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?
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.
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.
I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor. When I buy an Apple computer, I don't want to have a relationship with Apple. I don't want to log in to iCloud. I don't want them deciding what software I can run and what I can't. I don't want them wagging their finger disapprovingly at me when I download and run something not "notarized" by them. I don't want them mediating my use of my own computer! When I buy a Windows PC it's even worse. Again, I don't want to log into a Microsoft account. I don't want them pushing other software on me via in-OS ads. I don't want to send telemetry back to them. I don't want them recording my screen and saving it god knows where for nebulous "features".
When I buy a table saw, I don't expect DeWalt to hang around my workshop telling me what I can and can't cut, watching and logging what wood I use and when I use it, what my finished product looks like, changing the features and buttons on the saw in the middle of the night. Why the fuck do we tolerate this from software??
It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions! Some of them are letting telemetry and metrics and A/B testing creep in. And some third party Linux software is just as intrusive and demanding as commercial Windows/Mac software.
> I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor.
This is precisely it.
When I buy a screwdriver, I just want to use it when I need it. I don't want to have an account with Craftsman and give them any PII, etc. No, I just want to use the product I purchased.
It is really the same with any tech product. I bought it, I want to use it. I want zero contact with the manufacturer (even if I like them).
You bought a Mac that comes with Apple things. Macs don’t ship without Apple things. You get them for Apple things. You entered into the relationship explicitly. What’s the gripe?
I don't think anything has changed in the world. I suspect that you, like I, and lots of other hackers, had a very different group of friends growing up, and you didn't realize how insular your community was. Now as an adult you're seeing kids who are outside that particular narrow friend group, and attributing the change to the kids, rather than your to wider perspective.
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.
> In some Linux distros like Debian, everything is illegal/prohibited until you explicitly allow it
Bit of a nitpick, but this is certainly not true of their userspace, where an `npm install` can just install a keylogger or read your ssh keys, or do whatever it wants -- except for updating your video card driver.
I would hope that someone deliberately choosing to run a headless Debian install would be wise enough to not go around running `npm install` willy nilly. In my personal experience, I've never once needed an `npm install` in Debian environment. I've only ever used them in server environments and to be honest thinking about it, that was all pre-npm when javascript was kept where it belonged in your browser and not my server. Someone screwed us all allowing JS on the server, but that's an entirely different conversation.
Well, it's enough to use a trusted app as your own user on non-trusted data. The former just has to have a memory vulnerability, which is not rare given most of it is C.
So yeah, don't be so confident in it working out. Unfortunately gnu/linux desktop is severally lacking in security (and by desktop I mean a headless personal use as well)
I used to run npm install unsupervised from a script on headless Debian that I deliberately chose dozens of times everyday. Later I moved my CI to Alpine.
As much as a sibling comment gets it right, this is wrong:
> And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
They never built those skills. I know that a lot of us cheered the computer revolution, thinking that everyone born after would understand the things that older generations didn't get, but most didn't care and didn't learn.
I always thought the quote "you're not the customer you're the product" originated with RMS, I went to look it up before I commented and it turns out it was Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman in 1973! Just as true now as then. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/
Yes, and if the OS maker is not mining you for data, they are leaving mountains of cash on the table. So mine they must and mine they will. The financial incentives are overwhelming.
We should be removing those incentives at every level: legislative, societal, government and private.
Chrome was the first major piece of software to incorporate automatic background installation of software updates without explicit user assent in 2008. Now, it's everywhere. I think this was an underappreciated event in the history of software freedom.
But it was the internet that made all the spying, profiling, and tracking possible. Before that, there was no motivation, so all software was developed and sold solely on its benefits to the user.
Today, even free software can have telemetry and ulterior motives.
The charitable take is that computing has grown to expand more and more use cases, and to deliver good experiences for those use cases requires simplifying assumptions, and that's where the inherent complexity of life leaks in.
for me it was around the time of windows 8, that I felt my computer had a lot of things to do that weren't the application I actually wanted to use. Before that I would just occasionally feel that the system could be a little kludgy.
People want the features that these things drive. PCs stopped being a purely "user says X, do X" thing at approximately the moment they became powerful enough to run things in the background. The idea that the computer would be helpful and do things for you beyond what you explicitly asked for is pretty attractive. People don't like being spied on, but good news, this one is all local. This isn't like Facebook building a social graph for you so they can sell the data to advertisers.
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.
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.
I suspect a lot of the fascination is because the information can be used to improve our quality of life. I suspect the cynicism comes from those who have the most access to this information using it to improve their quality of life at our expense. (That, and actually making use of the information takes more effort than most people are willing to expend.)
I have always been leery of data collection, but I have my own parallel: there was a lot of optimism about the benefits of personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course, that was pushed by the industry itself. I have since realized that what was happening then was not all that different from what is happening today. The outcomes were different because the tools were different, but it basically reduced/reduces to a bunch of people trying to enrich themselves by promising one thing and delivering another.
Adjacent to this I think it’s becoming clear that these technologies also change the signals we receive from one another. For example remembering details in a conversation is a signal that you were listening. If some system makes a breach into that social interaction you lose that signal. Now remembering details is no longer a signal.
I’m seeing it with polished websites. A polished site used to be a signal that a product was somewhat well thought out—at least it was worth the creators time to polish its marketing page. While now that AI products spit those out with AI speak that signal is lost.
I wonder if we’ll find out that the signal itself was more important than the means of sending the signal.
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
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.
I think of privacy as the right to be myself, because I get to choose which parts of my persona(s?) to expose.
People change over time, and those I care about will be part of the journey. We don’t remember each other’s mistakes all the time.
And then, of course, there is the effort we put into these relationships. I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises than their LLM of choice automatically sends me a carefully crafted messaged based on our interactions.
> I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises
Do most people really remember all the birthdays they acknowledge? For me they must be diarised, or beyond immediate family there's no chance.
I used to think it was artificial and pointless to wish people happy birthday after being reminded by google calendar. I now know enough adults who have taken (mostly minor) offence to being forgotten, that I play the game.
> 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.
As this becomes normalized, people will retreat to a safer persona even in private conversations. This does not solve the problem at all; a great many mental illnesses and dynamics around pathological abuse are tied to the details of how each of us has a private and public-facing persona.
Already I see Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are heavily resenting the demands placed on them to be always in 'branding'/'self-marketing' modes, and are seeking ways to retreat from the relentless expectations of being always in 'public persona', and are suspicious that this way of living is harmful.
Exactly. It’s a chilling effect on an ever-increasing proportion of human interaction. If everything you say is on permanent record then the safest course of action is to say little, and keep it as bland as possible.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot with zoom recordings. In office we used to have chats about a wide range of topics that were sometimes heated, but also respectful. Now with every meeting recorded, it’s all become pretty saccharine.
I don't think this is the same situation at all. Zoom recordings are outside your control and you know your boss or HR will have access to them. And relationships with employers are often closer to enemy than friend.
Your friend's Mac creating a knowledge graph is totally different because they control it. It gives them power to remember more about their interactions with you, but they would have to actively abuse it to hurt you in any way. If you can't trust someone with information then don't give it to them in the first place expecting them to forget it.
The problem is what happens if you get hacked or Apple decides to sell you out/work with law enforcement. I would only trust code like that if it was fully transparent about what it's doing, open source and strictly opt in. Apple is doing it in the background and that makes it instantly suspicious.
I don't understand what's wrong with the tech industry in the past 20 years. It feels like every time there is an opportunity to do the wrong thing, there is a mad rush towards that opportunity. Quickly! Do the wrong thing _first_ so some other company doesn't get to profit from evil instead of us. No company seems to consider abstaining from evil practices; burying the knowledge, or building systems which cannot be used for evil. The question only seems to be, how can _our_ evil succeed and benefit us.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yes! Why is the keyboard on iOS still sooooo frustrating to use? Sometimes I wonder if it’s been intentionally nerfed to push us to use siri or apple intelligence.
I’m just waiting for the next iOS release with “Next-gen Swipe powered by Apple Intelligence Pro” (that conveniently only works on the latest 2 generations of iPhone)
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.”
The interesting aspect for me is that what we perceive as "claudism" here is exactly how TV reporters have always talked - and to a point, how marketers / pitchers talk. How did it end up having this disproportionate weight in AI engines ?
Presumably because it was at least for a good while ranked high in evaluations because it sounded punchy and gave the impression of being insightful. In isolation. Before it oversaturated everything.
> 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.
> 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.
It's no less true, though. I'm sure there is a cohort of HN folks who don't have or maintain a social media account (either any more, or ever), there are likely many more that do.
There's always been a good bit of tension here between the YC founders and the people who work in the industry. I was banned for comments about PG ten years ago. Neither VC nor workers here are unaware of the consequences of widespread apathy. My disappointment is with one side of that argument capitulating or acting as if the principle is lost, or perhaps being too uneducated and ignorant to state the case.
The VC around here loses more than we do if HN ceases to be a useful barometer.
> I was banned for comments about PG ten years ago.
Where was that? I'd like to see a link, because this doesn't sound right to me. I was running HN 10 years ago, and it has never been a practice to ban people for "comments about PG".
We ban accounts that repeatedly break the site guidelines, including with personal attacks, but that is not a question of who the person is—it's a question of how badly they've broken the rules.
On a side note, every few times I open Google's photo gallery on my android phone, it pops up a dark pattern "backup your photos" toast with a pre-selected radio box saying yes, and two or three delicate manual steps to AVOID having it start uploading all my photos right then.
> 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.
I would _LOVE_ an option in iOS to say "don't accept these from anyone, and regardless of what you think about in the future, never send one either" that is honored indefinitely.
> 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."
I got inspired by the automatic “memories” videos/slideshows that Photo makes, and applied it to a video game of AI creatures. The creatures accumulate memories about their experiences, and then the game builds reels with little images or replays of their memories as they happened, with comments about their feelings. It’s pretty fun to watch
And yet if I ask Siri “read me the most recent text message from Matt Wells” it fails saying “I couldn’t find any messages…” even though it’s right there.
And definitely not "cannot even turn this shit off" mode.
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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.
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.
More and more companies will start to use this loophole...
Next, Google will be downloading a database of 2 billion ads to your PC to check against all your private data and decide which ad to show you for anything you search in the future.
And because its all on your PC, no GDPR issues - you are processing your own data.
Except it isn't... Because the company with an ad in the database for sex toys targeted at the trans community will have a damn good idea about your sexual orientation when you click that carefully targeted ad and arrive at their website.
in this hypothetical setup you're effectively downloading malware, I wouldn't really consider that a loophole. Regulation that concerns data ownership can do precisely what the name says, give you control over where your data lives.
If you have full sovereignty over your data and your computer and you decide to use software that downloads ads and blasts them to you, at some point even in the best jurisdiction you're responsible for what you install
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.
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
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.
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.
> Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed?
Ok, but that seems to contradict your original assertion that it doesn't matter where the data is processed. The processes we're talking about run on your computer, processing data about you so that the services your OS provides can use that data to make the services work. That sounds a lot to me like "your own data processed on your device"
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)
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.
Also available to any other app with "full disk access" to just read and upload. A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).
Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user. That's hardly unique to this data, and is a well known issue when it comes to personal data and the applications you run under the unix permissions model. That this is at least behind the "full disk access" control makes it more protected than something like all of the tax and accounting data your financial software is storing in your Documents or home folder (well, technically under macOS your Documents folder also has its own permission, but it's the same sort of thing where anything with permission to read from your Documents folder can read anything in there).
It's an eternal balancing act because every time Apple implements some new restriction in their OS that prevents apps from doing whatever they want, whenever they want, people get mad at them. But without those restrictions, the ever increasing amount of personal data that is stored on your computer is exposed to the ever increasing number of data slurping applications that you run.
>Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user.
That not being the case is the whole purpose of the per-app sandboxes which macOS has along with TCC. We're not discussing plain Unix permissions alone.
Ok, and the data is in a location that you need to grant full disk access to an application in order to access it. So what is the complaint here? Is it that if you run an application and give it access to the data that it has access to the data?
This drives me crazy. I'm slowly working on isolating every application into it's own sandbox but the fact that this wasn't built into the kernel drives me up the wall.
> A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).
I assume you mean 'many' and not 'make'—this is untrue; you only need to grant FDA if you're trying to access protected areas, like the knowledge graph store.
Granting full disk access to an app that you don't trust not to surreptitiously exfiltrate your data is the kind of user error where the buck stops with PEBCAK.
"Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly... Ask them. Ask them every time. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data." – Steve Jobs (2010)
__
moderators: "Let's talk about privacy, sorry Mark, who is here..."
Jobs: "We've always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleges in the Valley..."
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.
>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.
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I finally made the full switch to Linux earlier this year. Been a (primarily) Apple user since 1992.
[†] 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
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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.
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).
I’m just glad that we’re still at the stage where the spying is happening on your own network and is still theoretically blockable. If cellular or satellite connectivity ever gets cheap enough they’ll just bypass your network completely.
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)?
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).
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).
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).
I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging.
I've also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to properly configure which DNS-server should be used, but while reading this thread I'm beginning to wonder: maybe the reason I'm having so much trouble understanding how to set this up properly could be that the OS is messing with me and my DNS-settings, and the lack of documentation describing how DNS-resolution is supposed to work on MacOS is really a feature meant to keep me from finding out that they are deliberately making it impossible to secure connectivity at a DNS-level?
Next thing you know, a similar explanation might pop up regarding configuration of the packetfilter. It has already been frustrating not being able to figure out these basics on my own for several years. It will be absolutely infuriating to find out this struggle has been pointless anyway, and it turns out they have been using mislabeling core components of their OS. The moment DNS-settings are not really settings the OS uses when doing DNS-lookups, I feel deliberately deceived.
It's like calling an OS Unix-based, and subsequently override standard Unix-rules seemingly at random and without consent of whoever is supposed to be the system's administrator, that people might start thinking the OS is merely intended as a tool to ruin any reputation of reliability that Unix may have once had. The great thing about a Mac is that it just works, they said. So far my experience has been the opposite. And whenever I get the illusion that something works as it is expected to work, I've learned to recognize it for what it is. An illusion. How is any of such behaviour even legally and ethically justified? How can they legally sell systems running MacOS to customers whose job includes working with classified information? How are such customers supposed to secure their system if it these 'features' are not properly documented?
> I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging
You should be doing this level of blocking and detection at the router/gateway, not on the computer itself because your Mac has like 4 different OSes and macOS already has a lot of exceptions when it comes to filtering/logging Apple related communications.
If you don't have a router/gateway where you can set firewall rules and logging already, how much do you really care about this? Because I can guarantee your Mac is far from the worst offender on your network.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.)
If you intend to use PiHole, why is your DHCP server configuring a non-PiHole DNS server?
And why would you expect the pre-boot environment to respect OS network configuration?
Just like every non-Apple system I’ve ever seen with pre-boot network support, it has its own configuration, which defaults to DHCP.
I’d honestly be more suspicious if the firmware tried to grovel through OS data to find a working network configuration you may not want it to use.
Not that it would have very good luck doing so on a security-conscious user’s system, given that, on most systems at least, pre-boot networking is configured long before encrypted boot volumes are unlocked, since at that point you’re already well on your way to booting a specific OS with its own network stack and the pre-boot networking environment is no longer required.
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.
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).
Also watch out for BLE. I had to disable bluetooth on my mac studio that I disconnnected from the LAN / WAN because it was discovering iOS devices nearby and relaying data through them.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
If I were a mobster under government surveillance, why would I carry a mobile phone while discussing the family business, or intentionally allow anyone in my vicinity to do so, any more than I'd have such a conversation with someone I knew was wearing a wire?
... 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.
> 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.
Because its also used by other apps (e.g. Photos has a feature to identify faces and catalog people in your photo library, Messages has a feature to allow important messages through Do Not Disturb and infers importance from these stores).
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.
On top of dabinat's point on consent, there is the resource use and accuracy part.
I can't imagine how much sleuthing is needed to infer who would be someone's divorced mother if it wasn't explicitely labelled, but it's completely unneeded until the day they actually try to use that info through some Apple service. Then, they'll be in for a surprise the day it infers it's their boss instead.
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.
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.
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.
Yep I cannot fathom why people feel OK shipping anything like that publicly. The headers are also all completely stupid.
> Every node as a list — the graph is not the only way in
> Family, as the scorecard has it
> Reachable, exactly as stored
Oh good I was worried it was going to show me something altered
> WHY RESOLVABLE MATTERS
Oh fuck off. This isn't Axios! I hate these pathetic brainrot stupid phrases Why it matters What Happened What Changed, how patronizing. Instaclosed, instakilled python, what a fucking waste of my time and a waste of an article too
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.
I'm having more trouble spotting AI text these days. It used to jump out at me. I'm not sure if it's that the LLMs are better or it's just becoming so normal to see that I stop recognizing it. This one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read. Going back and scrolling deeper into the post, it does become much sloppier.
That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protected. What does that even mean? Why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? I don't care that there's 51 database files and 181 other things and 278 doodads. Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and like you said, your eyes start to glaze over because there's so much irrelevant information. No human would've chosen to write all that tedious detail in their post about something much more interesting. It's bad writing. It's slop.
A human would've said something like "It's a database in <Library/IntelligencePlatform> with three columns that contain..." and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.
>this one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read
Maybe you're just looking for GPT 3.5 era tells?
Because this one sure screams AI slop loudly and clearly:
"The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half. "
"The graph is the overview, and an overview is easy to shrug at. The pages behind it are not."
"Six people, six relationships, and a subtitle saying nobody typed any of it."
"Below that is the part I find hardest to argue with."
"This is the page's own honest point: the graph points at the face clusters and can name almost none of them (three of the twenty-nine, in the fixture). It does not need to."
"None of this is content. It is all metadata, and it is enough."
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.
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?
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.
Maybe LLMs are better writers than the majority of people, but that's only because the majority of people just don't write. If you have any level of competency, you are a better writer than an LLM, because good writing requires empathy. It required thinking about what the audience knows, what they want to know, what kind of writing they are comfortable with, and so on.
Agreed, I haven't read most of it because it's poorly written: too verbose, points are buried, it's three times longer than it should be. I still don't know what this database is used for and don't want to go through that writing to find out.
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…
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.
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.
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.”
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?
>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?
This is completely tangential to your point, but I'd bet that this daemon isn't always running. Apple is fond of putting as much system functionality as possible into daemons that (a) can be spun up quickly when needed in response to Mach IPC messages, (b) can be killed safely at any time to free up memory, including with SIGKILL if necessary, and most importantly (c) operate in the tightest, most locked-down sandbox they could devise.
For background computational tasks like this one, it can also be helpful for getting thread prioritization right. If some computation doesn't need to happen quickly, a daemon can easily make sure that it gets assigned to efficiency-optimized CPU cores, tell the OS scheduler to give priority to more important stuff, reduce precision of timers to coalesce wakeups, and make sure that any thermal throttling affects the background stuff before it slows down anything the user will notice. It's a pretty slick system.
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.
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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.
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>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...
> I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic
> Also, my IQ scares even me
Oh, brother.
I mean this with the best of intentions and care: have you been psychiatrically evaluated lately? The language you’re using is consistent with friends I know who are off their stabilizing medications.
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.
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.
So my questions regarding security implications of running your code, my LLM friend reviewed the code and expressed possible concerns over (a) malicious browser extensions now get to see what they couldn't before; (b) you are not using https. There was bunch more but they can all be addressed on my end. Your thoughts?
You don’t need https for a web running locally; nothing goes into the network. Malicious browser extension can be real, but if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph
> if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph
That is certainly true, and it is equally true that that possibility places a responsibility on you to put that in a section in your readme.
So yeah, I may have a bad extension but that thing never had access to the possibly aptly named 'IntelligencePlatform' that's keeping tabs on my digital activities, until I ran your code. Correct?
I would go further and suggest that you do not access any website or open any files via your browser while you have malicious browser extensions installed. You do not need this project's README to tell you this.
My evil extension|browser may know what porn I watch or which sites I am visiting or possibly lift some bits it is not supposed to have. But it does not have access to Apple's comprehensive graph of my digital activities on their devices. Only Apple Inc. has that access.
So in fact the OP needs to put in the readme that "malicious browser extensions are a potential attack surface."
As a matter of fact, one could argue that a posting like this on Hackernews could potentially be a very sophisticated 'human engineering' effort by parties that have backdoors to browsers but have been defeated by Apple's security features.
My friend you need to trust your LLM less here, this is extremely off base. If you have malware installed, the problem is the malware. Far more is at risk from it than some brand new dashboard that no malware has been sitting around waiting for. Malware will be waiting for API keys, bank passwords, your Internet connection to resale as a residential proxy. Things that will actually make them money. Your concerns are unfounded and misplaced.
When you install a browser extension, your browser will notify you if it can read or modify page content before you enable it the first time. Using OPs tool is not unique in that it becomes vulnerable when paired with nefarious browser extensions, because all pages are. Https doesn't even solve that.
This is akin to some medicine saying that if paired with another specific medicine, you won't get desired results, and you are upset that it doesn't include a warning against combining the medicine with cyanide because you might die. The pairing with cyanide is irrelevant to the medicine and is just a side effect of cyanide.
I don't think your request is reasonable because I don't agree with your (or your LLM's) categorical assertion and risk assessment, not because I misunderstand the mechanics of the threat model, as niche as it is.
Also, small correction: any app with Full Disk Access can access this data.
"[A]ny app with Full Disk Access" requires yours truly's personal approval.
You acknowledge the threat is real yet say it is "niche".
And frankly, given that Apple can not possibly 'iKnow' more about me than myself, it seems running your 'niche critical but whocares' python server can only be informative to potential 3rd parties locked out of my Apple machine because they do NOT have been give permission by me to have "Full Disk Access".
I liked the start of the article, but glazed over once it switched to an AI voice. AI;DR.
It's a shame because I really appreciate your work here. Could be resolved as trivially as providing a copy of your writing style and having it adapt to that.
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...
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.)
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?
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
I don't understand how every post isn't incandescently furious about this? People just seem to be resigned! This is so far beyond what I'd consider ethical for a hardware company to do s that I will not ever buy an Apple product off the back of it.
Worse than resigned, people are happy about it. There's discussions about this over on Reddit too, where the users are even more overwhelmingly in favor of it. "If it didn't do this, 'Siri, call Jenny' wouldn't work! And it wouldn't be able to automatically tag Jenny in photos!" etc. People think this is fun and not creepy?
This lazy give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death thinking is so weird. I want my devices to be completely dumb. I don't want them to know anything about me. I don't want them to think for me or make decisions for me. I store data so I can retrieve it, not for the computer to "learn" from it. Leave me the hell alone.
> I want my devices to be completely dumb. I don't want them to know anything about me. I don't want them to think for me or make decisions for me. I store data so I can retrieve it, not for the computer to "learn" from it.
A respectable opinion! But are you self aware enough to realize that this opinion is NOT the norm? These products simply might not be for you, and it's frustrating they can't provide a "leave me alone" toggle somewhere in settings.
Well, this is HN, not the general population. Half of the people here probably helped build something like this at some point... (Purely for the technical challenge of course)
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.
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.
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.
this is completely wild. i use a mac for my personal computer, but also a mac for work. i ran this on my personal and noticed it was picking up slack chans i participate in often for work. i don't use slack on my personal computer. it has combined both knowledge graphs between the two computers (obviously through the apple platform) once it figured out i am the same person on both laptops. i share very little between the two laptops other than occasionally forwarding an email from a work computer to personal and vice-versa and having the same first/last name on both.
i think this is even more concerning now that i know it is building this graph in a distributed manner across multiple devices.
fyi: slack shows up as com.tinyspeck.chatlyio - it is the internal bundle identifier (Bundle ID) for the official Slack iOS app on Apple devices.
for those that complain about punctuation -- i skip it b/c i have numbness in the left hand due to an injury.
You probably have slack signed in on your iPhone and that iPhone shares a personal account with your Mac. Most of the data they have on me seems to be meta data from push notifications that exist on my phone.
It is really hard to get through articles with prose this bad. I don't know if it's because of LLM help or lack of practice, but man i have tried 3 times now to get through it and just can't.
Looking at my graph the information seems to come from:
1. The native Mails App
2. Notifications
When WhatsApp/Signal send you a notification they seem "leak" the message to the OS. Actually the suspected source 1 (Mail App) could also just be a case of the OS scraping the notifications API.
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.
The graph stored on my MacBook contains people I exclusively have contact with through WhatsApp. This means data from notifications (i.e. third-party-apps like WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) is also used to build the graph.
Honestly crazy.
Same. I have conversation group names from Signal on my phone which are reported here. I have Signal on my MacBook but I never used it and they aren't linked.
One great thing of the LLM age is being able to task Opus to do a security audit of a random open source tool. Or indeed a closed source one with the help of Ghidra. I can audit every Chrome plugin every time there's a new version. Finally, enough eyes to catch the shallow bugs.
What this incident highlights is you can now poke around the insides of MacOS, Android, and Windows to see what awful collection and telemetry has slipped in. Modifying what happens is a bigger challenge. Trusted boot and system integrity protection also protects the surveillance code.
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.
> 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.
Yikes. Luckily mine wasn't too bad - as I not on the Apple ecosystem for communication of any sort. I imagine Google's version of this for me would be even more horrifying though.
Since Apple goes through the trouble of invading my privacy like this, I would at least expect "Hey Siri, call mom" to do the right thing. But it does not. Either it calls the wrong person or asks me which of two particular number or email to use for FaceTime, when both lead to the same correct person anyway..so why bother asking? Apple makes the best hardware but its disappointing to see their software consistently fall short.
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.
"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.
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
It is almost certainly on a disk with full disk encryption turned on, and password/biometric unlock. Unlike iOS, MacOD hasn't gone down the path of separate encryption keys, secured by the secure coprocessor, for each category of secrets.
The best solution to not losing confidentiality is not to collect it, and not to process it or store it. Relatedly, why does this daemon have access without permission being granted? If it was a third party tool it would not.
The problem is that most people don't know it's happening. If, when you first set up your Mac, you were asked "Do you want the OS to construct a social profile about you to help with ... (list of features)" and you could say yes or no.
When you do that, it's quite hard for it not to sound creepy. And most people would probably say no.
But I don't think it should be prohibited by regulation. Some people might want it, or genuinely find it useful.
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.
Every day I thank Microsoft for making Windows 11 so bad and mandatory that I became a Linux acolyte, now preacher. All of these secret data collections you have to remember to turn off if even possible are appalling.
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!
"Is any of this sensitive? We'll leave that to you, since "sensitive" means different things to different people (though I think you have plenty to choose from here)."
I remember reading about how in Norway (I don't remember which specific country it was) you could go and register as belonging to X category (I don't remember if it was religion) so when you die you could choose where you’ll be buried.
And of course how the information was used by Nazis to search for you and... you know the rest of the story... including why it should be dissalowed in first place.
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).
I like how there are all these worries about privacy, and then the conclusion is to download some random software, give it access to this entire database, and throw it into an LLM API too while you're at it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GDPR applies to persons and businesses. The fact that you're violating GDPR, because without your knowledge Apple has deployed software on your computer that compiles this knowledge graph makes Apple complicit. Imagine violating a speed limit, because your car's speed indicator has a software flaw that causes it to show a lower speed.
This is not equivalent at all. You don’t need to create a GDPR notice because the user types their personal info into their own documents for example, despite you being on the path of it going to disk.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
Yup. Just had a support agent hit mute, disconnect the screen share and pretend the line cut out to get out of a tricky support request too ("why do I need to keep rebuilding the Spotlight index every couple of days?"). No attempt at calling back. Atrocious
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.
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.
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!)
> One edge of the graph (synthetic data): a person and the organization the store holds as their employer. PS500 is the id predicate.json gives employer, and its range is not an organization but a relationship type — so one edge is two rows sharing a relationshipId, one naming the kind of relationship and one pointing at the other entity. The forty-six relationship type classes in the table below exist to carry exactly that, which is what lets an edge hold a confidence of its own and be retracted later.
That is easily the sloppiest and least helpful explanations of edges and predicates I've ever read.
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
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.
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.
I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor. When I buy an Apple computer, I don't want to have a relationship with Apple. I don't want to log in to iCloud. I don't want them deciding what software I can run and what I can't. I don't want them wagging their finger disapprovingly at me when I download and run something not "notarized" by them. I don't want them mediating my use of my own computer! When I buy a Windows PC it's even worse. Again, I don't want to log into a Microsoft account. I don't want them pushing other software on me via in-OS ads. I don't want to send telemetry back to them. I don't want them recording my screen and saving it god knows where for nebulous "features".
When I buy a table saw, I don't expect DeWalt to hang around my workshop telling me what I can and can't cut, watching and logging what wood I use and when I use it, what my finished product looks like, changing the features and buttons on the saw in the middle of the night. Why the fuck do we tolerate this from software??
It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions! Some of them are letting telemetry and metrics and A/B testing creep in. And some third party Linux software is just as intrusive and demanding as commercial Windows/Mac software.
> It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions!
As much as I've loved Linux for over 30 years, even Linux is becoming suboptimal. I'm mostly installing FreeBSD or OpenBSD these days.
> I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor.
This is precisely it.
When I buy a screwdriver, I just want to use it when I need it. I don't want to have an account with Craftsman and give them any PII, etc. No, I just want to use the product I purchased.
It is really the same with any tech product. I bought it, I want to use it. I want zero contact with the manufacturer (even if I like them).
Sounds like you’d like our group: https://trustworthy.technology/
There’s an invite link to a chat group as well, at the bottom of the page.
Great resource!
"Army of light" though
You bought a Mac that comes with Apple things. Macs don’t ship without Apple things. You get them for Apple things. You entered into the relationship explicitly. What’s the gripe?
It's even reflected in the language used by younger generations, asking if things are "allowed" or assuming things are illegal by default.
I don't think anything has changed in the world. I suspect that you, like I, and lots of other hackers, had a very different group of friends growing up, and you didn't realize how insular your community was. Now as an adult you're seeing kids who are outside that particular narrow friend group, and attributing the change to the kids, rather than your to wider perspective.
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.
Complete nonsense. You get passwordless root upon install.
> In some Linux distros like Debian, everything is illegal/prohibited until you explicitly allow it
Bit of a nitpick, but this is certainly not true of their userspace, where an `npm install` can just install a keylogger or read your ssh keys, or do whatever it wants -- except for updating your video card driver.
I would hope that someone deliberately choosing to run a headless Debian install would be wise enough to not go around running `npm install` willy nilly. In my personal experience, I've never once needed an `npm install` in Debian environment. I've only ever used them in server environments and to be honest thinking about it, that was all pre-npm when javascript was kept where it belonged in your browser and not my server. Someone screwed us all allowing JS on the server, but that's an entirely different conversation.
Well, it's enough to use a trusted app as your own user on non-trusted data. The former just has to have a memory vulnerability, which is not rare given most of it is C.
So yeah, don't be so confident in it working out. Unfortunately gnu/linux desktop is severally lacking in security (and by desktop I mean a headless personal use as well)
I used to run npm install unsupervised from a script on headless Debian that I deliberately chose dozens of times everyday. Later I moved my CI to Alpine.
Side effects of living in an authoritarian panopticon
As much as a sibling comment gets it right, this is wrong:
> And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
They never built those skills. I know that a lot of us cheered the computer revolution, thinking that everyone born after would understand the things that older generations didn't get, but most didn't care and didn't learn.
And PC’s became appliance like with updates, accounts, and now ads
I always thought the quote "you're not the customer you're the product" originated with RMS, I went to look it up before I commented and it turns out it was Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman in 1973! Just as true now as then. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/
Yes, and if the OS maker is not mining you for data, they are leaving mountains of cash on the table. So mine they must and mine they will. The financial incentives are overwhelming.
We should be removing those incentives at every level: legislative, societal, government and private.
> When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user
When we connected them to the internet.
We connected them to the internet a full decade or more before this happened.
I would say it started with Chrome and Gmail
Chrome was the first major piece of software to incorporate automatic background installation of software updates without explicit user assent in 2008. Now, it's everywhere. I think this was an underappreciated event in the history of software freedom.
My computer has been connected to the Internet since the 90s and it's also constantly been my computer. The trick is, run software that is free.
But it was the internet that made all the spying, profiling, and tracking possible. Before that, there was no motivation, so all software was developed and sold solely on its benefits to the user.
Today, even free software can have telemetry and ulterior motives.
The charitable take is that computing has grown to expand more and more use cases, and to deliver good experiences for those use cases requires simplifying assumptions, and that's where the inherent complexity of life leaks in.
Well, people use less and less open source, and more and more vendor provided enshittified apps, which of course don't act in YOUR best interest.
Campaign for privacy laws, open standards, right to repair, interoperability requirements etc.
Richard Stallman told y'all when it happened that it was happening
for me it was around the time of windows 8, that I felt my computer had a lot of things to do that weren't the application I actually wanted to use. Before that I would just occasionally feel that the system could be a little kludgy.
Every bad day for Apple-Microsoft is another great day for switching to Linux.
You have choices. Make them.
And get an Android, install apps via F-Droid, which has really good apps by now, and they're all(?) crap-free.
Can I borrow some money? These choices cost me more than I can afford. Still using a six year old macbook I am so poor.
People want the features that these things drive. PCs stopped being a purely "user says X, do X" thing at approximately the moment they became powerful enough to run things in the background. The idea that the computer would be helpful and do things for you beyond what you explicitly asked for is pretty attractive. People don't like being spied on, but good news, this one is all local. This isn't like Facebook building a social graph for you so they can sell the data to advertisers.
As soon as they were connected to a network and capable of participating in the business OODA loop against their competitors in real time.
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.
Add me to the list. This feels like a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” item.
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.
The system could work just as well for the user, stored only on the users devices, syncing in encrypted form only.
The plausibility in plausible deniability evaporates instantly with device/service/software provider's accessibility.
But faux plausible deniability seems to be just as effective of a fig leaf.
I suspect a lot of the fascination is because the information can be used to improve our quality of life. I suspect the cynicism comes from those who have the most access to this information using it to improve their quality of life at our expense. (That, and actually making use of the information takes more effort than most people are willing to expend.)
I have always been leery of data collection, but I have my own parallel: there was a lot of optimism about the benefits of personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course, that was pushed by the industry itself. I have since realized that what was happening then was not all that different from what is happening today. The outcomes were different because the tools were different, but it basically reduced/reduces to a bunch of people trying to enrich themselves by promising one thing and delivering another.
Adjacent to this I think it’s becoming clear that these technologies also change the signals we receive from one another. For example remembering details in a conversation is a signal that you were listening. If some system makes a breach into that social interaction you lose that signal. Now remembering details is no longer a signal.
I’m seeing it with polished websites. A polished site used to be a signal that a product was somewhat well thought out—at least it was worth the creators time to polish its marketing page. While now that AI products spit those out with AI speak that signal is lost.
I wonder if we’ll find out that the signal itself was more important than the means of sending the signal.
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...
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.
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
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.
There’s a very big difference between opting in to using a tool and having the tool silently start analysing you in the background.
I'm really trying to understand what as-a-fox means.
It's in his profile https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PaulHoule -> https://gen5.info/fox/ -> User's Manual for the Fox-Photographer
Same. A furry photographer?
In context, I interpreted it as a furry costume.
Based on the second paragraph, I’d assume a person in a fox fursuit with a camera. I can only imagine how hot that costume would be.
You could text Paul. He is but a Google search away to see the shtick.
I think of privacy as the right to be myself, because I get to choose which parts of my persona(s?) to expose.
People change over time, and those I care about will be part of the journey. We don’t remember each other’s mistakes all the time.
And then, of course, there is the effort we put into these relationships. I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises than their LLM of choice automatically sends me a carefully crafted messaged based on our interactions.
Maybe we’re the weird ones.
> I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises
Do most people really remember all the birthdays they acknowledge? For me they must be diarised, or beyond immediate family there's no chance.
I used to think it was artificial and pointless to wish people happy birthday after being reminded by google calendar. I now know enough adults who have taken (mostly minor) offence to being forgotten, that I play the game.
> 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.
As this becomes normalized, people will retreat to a safer persona even in private conversations. This does not solve the problem at all; a great many mental illnesses and dynamics around pathological abuse are tied to the details of how each of us has a private and public-facing persona.
Already I see Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are heavily resenting the demands placed on them to be always in 'branding'/'self-marketing' modes, and are seeking ways to retreat from the relentless expectations of being always in 'public persona', and are suspicious that this way of living is harmful.
Exactly. It’s a chilling effect on an ever-increasing proportion of human interaction. If everything you say is on permanent record then the safest course of action is to say little, and keep it as bland as possible.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot with zoom recordings. In office we used to have chats about a wide range of topics that were sometimes heated, but also respectful. Now with every meeting recorded, it’s all become pretty saccharine.
I don't think this is the same situation at all. Zoom recordings are outside your control and you know your boss or HR will have access to them. And relationships with employers are often closer to enemy than friend.
Your friend's Mac creating a knowledge graph is totally different because they control it. It gives them power to remember more about their interactions with you, but they would have to actively abuse it to hurt you in any way. If you can't trust someone with information then don't give it to them in the first place expecting them to forget it.
The problem is what happens if you get hacked or Apple decides to sell you out/work with law enforcement. I would only trust code like that if it was fully transparent about what it's doing, open source and strictly opt in. Apple is doing it in the background and that makes it instantly suspicious.
I don't understand what's wrong with the tech industry in the past 20 years. It feels like every time there is an opportunity to do the wrong thing, there is a mad rush towards that opportunity. Quickly! Do the wrong thing _first_ so some other company doesn't get to profit from evil instead of us. No company seems to consider abstaining from evil practices; burying the knowledge, or building systems which cannot be used for evil. The question only seems to be, how can _our_ evil succeed and benefit us.
Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI
phew, I knew not spending a lot of effort in skool for learning proper grammar would be worth it as an adult
The credibility of the lazy is going up, what could go wrong!
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.
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.
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.
I turned autocomplete off for this reason
Did your autocorrect correct “autocorrect” to “autocomplete”?
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.
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.
Yes! Why is the keyboard on iOS still sooooo frustrating to use? Sometimes I wonder if it’s been intentionally nerfed to push us to use siri or apple intelligence.
I’m just waiting for the next iOS release with “Next-gen Swipe powered by Apple Intelligence Pro” (that conveniently only works on the latest 2 generations of iPhone)
The current iOS keyboard is the worst mobile/touch keyboard I've ever used, and that goes back to Android well over a decade ago.
I primarily type on mobile via Swype, which may account for varying mileage.
For the record, “primarily” took 4 tries, “varying” 2, and “took” 3.
I type this way because I tried it out on Android a decade and a half ago and it was fucking great!
I considered it intentional, since as a matter of fact "autocomplete" is more correct.
Same difference
Autocorrupt
See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.
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.”
The interesting aspect for me is that what we perceive as "claudism" here is exactly how TV reporters have always talked - and to a point, how marketers / pitchers talk. How did it end up having this disproportionate weight in AI engines ?
Presumably because it was at least for a good while ranked high in evaluations because it sounded punchy and gave the impression of being insightful. In isolation. Before it oversaturated everything.
LLM writing makes me puke
> 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.
> 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/
>> the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free
This is truly disappointing to hear on HN.
It's no less true, though. I'm sure there is a cohort of HN folks who don't have or maintain a social media account (either any more, or ever), there are likely many more that do.
You realize this site is run by a venture capital firm and startup accelerator whose alumni include companies like Flock and Delve, right?
There's always been a good bit of tension here between the YC founders and the people who work in the industry. I was banned for comments about PG ten years ago. Neither VC nor workers here are unaware of the consequences of widespread apathy. My disappointment is with one side of that argument capitulating or acting as if the principle is lost, or perhaps being too uneducated and ignorant to state the case.
The VC around here loses more than we do if HN ceases to be a useful barometer.
> I was banned for comments about PG ten years ago.
Where was that? I'd like to see a link, because this doesn't sound right to me. I was running HN 10 years ago, and it has never been a practice to ban people for "comments about PG".
We ban accounts that repeatedly break the site guidelines, including with personal attacks, but that is not a question of who the person is—it's a question of how badly they've broken the rules.
Also, if the person is connected to YC, that would make us a little less likely to ban them, by the principle described here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
On a side note, every few times I open Google's photo gallery on my android phone, it pops up a dark pattern "backup your photos" toast with a pre-selected radio box saying yes, and two or three delicate manual steps to AVOID having it start uploading all my photos right then.
Unbelievably invasive and offensive.
We’re just serfs of the feudal overlords. We only exist to fill their coffers.
> 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.
I think(?) it also figures it out from the contact photo you give someone and matching from that. Not everyone puts photos on their contacts though.
I don't trust people that push their contact info like that. That's something from an entirely different generation that I just can't grok
I would _LOVE_ an option in iOS to say "don't accept these from anyone, and regardless of what you think about in the future, never send one either" that is honored indefinitely.
And what is your "Verify" procedure?
With proprietary software, you just have to take the company's word for it
> 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."
I got inspired by the automatic “memories” videos/slideshows that Photo makes, and applied it to a video game of AI creatures. The creatures accumulate memories about their experiences, and then the game builds reels with little images or replays of their memories as they happened, with comments about their feelings. It’s pretty fun to watch
And yet if I ask Siri “read me the most recent text message from Matt Wells” it fails saying “I couldn’t find any messages…” even though it’s right there.
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.
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.
If it is stored entirely on the machine you own, then you are processing and storing the data.
More and more companies will start to use this loophole...
Next, Google will be downloading a database of 2 billion ads to your PC to check against all your private data and decide which ad to show you for anything you search in the future.
And because its all on your PC, no GDPR issues - you are processing your own data.
This is how privacy-preserving advertising works, yes. To be entirely honest if this works I think I’d agree with that term!
Except it isn't... Because the company with an ad in the database for sex toys targeted at the trans community will have a damn good idea about your sexual orientation when you click that carefully targeted ad and arrive at their website.
Vendor of guns will know that people visiting their website like guns. And similarly for other toys with a barrel. Oh no.
I mean…yeah? At some point you’re going to give them your credit card info and home address
in this hypothetical setup you're effectively downloading malware, I wouldn't really consider that a loophole. Regulation that concerns data ownership can do precisely what the name says, give you control over where your data lives.
If you have full sovereignty over your data and your computer and you decide to use software that downloads ads and blasts them to you, at some point even in the best jurisdiction you're responsible for what you install
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.
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
It does matter. Your interpretation of “data collection” leads to absurd results.
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.
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
> Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed?
Ok, but that seems to contradict your original assertion that it doesn't matter where the data is processed. The processes we're talking about run on your computer, processing data about you so that the services your OS provides can use that data to make the services work. That sounds a lot to me like "your own data processed on your device"
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)
> Data collection is still data collection, it doesn't matter whether I am the one processing that data or a third party
It absolutely matters who collects or processes for who must be GDPR compliant.
You should admit it’d be a bit silly to give notice to yourself that you are processing your own data!
Might not be used in the EU
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.
Also available to any other app with "full disk access" to just read and upload. A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).
Which is why Apple is so skittish about "full disk access".
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=p6zjojqw
Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user. That's hardly unique to this data, and is a well known issue when it comes to personal data and the applications you run under the unix permissions model. That this is at least behind the "full disk access" control makes it more protected than something like all of the tax and accounting data your financial software is storing in your Documents or home folder (well, technically under macOS your Documents folder also has its own permission, but it's the same sort of thing where anything with permission to read from your Documents folder can read anything in there).
It's an eternal balancing act because every time Apple implements some new restriction in their OS that prevents apps from doing whatever they want, whenever they want, people get mad at them. But without those restrictions, the ever increasing amount of personal data that is stored on your computer is exposed to the ever increasing number of data slurping applications that you run.
>Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user.
That not being the case is the whole purpose of the per-app sandboxes which macOS has along with TCC. We're not discussing plain Unix permissions alone.
Ok, and the data is in a location that you need to grant full disk access to an application in order to access it. So what is the complaint here? Is it that if you run an application and give it access to the data that it has access to the data?
This drives me crazy. I'm slowly working on isolating every application into it's own sandbox but the fact that this wasn't built into the kernel drives me up the wall.
> A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).
I assume you mean 'many' and not 'make'—this is untrue; you only need to grant FDA if you're trying to access protected areas, like the knowledge graph store.
Granting full disk access to an app that you don't trust not to surreptitiously exfiltrate your data is the kind of user error where the buck stops with PEBCAK.
"Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly... Ask them. Ask them every time. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data." – Steve Jobs (2010)
__
moderators: "Let's talk about privacy, sorry Mark, who is here..."
Jobs: "We've always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleges in the Valley..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk_pLVQRNzg
The permissions system in iOS feels like it is following Jobs' ethos. Truly amazing all these years later. Kudos to the iOS team!
Who ever implemented what is called out in TFA, is clearly diverging from what makes Apple and AAPL very special. Please stop that.
https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/
NextDNS.io
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.
>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.
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I finally made the full switch to Linux earlier this year. Been a (primarily) Apple user since 1992.
> APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use the router-supplied DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings).
is that for real? wow
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
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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.
Wow!!
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).
¢¢
I’m just glad that we’re still at the stage where the spying is happening on your own network and is still theoretically blockable. If cellular or satellite connectivity ever gets cheap enough they’ll just bypass your network completely.
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.
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)?
Well fuck.
Just dug my old Xeon workstation out of the cupboard and am installing Debian on it.
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!
What about the security risks of running outdated OS and outdated software on a machine connected to the internet?
> 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).
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).
I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging.
I've also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to properly configure which DNS-server should be used, but while reading this thread I'm beginning to wonder: maybe the reason I'm having so much trouble understanding how to set this up properly could be that the OS is messing with me and my DNS-settings, and the lack of documentation describing how DNS-resolution is supposed to work on MacOS is really a feature meant to keep me from finding out that they are deliberately making it impossible to secure connectivity at a DNS-level?
Next thing you know, a similar explanation might pop up regarding configuration of the packetfilter. It has already been frustrating not being able to figure out these basics on my own for several years. It will be absolutely infuriating to find out this struggle has been pointless anyway, and it turns out they have been using mislabeling core components of their OS. The moment DNS-settings are not really settings the OS uses when doing DNS-lookups, I feel deliberately deceived.
It's like calling an OS Unix-based, and subsequently override standard Unix-rules seemingly at random and without consent of whoever is supposed to be the system's administrator, that people might start thinking the OS is merely intended as a tool to ruin any reputation of reliability that Unix may have once had. The great thing about a Mac is that it just works, they said. So far my experience has been the opposite. And whenever I get the illusion that something works as it is expected to work, I've learned to recognize it for what it is. An illusion. How is any of such behaviour even legally and ethically justified? How can they legally sell systems running MacOS to customers whose job includes working with classified information? How are such customers supposed to secure their system if it these 'features' are not properly documented?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! :(
> I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging
You should be doing this level of blocking and detection at the router/gateway, not on the computer itself because your Mac has like 4 different OSes and macOS already has a lot of exceptions when it comes to filtering/logging Apple related communications.
If you don't have a router/gateway where you can set firewall rules and logging already, how much do you really care about this? Because I can guarantee your Mac is far from the worst offender on your network.
Job's biggest innovation was the word "no." I don't understand how everyone didn't jump ship once that word left Apple's vernacular.
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.
Can one not just use their router's firewall to drop all DNS queries which do not originate from your PiHole?
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.
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.
>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.
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)
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].
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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>
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...
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.)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.
If you intend to use PiHole, why is your DHCP server configuring a non-PiHole DNS server?
And why would you expect the pre-boot environment to respect OS network configuration?
Just like every non-Apple system I’ve ever seen with pre-boot network support, it has its own configuration, which defaults to DHCP.
I’d honestly be more suspicious if the firmware tried to grovel through OS data to find a working network configuration you may not want it to use.
Not that it would have very good luck doing so on a security-conscious user’s system, given that, on most systems at least, pre-boot networking is configured long before encrypted boot volumes are unlocked, since at that point you’re already well on your way to booting a specific OS with its own network stack and the pre-boot networking environment is no longer required.
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.
>>[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).
> Wait until you discover that macOS entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings, before every bootup, to reach out to security.apple.com.
Good! I sure hope when I disable my stolen laptop that you can't defeat it with a simple DNS server.
Also watch out for BLE. I had to disable bluetooth on my mac studio that I disconnnected from the LAN / WAN because it was discovering iOS devices nearby and relaying data through them.
How? I'm curious.
This makes me glad I already switched my desktop to Linux (from Windows) and am about to get a new laptop to run Linux on
The good news is that with AI, nothing stops Linux desktops from looking and feeling like (Former) osx..
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.
Asahi Linux is said to be pretty good on an M1.
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.
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
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.
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/
This would be much more interesting if it just exposed an API and didn't force Lua on you.
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.
one would think, but a lot of things stopped Linux to just fucking work with Wifi on my machine
> Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.
don't wait
your impulse will be gone in a day or two if you wait, miraged away into "eh, doesn't matter"
do. not. wait.
that's a trap
switch now
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?
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.
> available to anyone at my work or home when someone leaves their laptop open
They also need to know your password to access it so at that point all bets are off.
in some countries you cannot opt-out of providing a password to your device.
I'm not sure if "forgetting" it is going to cut it - it much depends on a jurisdiction.
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.
>All that said turning off Apple Intelligence should eliminate the collection.
Amen.
Does it?
No. As far as I remember you cannot disable or kill the background daemons without disabling SIP either.
Well that is something and it has a certain logic. If you want to live off the grid all platform trust is removed.
Does what?
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.
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.
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.
The point is that that information is already out there. It might not be on your laptop, but it exists.
Yeah they definitely need this data from your Mac to find out who your brother is.
"I hate to break it to you", but it's very rational to take imperfect measures against violation.
No it isn’t. It’s a waste of time and energy.
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.
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."
> 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.
If I were a mobster under government surveillance, why would I carry a mobile phone while discussing the family business, or intentionally allow anyone in my vicinity to do so, any more than I'd have such a conversation with someone I knew was wearing a wire?
... 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.
> 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.
So why does it keep collecting data when I have chosen to entirely disable Siri?
Because its also used by other apps (e.g. Photos has a feature to identify faces and catalog people in your photo library, Messages has a feature to allow important messages through Do Not Disturb and infers importance from these stores).
Yes, this is the right question to ask.
>>"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
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.
Doesn't that mean you end up with a similar database of facts about yourself, what's the difference?
The difference here is consent. Cortana asked who the boss was and OP had the option to not give that information.
On top of dabinat's point on consent, there is the resource use and accuracy part.
I can't imagine how much sleuthing is needed to infer who would be someone's divorced mother if it wasn't explicitely labelled, but it's completely unneeded until the day they actually try to use that info through some Apple service. Then, they'll be in for a surprise the day it infers it's their boss instead.
That's the other side of whimsy and "magic".
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
Yep I cannot fathom why people feel OK shipping anything like that publicly. The headers are also all completely stupid.
> Every node as a list — the graph is not the only way in
> Family, as the scorecard has it
> Reachable, exactly as stored
Oh good I was worried it was going to show me something altered
> WHY RESOLVABLE MATTERS
Oh fuck off. This isn't Axios! I hate these pathetic brainrot stupid phrases Why it matters What Happened What Changed, how patronizing. Instaclosed, instakilled python, what a fucking waste of my time and a waste of an article too
> Six people, six relationships, and a subtitle saying nobody typed any of it.
> a closeness score above the cut · nobody typed it
> A dashed line is a conclusion nobody typed.
> Nobody stored a sleep schedule.
> The hours the log goes quiet - a sleep schedule nobody wrote down
> published by metadata that contains no words.
This is Claude-ism that is particularly infuriating, it never makes any sense.
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.
I'm having more trouble spotting AI text these days. It used to jump out at me. I'm not sure if it's that the LLMs are better or it's just becoming so normal to see that I stop recognizing it. This one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read. Going back and scrolling deeper into the post, it does become much sloppier.
> quite long-winded for a blog post
That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protected. What does that even mean? Why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? I don't care that there's 51 database files and 181 other things and 278 doodads. Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and like you said, your eyes start to glaze over because there's so much irrelevant information. No human would've chosen to write all that tedious detail in their post about something much more interesting. It's bad writing. It's slop.
A human would've said something like "It's a database in <Library/IntelligencePlatform> with three columns that contain..." and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.
>this one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read
Maybe you're just looking for GPT 3.5 era tells?
Because this one sure screams AI slop loudly and clearly:
"The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half. "
"The graph is the overview, and an overview is easy to shrug at. The pages behind it are not."
"Six people, six relationships, and a subtitle saying nobody typed any of it."
"Below that is the part I find hardest to argue with."
"This is the page's own honest point: the graph points at the face clusters and can name almost none of them (three of the twenty-nine, in the fixture). It does not need to."
"None of this is content. It is all metadata, and it is enough."
My bad. In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough...
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.
> 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!"
Yes, that was a weird defense; essentially, he used it for the actual interesting parts of the article.
So most of it?
So only the parts that matter, you ai slopped. Great work.
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?
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.
You are. I promise you. Almost every single person is a better writer than an LLM. You're wilfully sabotaging yourself.
Maybe LLMs are better writers than the majority of people, but that's only because the majority of people just don't write. If you have any level of competency, you are a better writer than an LLM, because good writing requires empathy. It required thinking about what the audience knows, what they want to know, what kind of writing they are comfortable with, and so on.
LLMs fail at those things.
LLM are terrible writers though. Worse than most humans unless they have some mental disability.
Agreed, I haven't read most of it because it's poorly written: too verbose, points are buried, it's three times longer than it should be. I still don't know what this database is used for and don't want to go through that writing to find out.
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…
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.
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.
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.”
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).
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?
>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?
> always-running daemon
This is completely tangential to your point, but I'd bet that this daemon isn't always running. Apple is fond of putting as much system functionality as possible into daemons that (a) can be spun up quickly when needed in response to Mach IPC messages, (b) can be killed safely at any time to free up memory, including with SIGKILL if necessary, and most importantly (c) operate in the tightest, most locked-down sandbox they could devise.
For background computational tasks like this one, it can also be helpful for getting thread prioritization right. If some computation doesn't need to happen quickly, a daemon can easily make sure that it gets assigned to efficiency-optimized CPU cores, tell the OS scheduler to give priority to more important stuff, reduce precision of timers to coalesce wakeups, and make sure that any thermal throttling affects the background stuff before it slows down anything the user will notice. It's a pretty slick system.
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.
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...
> I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic
> Also, my IQ scares even me
Oh, brother.
I mean this with the best of intentions and care: have you been psychiatrically evaluated lately? The language you’re using is consistent with friends I know who are off their stabilizing medications.
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.
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.
Hi there. Thanks for this!
So my questions regarding security implications of running your code, my LLM friend reviewed the code and expressed possible concerns over (a) malicious browser extensions now get to see what they couldn't before; (b) you are not using https. There was bunch more but they can all be addressed on my end. Your thoughts?
You don’t need https for a web running locally; nothing goes into the network. Malicious browser extension can be real, but if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph
> if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph
That is certainly true, and it is equally true that that possibility places a responsibility on you to put that in a section in your readme.
So yeah, I may have a bad extension but that thing never had access to the possibly aptly named 'IntelligencePlatform' that's keeping tabs on my digital activities, until I ran your code. Correct?
I would go further and suggest that you do not access any website or open any files via your browser while you have malicious browser extensions installed. You do not need this project's README to tell you this.
That is a categorical error.
My evil extension|browser may know what porn I watch or which sites I am visiting or possibly lift some bits it is not supposed to have. But it does not have access to Apple's comprehensive graph of my digital activities on their devices. Only Apple Inc. has that access.
So in fact the OP needs to put in the readme that "malicious browser extensions are a potential attack surface."
As a matter of fact, one could argue that a posting like this on Hackernews could potentially be a very sophisticated 'human engineering' effort by parties that have backdoors to browsers but have been defeated by Apple's security features.
My friend you need to trust your LLM less here, this is extremely off base. If you have malware installed, the problem is the malware. Far more is at risk from it than some brand new dashboard that no malware has been sitting around waiting for. Malware will be waiting for API keys, bank passwords, your Internet connection to resale as a residential proxy. Things that will actually make them money. Your concerns are unfounded and misplaced.
When you install a browser extension, your browser will notify you if it can read or modify page content before you enable it the first time. Using OPs tool is not unique in that it becomes vulnerable when paired with nefarious browser extensions, because all pages are. Https doesn't even solve that.
This is akin to some medicine saying that if paired with another specific medicine, you won't get desired results, and you are upset that it doesn't include a warning against combining the medicine with cyanide because you might die. The pairing with cyanide is irrelevant to the medicine and is just a side effect of cyanide.
I don't think your request is reasonable because I don't agree with your (or your LLM's) categorical assertion and risk assessment, not because I misunderstand the mechanics of the threat model, as niche as it is.
Also, small correction: any app with Full Disk Access can access this data.
"[A]ny app with Full Disk Access" requires yours truly's personal approval.
You acknowledge the threat is real yet say it is "niche".
And frankly, given that Apple can not possibly 'iKnow' more about me than myself, it seems running your 'niche critical but whocares' python server can only be informative to potential 3rd parties locked out of my Apple machine because they do NOT have been give permission by me to have "Full Disk Access".
I liked the start of the article, but glazed over once it switched to an AI voice. AI;DR.
It's a shame because I really appreciate your work here. Could be resolved as trivially as providing a copy of your writing style and having it adapt to that.
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.
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...
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.)
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?
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
It cannot be read by any other apps unless you explicit give them Full Disk Access.
If you use iCloud, all the data in this db can be derived from other data already stored (messages, logs, etc).
I don't understand how every post isn't incandescently furious about this? People just seem to be resigned! This is so far beyond what I'd consider ethical for a hardware company to do s that I will not ever buy an Apple product off the back of it.
It’s local to your device and provides a useful service?
Worse than resigned, people are happy about it. There's discussions about this over on Reddit too, where the users are even more overwhelmingly in favor of it. "If it didn't do this, 'Siri, call Jenny' wouldn't work! And it wouldn't be able to automatically tag Jenny in photos!" etc. People think this is fun and not creepy?
This lazy give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death thinking is so weird. I want my devices to be completely dumb. I don't want them to know anything about me. I don't want them to think for me or make decisions for me. I store data so I can retrieve it, not for the computer to "learn" from it. Leave me the hell alone.
> I want my devices to be completely dumb. I don't want them to know anything about me. I don't want them to think for me or make decisions for me. I store data so I can retrieve it, not for the computer to "learn" from it.
A respectable opinion! But are you self aware enough to realize that this opinion is NOT the norm? These products simply might not be for you, and it's frustrating they can't provide a "leave me alone" toggle somewhere in settings.
Well, this is HN, not the general population. Half of the people here probably helped build something like this at some point... (Purely for the technical challenge of course)
(And the other half are Apple vassals)
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:
Good call; just applied this myself. What other files do you lock down?
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.
I have lost my faith in that
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.
I had faith in Apple until I saw the technology oligarchy and how they behaved around the current US administration.
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.
Something that is additionally concerning is that you apparently cannot read your own data:
Edit: I was wrong. The snarky comment below is right.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.
Giving a browser full disk access is definitely not a good idea: I think it is you who has misconfigured.
I think it is you who needs to read more carefully. They said "terminal" not browser.
At the time of my reply they wrote Firefox. Now it says Finder. Snarky edit!
this is completely wild. i use a mac for my personal computer, but also a mac for work. i ran this on my personal and noticed it was picking up slack chans i participate in often for work. i don't use slack on my personal computer. it has combined both knowledge graphs between the two computers (obviously through the apple platform) once it figured out i am the same person on both laptops. i share very little between the two laptops other than occasionally forwarding an email from a work computer to personal and vice-versa and having the same first/last name on both.
i think this is even more concerning now that i know it is building this graph in a distributed manner across multiple devices.
fyi: slack shows up as com.tinyspeck.chatlyio - it is the internal bundle identifier (Bundle ID) for the official Slack iOS app on Apple devices.
for those that complain about punctuation -- i skip it b/c i have numbness in the left hand due to an injury.
Are you signed into the same iCloud account on both laptops? If not I don’t see how they could reliably combine the graphs
You probably have slack signed in on your iPhone and that iPhone shares a personal account with your Mac. Most of the data they have on me seems to be meta data from push notifications that exist on my phone.
This data probably isn't backed up to iCloud. But if it were, that'd make for an interesting (Facebook-esque?) intelligence resource at scale.
A script to prevent daemons from writing to the file containing the graph https://pastecode.io/s/70pnir9y
Terminal must have Full Disk Access System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access; sudo alone does not bypass this protection
Horrifying, but also really interesting as a student of schema design, especially for probabilistic or inferential processes, and graph data.
It is really hard to get through articles with prose this bad. I don't know if it's because of LLM help or lack of practice, but man i have tried 3 times now to get through it and just can't.
Woah. Still on Sequoia with no intention to upgrade, but maybe the next laptop runs Linux.
I'm on Sequoia. Check out ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
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.
What similarities do you find between macOS and GhostBSD? The Mate desktop by itself isn't super mac-like.
I also see it defaults to the growing pile of bugs known as XLibre.
The similarity is predominantly between the userland. (The Freebsd kernel and XNU is mostly historical as far as I know)
A typical Linux user will be used to GNU conventions and probably have a lot of annoyances.
GhostBSD is simply a beginner friendly distro of FreeBSD.
In one line both MacOS users and BSD broadly will squirm at the likes of things like `ls src/ -la`
But honestly, I was interdicting in the idea that Linux is the only alternative really.
Funny enough, for me it doesnt seem to have a lot of data:
- call logs of my iPhone, who and how long/how often i called each person in the last 90 days
- group chat names that seem to have come from the Signal Mac OS app (how is that even possible?)
Looking at my graph the information seems to come from: 1. The native Mails App 2. Notifications
When WhatsApp/Signal send you a notification they seem "leak" the message to the OS. Actually the suspected source 1 (Mail App) could also just be a case of the OS scraping the notifications API.
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.
But it does this even when siri is disabled
The graph stored on my MacBook contains people I exclusively have contact with through WhatsApp. This means data from notifications (i.e. third-party-apps like WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) is also used to build the graph. Honestly crazy.
Same. I have conversation group names from Signal on my phone which are reported here. I have Signal on my MacBook but I never used it and they aren't linked.
One great thing of the LLM age is being able to task Opus to do a security audit of a random open source tool. Or indeed a closed source one with the help of Ghidra. I can audit every Chrome plugin every time there's a new version. Finally, enough eyes to catch the shallow bugs.
What this incident highlights is you can now poke around the insides of MacOS, Android, and Windows to see what awful collection and telemetry has slipped in. Modifying what happens is a bigger challenge. Trusted boot and system integrity protection also protects the surveillance code.
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.
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.
> 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.
How does one best disable this (knoweledgeconstructiond et al)?
Yikes. Luckily mine wasn't too bad - as I not on the Apple ecosystem for communication of any sort. I imagine Google's version of this for me would be even more horrifying though.
Since Apple goes through the trouble of invading my privacy like this, I would at least expect "Hey Siri, call mom" to do the right thing. But it does not. Either it calls the wrong person or asks me which of two particular number or email to use for FaceTime, when both lead to the same correct person anyway..so why bother asking? Apple makes the best hardware but its disappointing to see their software consistently fall short.
I have been using "Hey Siri, call my {mom, dad,wife}" with zero issues for years now.
How does one disable this?
By buying a linux computer
you can't
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.
Have you actually tried doing this?
"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.
or "grandma needs this to just work, Apple knows better"
By using an OS that doesn't view you as cattle to be milked and eventually sent to the slaughterhouse.
All of this seems to be using sqlite, not KuzuDB derived tech that apple acquired about a year ago.
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/waterloo-based-graph-database-s...
What about iphones?
I’m just mad how wrong the inferences are
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...
It is a sqlite db, so you can load it with that
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?
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
I understand why they collect this but: Why is this not encrypted?
It is almost certainly on a disk with full disk encryption turned on, and password/biometric unlock. Unlike iOS, MacOD hasn't gone down the path of separate encryption keys, secured by the secure coprocessor, for each category of secrets.
The best solution to not losing confidentiality is not to collect it, and not to process it or store it. Relatedly, why does this daemon have access without permission being granted? If it was a third party tool it would not.
Articles like this make me rethink my politics. I now think software tech monopolies need some 1950's style broadcast TV level regulation.
The problem is that most people don't know it's happening. If, when you first set up your Mac, you were asked "Do you want the OS to construct a social profile about you to help with ... (list of features)" and you could say yes or no.
When you do that, it's quite hard for it not to sound creepy. And most people would probably say no.
But I don't think it should be prohibited by regulation. Some people might want it, or genuinely find it useful.
> most people don't know it's happening.
And if they know, they cheer it on. Just read this thread.
Why the downvotes on this? Wish people would leave comments
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.
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.
I’ve often wondered if Windows 11 might do the same thing. Surely, any low Apple has stooped to, Microsoft has stooped to as well.
On a long enough timeline, all closed-source software turns into spyware.
That’s a Law; is it christened yet, or should we name it ArcaneMachiner’s Law?
Every day I thank Microsoft for making Windows 11 so bad and mandatory that I became a Linux acolyte, now preacher. All of these secret data collections you have to remember to turn off if even possible are appalling.
This isn’t even LLM, it’s just anti-reader noise. HN needs to filter this stuff out going forward.
Why is my computer so slow? Idk, maybe it's making a map of your socialsphere. Yeah right! Right?
Apple doesn't need you to not buy ram to make it work for them. Joke's on Sam.
“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!
"Is any of this sensitive? We'll leave that to you, since "sensitive" means different things to different people (though I think you have plenty to choose from here)."
What would a jury say
More and more the obvious choice is Linux and some 3rd party dumb phone.
And Apple wants to sell us Privacy as feature. Isn't this a big red flag?
Decent work, if unreadable. I’ve disabled Apple Intelligence now.
It will still collect this data.
Source: have never had Apple Intelligence enabled, have these files anyway
Someone else said it and I’ll echo it. This is invasive and cannot be disabled by disabling Apple Intelligence.
I remember reading about how in Norway (I don't remember which specific country it was) you could go and register as belonging to X category (I don't remember if it was religion) so when you die you could choose where you’ll be buried.
And of course how the information was used by Nazis to search for you and... you know the rest of the story... including why it should be dissalowed in first place.
I'm going to be very angry if my mac turns out to be doing this
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
Works on Sequoia too fwiw
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).
Also works on Sonoma.
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.
> Viz. Apple IntelligencePlatform store
Why did you abbreviate 'visualise'? You're not running up against a character limit.
>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.
all that knowledge and Siri is still pretty dumb.
This gives a whole new dimension to the notion that we're carrying spy software in our pockets all day long.
I like how there are all these worries about privacy, and then the conclusion is to download some random software, give it access to this entire database, and throw it into an LLM API too while you're at it.
Previously discussed in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521306
Stop using Macs. Its pretty easy to switch to linux.
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.
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.
As a general rule you cannot override national law by accepting service terms.
Unlike Americans seem to think, terms of use don’t override law.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873517
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.
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.
GDPR applies to persons and businesses. The fact that you're violating GDPR, because without your knowledge Apple has deployed software on your computer that compiles this knowledge graph makes Apple complicit. Imagine violating a speed limit, because your car's speed indicator has a software flaw that causes it to show a lower speed.
This is not equivalent at all. You don’t need to create a GDPR notice because the user types their personal info into their own documents for example, despite you being on the path of it going to disk.
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?
I could test on old OSs. Information might be there, but under different names / DBs that the tool does not catch
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.
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?
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.
Can we start a class action suit?
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.
In Germany, it breaks TDDDG §25 verbatim, storage of data not explicitly consented to and not technically necessary is already illegal.
So sue them. You will then learn whether you are right or not.
If you have the time and money.
In the meantime the German government probably uses that info.
Conspiracy talk. Show any indication that this data ever leaves its store first.
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.
great, now how do I nuke it?
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)
True, Apple is competing with Microslop now on shittiness and user abuse. Linux really is the only viable OS that remains.
Yup. Just had a support agent hit mute, disconnect the screen share and pretend the line cut out to get out of a tricky support request too ("why do I need to keep rebuilding the Spotlight index every couple of days?"). No attempt at calling back. Atrocious
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.
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.
Same - If anything, this made me feel better by showing how little my Mac knew about me, and how weak its data collection capabilities were.
can we block these two processes using little snitch?
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!)
But you can probably (as root) remove execute permissions and kill the running daemons. Until the next OS update.
The processes aren't (as far as anyone knows) slinging data over the network.
> One edge of the graph (synthetic data): a person and the organization the store holds as their employer. PS500 is the id predicate.json gives employer, and its range is not an organization but a relationship type — so one edge is two rows sharing a relationshipId, one naming the kind of relationship and one pointing at the other entity. The forty-six relationship type classes in the table below exist to carry exactly that, which is what lets an edge hold a confidence of its own and be retracted later.
That is easily the sloppiest and least helpful explanations of edges and predicates I've ever read.
> who you know
Whom you know.
Makes me cringe too.