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Comment by makerofthings | Hacker News Reader

My phone is an extension of my brain, it is my most trusted companion. It holds my passwords, my mail, my messages, my photos, my plans and notes, it holds the keys to my bank accounts and my investments. I sleep with it by my bed and I carry it around every day. It is my partner in crime.

Now apple are telling me that my trusted companion is scanning my photos as they are uploaded to iCloud, looking for evidence that apple can pass to the authorities? They made my phone a snitch?

This isn't about security or privacy, I don't care about encryption or hashes here, this is about trust. If I can't trust my phone, I can't use it.

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Technically they could have been scanning the photos already to power some AI algorithms or whatever else.

I think this is a nudge for folks to wake up and see the reality of what it means to use the cloud. We are leasing storage space from Apple in this case.

Technically, it’s no different than a landlord checking up on their tenants to make sure “everything is okay.”

And technically, if you do not like iCloud, don’t use it and roll your own custom cloud storage! After all, it’s redundancy and access the cloud provides. And Apple provides APIs to build them.

Hell, with the new Files app on iOS i just use a Samba share with my NAS server (just a custom built desktop with RAID 5 and Ubuntu.)

They do scan the photos on my device, to provide useful functionality to me. All good. If they scan photos in iCloud, that's up to apple, I can use it or not. No problem. With this new setup, my device can betray me.I think that is different and crosses a line.

> Technically, it’s no different than a landlord checking up on their tenants to make sure “everything is okay.”

By this logic, you don't own your phone but rent it from Apple?

Technically I own my iPhone but the software is licensed to me (not a lawyer but that’s my understanding).

We probably also sign something that allows Apple to do what they will with our images—albeit we retain the copyrights to them.

Just to reiterate: the landlord metaphor is referring to software which we lease from Apple—not the device itself.

This is yet another case where I want to emphasize the importance of OPEN hardware and software designs. If we truly want ownership, we have to take ownership into our hands (which means a lot of hard work). Most commercial software is licensed so no we don’t own anything in whole that runs commercial software.

No they really couldn't, because someone investigating, monitoring and reverse engineering the device traffic might have noticed, it would be leaked by a whistleblower, there are plenty of ways this could ruin Apple.

Not so now, they are in the clear either way because Apple themselfes cannot look into the hashes databank. So the backdoor is there, the responsibility of the crime of spying is forwarded to different actors, which even cannot be monitored by Apple.

This is truly a devilish device they thought up. Make misuse possible, exonerate any responsibility to outside actors, act naive as if hands are clean.

This is the thing Apple doesn't realize: our phone's OS vendor has one job: not to betray us.

They have betrayed us.

I have purchased my last iPhone.

good luck finding a replacement, you'll end up using a custom rom if you are serious about tracking and privacy, and that custom rom will be... fully dependent on donations.

I'd pay for it as a subscription service TBH. It would be good for security minded corps and nerds.

of all the items in the list, this is what the govt is interested in :

> It is my partner in crime.

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