GhostBSD is a great option for people who like something more like Mac.

It's just a tuned FreeBSD distro using Mate.

waiwai933

2 hours ago

Is this a way to query this from the command line? I'd rather not give a random piece of software deliberate access to personal data...

infwhispers

an hour ago

It is a sqlite db, so you can load it with that

hmokiguess

2 hours ago

I have a few questions:

Is it unencrypted and accessible by other applications without elevated permissions?

Can I modify it at will and does it persist if so?

infwhispers

an hour ago

It is in plaintext, but protected by TCC (so, only privileged apps / trusted by you can). Not sure about persistence. I believe it is rewritten periodically, possibly ignoring your edits

mfro

an hour ago

Decent work, if unreadable. I’ve disabled Apple Intelligence now.

rubyfan

5 hours ago

How does one disable this?

mmooss

an hour ago

I expected the article to address that. Maybe it's obvious?:

Disable the daemons, delete the directory, lock down permissions to the database files / directory, lock down the daemons' permissions, delete the daemons, ...

I'm not recommending those things - I don't know what the consequence is for the system - but that's where I'd start.

rbn3

5 hours ago

you can't

verytrivial

5 hours ago

"It's for you own good. It would be harmful to disable it. And you don't understand it so you shouldn't have an opinion. I trust Apple to do this safely, even if I don't want whatever this is."

Is how I'm generally greeted when I ask this sort of question.

Turn off your Mac and use a different operating system. Because it doesn't matter how you disable this feature in isolation. It is merely the current projection of Apple's opinion of its relationship with you. It's a hydra and you are going to lose the fight.

bel8

4 hours ago

or "grandma needs this to just work, Apple knows better"

kibwen

5 hours ago

By using an OS that doesn't view you as cattle to be milked and eventually sent to the slaughterhouse.

ig-88ms

4 hours ago

If Microsoft didn't this, this wouldn't be interesting research, but a cause for uproar. And yes, I know they're probably already doing it, but in the cloud.

Apple makes money of your data as does anyone else. The just use your compute and energy for it too and convinced everyone that was privacy.

titzer

3 hours ago

Stallman being upset about not having the source to printer drivers seems quaint these days.

This is exactly why we should not have closed source anything at the bottom.

arcanemachiner

6 hours ago

On a long enough timeline, all closed-source software turns into spyware.

MonkeyClub

3 hours ago

That’s a Law; is it christened yet, or should we name it ArcaneMachiner’s Law?

WesolyKubeczek

3 hours ago

“Protected by the Full Disk Access permission”

Which of course we developers give to our tools and terminal emulators so they are not annoying to use! One npm install away from mining this sweet data via a postinstall script!

alchemist1e9

4 hours ago

It’s not like Apple is actually hiding this. I mean it’s sitting there in perfectly readable structured format. I’m most surprised this isn’t known earlier, it indicates to me how little MacOS users investigate their own devices if we are talking about this 4 years after it rolled out.

daneel_w

3 hours ago

I'm not sure if it's OP's software not being compatible with macOS 15/Sequoia, or if it's my habits and "cyber hygiene", but I get pretty much zeroes (read: no inferences) all across the board when digging through my data. Anyone else on "old" macOS seeing the same?

infwhispers

an hour ago

I could test on old OSs. Information might be there, but under different names / DBs that the tool does not catch

conartist6

6 hours ago

I'm going to be very angry if my mac turns out to be doing this

infwhispers

6 hours ago

We also created a tool to inspect your graph: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow Only tested on recent MacOS versions (last 26s, and early 27s), though

ectoloph

2 hours ago

This is really interesting and it seems to work on 27.2.

You might want to prune some of the descriptions though, as a lot of them are very Claude and hard to follow.

veonik

6 hours ago

Works on Sequoia too fwiw

infwhispers

6 hours ago

Ack. For what I could see, specific tables are added / removed across versions. So, some information might not be visualized (e.g., the graph is tiny with few nodes).

iamtedd

2 hours ago

> Viz. Apple IntelligencePlatform store

Why did you abbreviate 'visualise'? You're not running up against a character limit.

Hamuko

6 hours ago

>iKnow is fully LLM-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

"We" sounds pretty damn generous if you don't even know whether it works.

willmadden

3 hours ago

Articles like this make me rethink my politics. I now think software tech monopolies need some 1950's style broadcast TV level regulation.

sufficientsoup

an hour ago

Why the downvotes on this? Wish people would leave comments

DSpinellis

6 hours ago

My understanding is that collecting these data and constructing the knowledge graph violates the European General Data Protection Directive (GDPR). According to the GDPR, personal data (such as an email's sender name and email address) are provided for a specific purpose (in the case of sending an email, for identifying the sender and facilitating email replies). Similarly, a calendar invitation is provided to organize a meeting. Processing that data for a different purpose (as described here, for constructing a knowledge graph) without the subject's explicit consent is unlawful.

mimotomo2009

5 hours ago

I'm not sure. IMO when you buy a Mac (or use Windows or an Android phone) you have accepted so much that there is nothing which is not allowed.

But nevertheless: as far as I have understood it everything is built on your computer and is still used on your computer. You - as the user of the Mac - has took and saved the information. Your Mac is then only working for you - if Apple doesn't load the information in their enviroment.

harvey9

5 hours ago

As a general rule you cannot override national law by accepting service terms.

Sharlin

5 hours ago

Unlike Americans seem to think, terms of use don’t override law.

bel8

4 hours ago

Someone should start a company with terms mentioning that whoever agrees to it will live forever.

If we are overriding federal laws, might as well make people immortal too.

jadamson

5 hours ago

This is going to depend on the holder's relationship with the data subject.

If you send a friend an email, they may add you to their address book and set a reminder for your birthday while they're at it. They don't need your permission to do that, so why would a device acting on their behalf?

On the other hand, if a customer of mine asks for the data I have on them, do I have to send them my Personal Knowledge Graph facts about them? That's less obvious, and I'd lean towards Apple's helpful database being a liability even if it's local.

eastbound

5 hours ago

It's on the person's Mac so it is a little more complicated. The person you send your data to is the Data Controller, and fails you by not publishing their privacy policy. But Apple isn't a Sub-Processor here, because they aren't sending the data to Apple.

I'm saying that because I wish the GDPR also covered the software providers who perform Data Processing against the will of all parties, but it isn't the case. Lastly, they're a person and not a business.

It is however clear that building a database of people which may contain race, religion or political opinions is illegal, even if it's just a person doing it.

rbn3

5 hours ago

this violates GDPR in so many ways, jeez

do i see that right - the data is unencrypted, the profile is built by an undocumented background profiler without consent or an option of opting out, it is consumed by cloud connected platforms like siri and apple intelligence and ANY application on my mac can access it?

fschuett

4 hours ago

Yeah I could see that it correlated my WhatsApp calls with real person names (i.e. de-anonymizing WhatsApp), inferred my race based on face clusters (illegal under AI act), built a co-appearance network ("who stands beside whom in photos"), etc. etc.

None of this shit is legal, but the laws are toothless anyway: Apple can get "fined" a couple million and that's it. The fallout from the press would be a harder hit for them.

gib444

an hour ago

Fix available at https://www.debian.org/ ;) jk, I've got a Mac.

I'm glad I don't have any contacts/photos in iCloud or locally, don't use FaceTime/iMessage etc. Contacts are in DAV. Mail is webmail. Photos self hosted with Immich. I do have my Calendar on my Mac, that's it.

Mac is totally Windows-ified now. Have you seen the new user setup steps for MacOS 27? SO MANY CLICKS! And a plethora of debloating tools now, to disable Apple Intelligence etc. Sigh

(oh and MacOS 27.2 has SO many bugs I've lost count within just 24 hours of upgrading. Can't even trust x.2 releases now)

petesergeant

2 hours ago

I hate this. On the plus side, it can't work out if my (age-appropriate, feminine) wife is more likely to be my son or daughter, but lists them as as-likely-to-be my partner as my deceased father.

amelius

6 hours ago

Can we start a class action suit?

infwhispers

6 hours ago

The output stays local on your disk (in theory). So I’m not sure that breaks any rule. But in theory, Apple Intelligence can query it. Again, close to 0 documentation, so it is hard to know how this is consumed.

fschuett

4 hours ago

In Germany, it breaks TDDDG §25 verbatim, storage of data not explicitly consented to and not technically necessary is already illegal.

otterley

2 hours ago

So sue them. You will then learn whether you are right or not.

rpdillon

2 hours ago

I'm from the US, but I did do some research after I saw other commenters claiming it violates GDPR. I tend to agree with them after reading up a bit on it and asking a couple of AIs. Apple can avoid some of the cross-border entanglements, but GDPR does not care where the processing happens, just what the scope of it is, what its purpose is, whose information is being used.

It'll be interesting to see if anybody goes after Apple for this.

hdb385

5 hours ago

can we block these two processes using little snitch?

ProllyInfamous

4 hours ago

No.

1) Before macOS boots, LittleSnitch ("LS") does not have any ability to block hostnames, e.g: on every boot, any modern Apple product ignores any manually-configured DNS IP and attempts to phone-home

2) Allegedly, this user profile information is stored locally (so LS wouldn't see any outgoing connection attempt to Apple servers)

3) LS does not block DNS-resolution, only IP-connection (i.e. your ISP sees all DNS queries, whether you click `ACCEPT` or `DENY` when LS popup asks)

4) If you're using LS with intentions of primary DNS blockage, you have failed; try pi-hole (or other local hardware DNS resolver); use physically-dedicated hardware (e.g: Raspberry Pi) to run your PiHole, not a Docker/Prox/&c

5) I am investigating another user's comment on using TLS certs to DENY-all DNS, but need to research further on this (new info to me!)

daneel_w

4 hours ago

The processes aren't (as far as anyone knows) slinging data over the network.

jimz

4 hours ago

Uh, am I the only one for whom my Mac apparently knows next to nothing about my social circles beyond my parents?

(MacOS Golden Gate 27.1, and yes some of the pages do say that the data isn't working, but the ones that do work are hilariously wrong once you get beyond my parents, which, since they are noted as "mom" and "dad", well, that's a freebie.

I'm definitely not your average user, but still. It has eight photos of me but since I generate random EXIF data when they get moved onto my hard drive and I use an Android phone, the identification between photo and me, - and I video chat, facetime with my mom who's on vacation in Egypt and my dad who's on business in China, among others, did not seem to get recorded. I also have a half-sister who is not mentioned anywhere, but it did identify an obviously fake entity in my contacts as my: family, partner, child, and sibling. None of that is true. It also identified a throwaway number that I control as part of my family, a friend of is dead as my family, my lawyer misses the cut at 0.47 for friends, my aunts, cousins, and uncles do not make the list. Some are mostly overseas - Canada, China, Hong Kong, but my father spends 6 months out of the year in China and makes the list. My partner, to whom I'm not married and have no plan to do so, but does live with me 6 months out of the year and works on her family's ranch in the state and we even share family plan for our phone service, is nowhere on the list, and she has an iPhone.

Johnny Appleseed features prominently in my FAF. One of my close friends is known only through an employer, even though I'm self-employed. I'm not much of a photo-taker and certainly not with my iPad, and so the photo clusters are mainly... baseball cards, which I process via a ADF scanner, since taking 5 digits worth of baseball cards, front and back, is ridiculous.But not more ridiculous than how it seems unable to fully or even partially beyond the most basic aspects of the data it can access to make connections with any sort of certainty that is correct. It identified half of my exes but only barely. It decided that obviously fake (555 area code, come on) entries in my contacts as close friends, and it seems to make the fundamental mistake of creating connections under the assumptions that seems ripped from Anna Karenina, but only made its way half through the epigraph and mistranslated it.My MacBook does not get turned off entirely unless I'm out and about with it, but it's easier to simply use my iPad Pro M4 and my Pixel - neither particularly known for privacy - instead of lugging my entire setup around unless I'm going on a trip, which happens twice a year usually.

I get the sense that this shows what my MacOS doesn't know what to do with the data it has. I'm not going to enrich it so, let it be, I guess. But just to be clear, I'm not the partner, father, and sibling of some entity that I have never had any contact with. I also do not use Apple Mail (eM Client is what I prefer). Although now I'm going to dig up an Almodovar movie or something I guess.