macOS phones home when previewing local image files [video] | Hacker News Reader

macOS phones home when previewing local image files [video]

youtube.com

64 pointsgatonegro23 comments

The author of the blog post makes a wild leap (from "A daemon connected to Apple's servers when I used QuickLook on a file" [paraphrased] to "Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent [...] Stock macOS now invades your privacy via the Internet when browing local files [...] macOS now contains network-based spyware"), with the strong implication that information about those files is being sent to Apple while stopping just short of actually claiming that.

I've seen these kind of accusations of spying be made a lot based on misinterpretation of very scant evidence, and without something more concrete I think that's almost certainly what's happening here. A far more likely explanation IMO is that the daemon is doing something like checking for regional availability of the Live Text feature (still somewhat problematic but definitely nowhere near the same ballpark), as partially suggested by this commenter: https://infosec.exchange/@yProd/109698545121198396

Regardless, it shouldn't be pinging the Internet whenever the user previews an image file. No good can come of such behavior.

The blog post reports it happening once, not every time. I'd agree that it would feel significantly worse/more suspicious if Apple's servers were contacted every time I previewed/opened a file.

Agree with gp that this is a astonishingly huge logical leap by the author. I would guess the author left the default “report metrics to apple” on, and apple is noting that “a user leveraged the photo preview feature for the first time in X days.” I do wish these metrics were optin but I somewhat get the decision from a PM standpoint, and to their credit Apple presents this choice to the user during the setup process in a really hard-to-miss way.

Incredibly lazy blog post IMO, if you’re going to write an article and video on an infosec site, take the time to MITM the connection so you can avoid purely tinfoil speculative reporting. Apple likely does not make this easy but it is possible to do anything when SIP is disabled.

Analytics are off, as is iCloud, the App Store, Siri Suggestions, and every other Apple service there is a knob exposed for.

Live Text is on, because the machine was recently updated to Ventura and it defaults to on and it never asked if I wanted it. (It's a brand new preference setting.)

If you're going to call someone lazy, look first into what it takes to MITM a TLS connection from an Apple system service to Apple. It seems you are unaware. It's not trivial these days.

Maybe media codec checks then, or a bug that ignores the metrics setting. We can go all day at this until someone finishes the research.

> It seems you are unaware. It's not trivial these days.

I know very well what it takes, thats why I said Apple does not likely make this easy. The last time I tried was a few releases ago: disable SIP, write a frida hook to disable pinning, maybe a couple hours the first time you do it. If I were in a pinch I might not even bother with that and instead just pop mediaservicesd into IDA or Hopper and attach to the process as it hangs in littlesnitch. However I did not write a tinfoil essay on a strange observed behavior without actually investigating it, so I will not be doing any of those for you.

If as you say Apple is deliberately making it so difficult to inspect what their OS is doing, maybe we should assume the worst, until proven otherwise.

There is no legitimate reason why quicklook should be hitting an API when I preview a bitmap in the Finder.

Analytics and Siri Suggestions are off. I don't use iCloud.

Text recognition models would likely be served from an Apple CDN, not api.smoot.apple.com.

I don't know what it's sending (an API hostname suggests some dynamic server code, not just a file download), but it should not be sending anything at all. I don't want it to, and I never consented to such transmission.

I didn't make the claim that file information is being sent because I didn't want to publish anything but facts. I have not done any RE on the binary itself as yet.

I'm responding to you in good faith in the hope that you will take this with an open mind, but now that I see the previous thread, I'm worried that you might not. I'm not sure if you saw this comment but I thought it was particularly constructive and deserves consideration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34403107

> I didn't make the claim that file information is being sent because I didn't want to publish anything but facts.

When you say "Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent" what 95% of people will hear is exactly the claim that scanned data is being sent to Apple. I don't think you can in good conscience say that you're only publishing facts if you are aware of the rate of misinterpretation and don't attempt to clarify.

Ironically you're doing exactly what you're accusing Apple of: saying technically truthful things that say one thing that cause people to believe a different thing (which is, as far as we know, not factual).

I was wondering how long it would take someone to notice.

It's deliberate.

Searched for the original post - it was submitted and flagged three days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34392391).

The post makes big accusations and extrapolations without proof or research, based on a web request whose contents this 'security researcher' didn't even see. A quick web search reveals mediaanalysisd has been a part of macOS since at least 2017.

It is disappointing to see Louis Rossmann blindly repeating any random claim from any random person. This is the same person who created a 'standard' (https://consoledonottrack.com) and spammed a bunch of popular projects with it with an entitled attitude.

I am not a fan of the Apple Tim Cook is leading, but let's be reasonable and put down the pitchforks for a moment. A single web request does not immediately equate to your files being scanned without consent. Louis should know better, and you should not believe any random crap just because he repeats it.

Anyone know how to actually examine the contents of the request? Everyone's tossing around their own theories as to what this request is for but it looks like nobody's doing any real investigation. I'm on macOS Ventura and I tried this method that was suggested in another HN post: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/logging-https.html

But it doesn't seem to work. According to the aforementioned post, Apple system binaries are using cert pinning so it's difficult to intercept the network requests that they make. The suggestion was setting an environment variable to politely ask them to log their requests. I don't think mediaanalysisd respects this variable, however.

Extremely creepy.

Is there a hosts entry I can add to block this behavior?

The original post:

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-n...

This is why I avoid buying an macOS laptop, creepy surveillance of users, and the fact that they wanted to scan users photos and denouncing them to police.

They wanted to be the friends of Police State, and they are friends of China.

Not normal behaviour

CSAM?

Almost certainly not. Likely just a metric on how often users utilize finder previews.

A metric for every preview? Sounds like a poor design decision to do metric reporting per usage.

> A metric for every preview?

That is not what the original blog post said. They are basing their whole argument on a single event.

I have analytics turned off. Apple has no rights to the metrics on my local computer.

Photo hosting services been scanning md5 sums of a database of known criminal images for 20 years. They did that on telecom and isp's since 2000'ish. Google/Apple searched your cloud for mp3s or torrented movies also.

Now Apple just moved the search to the OS via an API call to its server, and people are noticing the traffic.

When I worked in telecom, if there was a hit on an image it was reported to legal. Legal contacted the feds. Feds contacted the local PD of the user. The PD would send a cop in to pick up a burned cd. The server would zip all the users data and burn onto a dvd. We wouldnt touch the dvd, the cop would walk into the datacenter and hit eject and collect the dvd. No chain of custody issues.

> Now Apple just moved the search to the OS via an API call to its server, and people are noticing the traffic.

I'm not sure how photo hosting services doing this for the past 2 decades is related to this when the author of the post explicitly mentions he doesn't use Apple cloud services or products that would trigger such behaviour. This was the OS analysing someone's images, stored locally on their personal computer, and calling back to an API for no discernible reason.

Not sure how you cant understand, apple just moved it from cloud scanning to local scanning. Its a scummy thing to do, but apple was already doing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com