They don’t need to.

They only have to remove your personal data. So the company / AI model is not allowed to have data specifically on you, but it can have the average age of people living in your town even if your data contributed to calculating that average.

That said, Apple here never had affirmative consent, so they can’t get away with just doing this.

aware*

I’m on iOS 18, hmm. Maybe it’s region specific? Or just hasn’t been rolled out to me yet, for whatever reason.

Wealthy? Look at flagship phone sales numbers every year. Broke ass people have expensive gadgets all the time. Get a life.

Very few people spend $1000 outright on a phone, you know that right? Every major mobile provider has some sort of installment plan for purchasing a new device. Apple offers one directly as well.

While I’m still struggling to find an appropriate replacement for my photo editing apps, I’m happy to report that support and usability for most popular Linux distros have improved to the point that I now find Linux not only more stable, but easier to navigate than Win 10 was even at its best.

The amount of noise associated with Windows, generally due to people answering questions about the wrong version of windows or the wrong application, searching for any help topics is like trying to run through mud. It’s literally quicker now to learn a totally new skill on Linux than to try to update your knowledge base on Windows.

I don’t believe that Win10 will die, due to the huge amount of users and companies. I think that it will be the same a with Win7, which survived several years it’s announced end. There are still users which can’t even update to Win11 with a relative new computer (without tricks), not because the lack of sources, but because it’s specs don’t appear in the list made by M$ of supported specs, as in my case with a 3 years old Laptop, because my AMD Radeon 9425 don’t appears in this idiotic list, offering to buy a new PC to use Win11 🤬💩

The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.

What? I use a stock Pixel Pro and there’s no fluff. It’s very vanilla, but does everything I need it to do without fuss. I was using Nova Launcher Pro, but they sold it to an advertising company a while ago, so I went back to the stock launcher.

I have the 14 pro and my sister recently got the 16 base model. I don’t know why, but the pictures from her newer phone looked like a major leap backwards in quality. Also, the latest OS does feel like its features were written in crayon and that its waiting to kick off its training wheels. I can’t fully describe it: it’s not clunky or clumsy, it just feels like something is missing from the experience. I’ve never really felt this way from a phone version upgrade before.

I don’t want Apple exflitrating my photos.

Well they don’t. I don’t want to justify the opt-in by default but, again (cf my reply history) here they are precisely trying NOT to send anything usable to their own server. They are sending data that can’t be used by anything else but your phone. That’s the entire point of homomorphic encryption, even the server they are sent to do NOT see it as the original data. They can only do some kind of computations to it and they can’t “revert” back to the original.

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TLDR edit: I’m supporting the above comment - ie. i do not support apple’s actions in this case.

It’s definitely good for people to learn a bit about homomorphic computing, and let’s give some credit to apple for investing in this area of technology.

That said:

1. Encryption in the majority of cases doesn’t actually buy absolute privacy or security, it buys time - see NIST’s criteria of ≥30 years for AES. It will almost certainly be crackable <oneday> either by weakening or other advances… How many people are truly able to give genuine informed consent in that context?

2. Encrypting something doesn’t always work out as planned, see example:

“DON’T WORRY BRO, ITS TOTALLY SAFE, IT’S ENCRYPTED!!”

Source

Yes Apple is surely capable enough to avoid simple, documented, mistakes such as above, but it’s also quite likely some mistake will be made. And we note, apple are also extremely likely capable of engineering leaks and concealing it or making it appear accidental (or even if truly accidental, leveraging it later on).

Whether they’d take the risk, whether their (un)official internal policy would support or reject that is ofc for the realm of speculation.

That they’d have the technical capability to do so isn’t at all unlikely. Same goes for a capable entity with access to apple infrastructure.

3. The fact they’ve chosen to act questionably regarding user’s ability to meaningfully consent, or even consent at all(!), suggests there may be some issues with assuming good faith on their part.

What if I don’t want Apple looking at my photos in any way, shape or form?’

Then you don’t buy an iPhone. Didn’t they say a year or two ago that they’re going to scan every single picture using on-board processing to look for images and videos that could be child porn and anything suspicious would be flagged and sent to human review?

“opt out” to looking at my data ✅

Doesn’t this sort of bypass the whole point of encryption in the first place?

No, homomorphic encryption allows a 3rd party to perform operations on encrypted data without decrypting it. The resulting answer is in encrypted form and can only be decrypted by whoever has the key.

Extremely oversimplified example:

Say you have a service that converts dollar amounts to euros using the latest exchange rate. You send the amount in dollars, it multiplies by the exchange rate and then returns the euro amount.

Now, let’s assume the clients of this service do not want to disclose the amounts they are converting. What they could do is pick a large random number and multiply the amount by this number. The conversion service multiplies this by the exchange rate and returns the ridiculously large number back. Then you divide thet number by the random number you picked and you have converted dollars to euros without the service ever knowing the actual amount.

Of course the reality is much more complicated than that but the idea is the same: you can perform operations on data in its encrypted form and now know what the data is nor the decrypted result of the operation.

So homomorphic encryption means the server can compute on the data without actually knowing what’s in it. It’s counter-intuitive but better not think about it as encryption/decryption/encryption precisely because the data is NOT decrypted on the server. It’s sent there, computed on, then a result is sent back.

I’m not pretending to understand how homomorphic encryption works or how it fits into this system, but here’s something from the article.

With some server optimization metadata and the help of Apple’s private nearest neighbor search (PNNS), the relevant Apple server shard receives a homomorphically-encrypted embedding from the device, and performs the aforementioned encrypted computations on that data to find a landmark match from a database and return the result to the client device without providing identifying information to Apple nor its OHTTP partner Cloudflare.

There’s a more technical write up here. It appears the final match is happening on device, not on the server.

The client decrypts the reply to its PNNS query, which may contain multiple candidate landmarks. A specialized, lightweight on-device reranking model then predicts the best candidate by using high-level multimodal feature descriptors, including visual similarity scores; locally stored geo-signals; popularity; and index coverage of landmarks (to debias candidate overweighting). When the model has identified the match, the photo’s local metadata is updated with the landmark label, and the user can easily find the photo when searching their device for the landmark’s name.

Maybe they “encrypt” it in jpg? XD

If you’re an apple fanboy, you’ve got a lot of secret closet cries these days

Dammit jerboa.

seeing a blank comment, what do I do with that information to fix it?