I’ve watched the keynote and read some stuff on the internet and I’ve found this video about a dude talking about the new update (I linked it here because if you didn’t see the keynote, this is probably enough)
Is it just me, or… does no one address that Apple does a Microsoft move by basically scanning everything on every machine and feeding this into their LLM?
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MS has a horrible track record on privacy or even caring about their customers; Apple, deservedly or not, has higher level of consumer’s trust
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MS brought out features too obviously ripe for abuse built in the most insecure way, lied about it and was quickly proven a liar. Apple says they built their AI in a secure way, their fans believe them and have not challenged
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Undoubtedly, there is still a huge Apple fanbase that would tell you Apple’s turds smell nice. So there’s a portion of that in the mix as well
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- usually people got Microsoft license for free (by working in company, and company buy you enterprise license)
- But with apple, people usually get it by passion.
It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.
Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.
Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).
they definitely do spy on their users and sell their data, but are very clever at marketing their items as fashionable and people fall for it
Do you have a source for this?
LMAO at thinking Apple doesn’t spy on you
Specifically about personal data…
Apple may engage third parties to act as our service providers and perform certain tasks on our behalf, such as processing or storing data, including personal data, in connection with your use of our services and delivering products to customers.
As for anonymized aggregate data…
Aggregated data is considered non‑personal data for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.
(All from Apple’s privacy page)
So they may not be explicitly selling identifiable information (which is usually pretty standard with big companies, I think), they are sharing it with other companies (which is normal)…and they’re also almost definitely selling anonymized data (which is also standard).
Exactly.
My employer runs macos. So I’d argue Mac is still a business solution, but not as common as windows. Tools exist for managing macs at scale as well.
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Because I don’t use apple products and don’t keep up with the news? My work laptop is Mac, but that’s work’s problem (I hate that thing)
Apple at least talks about privacy and security. Windows just dumped that shit right on you and is planning on storing in unencrypted databases… like, I would expect there to be enough brainpower at M$ to be able to write an application and then secure it… Just use Linux and when Ubuntu and Fedora decide they want to implement those features… OpenBSD it is :D
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/05/deleted-iphone-photos-show-up-again-after-ios-update
So photos were forever stored on a database… How’s that privacy and security? This isn’t even just another iCloud leak… these were things people thought were deleted coming back.
Apple likes to talk because talk is cheap. Just like Apple used to say that Apple products didn’t get viruses. Or how Google said do no evil. Talk is cheap.
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So I’m curious . . . what reference am I missing that helps me understand what menu settings cause exactly which pieces of personal data to be shared with which Apple services? I want to RTFM, and while I appreciate people wanting to be helpful, comment replies are not themselves documentation.
(I switched from Android to ios in 2020 and haven’t really figured out details beyond turning icloud sync off for specific apps. I’d like to add more devices and learn to trust that sync method but I don’t understand where crypto is used and how the keys are handled.)
Everything is encrypted with iCloud except for email and something else that’s obviously not encrypted that I can’t fucking remember.
iCloud encryption can be defeated with a server side key that’s used by Apple if you need to recover your account (so like you get your account hijacked or forget your password or something). Apple can be compelled by subpoena, like any other company, to provide the contents of your iCloud because they have this capability.
If you don’t like that, you can turn on advanced data protection, which deletes their server side key, generates new keys and re encrypts everything after you write down your special alphanumeric key without which your iCloud contents are inaccessible.
The security checkup in settings will let you figure out who has access to what.
apple can get their consumers in a cult-like state it seems.
their marketing and pr is scary good.
Someone said it before on the internet: Apple is not a tech company, Apple is a marketing company.
I mean if you want to dig into it, Apple is a company that makes most of its from money from selling tech. They spend a lot on highly effective advertising, but they pay actual advertising companies to do that. So I don’t think that qualifies them as an advertising company unless you’re just trying to be dismissive. You make your money from making and selling tech, you’re a tech company first.
Google and Meta make the vast majority of their money by selling ads and selling user data to other advertising companies so they can create their own targeted ads. That by definition makes them ads companies more than tech companies.
Microsoft sells mostly software/services to enterprise clients, they’re a B2B software company. Amazon too with AWS, etc. I read the other day that with how big NYT’s word games have gotten they’re more of a gaming company that also sells newspapers these days.
Anyway, yeah you can call Apple an advertising company or a fashion company or whatever but the fact is they’re more of a tech company than most of the other companies you probably think of as tech companies. Apple-produced tech is regularly compared to the likes of Nvidia, Intel, and AMD. You can’t say the same for the other top “tech” companies.
It’s a very simple answer Apple has guaranteed that your data will stay on your device and stay secure. This is generally trusted because Apple has a track record of keeping user data secure on the device or encrypted in the cloud even in ways Apple cannot access. Point is, when Apple says they are going to do this in a way that respects privacy, and they outline the technical details of how it will work, people trust that because there’s a track record.
Microsoft has no such trust. They have a recent track record of being intrusive and using dark patterns to persuade users to give Microsoft their data, for example in Edge there have been new feature pop-ups that require data sharing with Microsoft and the two options are ‘got it’ and ‘settings’ so accepting requires one click and rejecting requires 4 going into the settings menu and changing a few things. Microsoft is also heavily pushing Copilot which is mostly cloud-based. Furthermore, Microsoft recently showed a system that would basically screenshot your computer at very regular intervals and store them in an insecure manner. Granted it was on the device, but the way they were going to be stored meant they could be stolen with two lines of code. And let’s not forget that Windows 11 cannot be set up without a Microsoft account, so to even use your computer you have to share your email address with Microsoft. In this and many other ways they just do not act like a company that respects privacy at all, they act like the typical big tech give us everything or we will make your life difficult type company that nobody trusts.
Apple has an overly authoritarian business model. They strictly control every aspect of their ecosystem.
Apple long ago alienated the kind of people who would get upset about spying, LLMs. They either never entered the Apple ecosystem, or they left it decades ago.
Apple cult sheeps
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=B_SqrNMPV5c&pp=ygUMTWFjIG9zIHNwaWVz
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m going to copy paste a reply I left somewhere else. This was for iOS AI, I’m unsure what the implemention for macOS is. If they are scanning everything then I do not support it.
From what I saw,
MS Recall is a 24/7 AI monitor system that captures everything you look at and saves it for later. They didn’t even do the bare minimum for protecting the data, it was just dumped in an unencytped folder where anyone get wholesale access to the data. All trust has been lost.
Apple is using AI as a tool to improve specific tasks/features that a user invokes. Things like assistant queries and the new calculator. They have said some promising things in regards to privacy, specificly with the use of ChatGPT - any inquiry sent to ChatGPT will ask the user permission first and obscure their IP. This shows they care enough to try, they have not lost our trust - but we remain skeptical.
If apple tries the same thing by scanning everything wholesale, then that’s getting over shadowed by the promises made by the implentaion on the much more popular iOS.
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OP will never acknowledge this.
If you watch WWDC, they shared how it works. They have a private cloud that does not persist data on it, only processes it. Also, it’s audited by a third party and there is a cryptographic mechanism that will not allow your request to be accepted unless the server software has been publicly signed by the auditor. At least, this is my best understanding of it from what I remember.
Also, in the same presentation they announced that you can now lock your Apps and hide them, which will keep its data out of the OS search results. I am fairly certain this also means it’s opted out of ML/AI processing given that any LLM would rely on the same search index.
I think it all remains to be seen, Apple was very specific in their wording about privacy, probably BECAUSE they saw what happened to Microsoft. We didn’t see any live demos and I am still a bit skeptical that it will work that well.
A key difference in how Apple is doing it though, is that it only exposes necessary data as context to an LLM request. Whereas Microsoft was capturing and training on everything.
I don’t have an iPhone 14 so luckily I can’t test this day one, I will wait for reviews and security researchers to look it over.
I think Apple’s emphasis on the privacy and security stuff would have happened anyway, because they’ve been positioning themselves as privacy focused for several years now.
