This is interesting!
Idk, to me it's just one more step in widening of the technological Overton window.
Also, the assistants are not recording, they're analyzing sound wave for the trigger word. This isn't recording, it's been explained countless times already.
This whole conversation is about taking it to next level.
I think as soon as the original capability launched the game was over. People don't understand technical distinctions like that and they've already accepted it.
I am talking about the recording that lasts. Recording people's voice without their consent, on your behalf, and transcribing the text for your later use. It's not volatile 2s analyzed by the DSP, it's an actual record of conversation.
This is not the same recording.
But yes, I see your point, too, maybe back then we got used to it at an even less intrusive level. So it progresses, slowly, but surely, like a frog in a pot.
This is about remote control. People who think Apple/Google/Microsoft will just pass on the reigns of that remote control are dangerously naïve.
Apple has locked down whole classes of third-party utilities for its mobile system and Google is copying them as we speak. We are slowing progress at great cost by letting them lock-in and rent seek.
The commenter may have sounded unhinged but the thesis is sound.
Everybody you know runs Linux on their router, set-top box, etc.
Big tech has moved on from amalgamating OS and UI features to copying entire distros.
And Android is still the biggest mobile OS.
So if everyone else has a feature that lets you use your voice all the time as an input device, you are seen behind the times if you don't offer it. But at the same time if you want to offer protection for that feature, not being able to access it outside the device is the only acceptable answer.
Consumers who are more discerning, privacy conscious and technologically literate would be best. But without that being an option, having one major company still even pretend to care about privacy is at least refreshing
This is the same as with the Meta glasses and that's where I believe said Overton window is being expanded to. I am not one for conspiracy theories but it's not hard to notice the sudden appearance of these devices and their "this is cool" and the implied "what is even your problem" gaslighting advertising.
I think sadly there is a much sadder and boring explanation. Google already tried Google Glass 12? years ago
its not sudden, its just the tech has matured enough. And Google and Fb are ad companies, their market is telling companies "we know everything about your customers, pay us so we can give it to you". For them to grow the arms race of privacy invading information collection is inevitable. But you cant keep asking more of consumers without giving them something in return, so they wrap the data collection in "features", which they then tell everyone you are falling behind if you do not have them.
So if you are not into data collection you either fall behind in feature parity or you find a way to have the minimum required info in terms of spillage. And Apple seems to fall on the second one
(Whether having gigantic corporations whose entire business model is selling advertiser information that users do not know was collected should be allowed to operate, and have hardware businesses, an dpolice connections and defense contracts is perhaps a much less interesting but easier moral question where the answer seems like an easy NO)
"for each desired change, make the change easy, then make the easy change"
If you don’t trust Apple, you’re on your own - you can probably recreate all this on a FOSS stack, but you’re gonna have to do it repeatedly for everything, and you’re on the hook for explaining it to everyone you know so they can use it, too. It’s not that you _can’t_ do it yourself, it’s just a whole lot harder than if you accept the bargain and trust Apple.
Whether or not you want to do that is up to you, but I don’t think anyone’s in the dark on what the bargain is.
(They are on watchlist for Apple Maps & other ads…)
And you’re absolutely right - as soon as they break the value proposition, the value of their package and the price people are willing to pay for it drops in half and they’ve all the sudden gotta compete with Google and Samsung and Huaiwei and the rest of that jungle, and that market sucks.
The massive issue in all of this is digital identity.
Everyone is a citizen of a private corporation without any rights or access points to their digital identity.
Humans rely on our digital identity (email accounts, iCloud, google, etc) for nearly everything.
In many ways, it's like the equivalent of using our license or other ID in physical spaces.
Except, humans are relying on digital identities provided as digital citizens of corporations (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc), whereby they do no have teh same recourse that official access points of data do.
If at any given time, the majority of the identity providers are generally or ultimately not on the side of the identity holders (human) wrt to their inalienable rights.
There's no easy answer for this. Convenience has been used as a massive tradeoff for security for 10-15 years to the point that most people don't know better, or that there were and can be better options.
Downplaying the fact that the single change of a few sentences could change for worse the promises any corporation makes (it's not entitled to serve the user's needs first, after all).
Security and Privacy in Apple certainly seem to be better, but are not the best they could be.
Privacy and security, especially where it comes to protecting people from increasing threats online including AI bots, is not going to come from corporations alone, they haven't been able to build or roll them out while they learn at the expense of people.
There's no answer being pointed to, only that Apple being the only vendor with some promises isn't very good at all.
Otherwise you don't really own your hardware.
LLMs will be able to secure (and insecure) more and more hardware as time goes on.
There’s some resilience, there.
The new ability to add one's own passes to Apple Wallet is nice though. Long overdue.
The systemic "lack of alternatives" is steering you, you confuse "not knowing alternatives" with the actual absence of alternatives and ignore possible further implications entirely.
The pattern is systemic capture, keeping you sedated about it is part of the scheme.
And yet, won't let me control my Nest Thermostat
(I'm not saying this is exclusively Apple's fault: the lack of Nest interop is Google's fault, but Apple isn't making it easy for third-parties to build Apple-Google bridges either)
(They support Matter protocol)
But I have, for example, a couple of Brilliant smart wall panels (one gang sized little panels with lighting and other controls) that I have to duplicate because despite the Brilliant being able to expose devices as a bridge to HomeKit I can’t say “Run this Scene” because Apple doesn’t allow external integrations to do so.
I’m honestly surprised in the age of vibe-coding we haven’t seen someone try to build out a direct “open walled garden”.
AI could solve the basic coverage on every operating system and screen shape, while the various p2p technologies have gotten really good and when combined with mDNS and maybe an encrypted byo-cloud-storage (eg drive, Dropbox, etc APIs) for async data synching. The nerd side is build a data sync layer, then a variety of apps and products can be built on top of it.
It doesn’t necessarily need to work as well as Apple, nor as rich features, it just needs to support enough devices well enough to allow heterogeneous-platform households or friends to share what they need.
And even if it did work as expected, given the track record of 3 lettres agences, the chance they didn't gag order their way into a back door for this one is also very low.
I find it naïve that after what we learned for the last 20 years people still believe this PR.
AWS enclaves [2] have been around for a few years now with decent research on the topic and they are highly secure from personal experience and pentesting [3]. The idea at least is similar for exclaves, instead of a separate VM or a completely detached coprocessor chip, Exclaves create isolated resources on the main system-on-chip.
[1]: https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c... [2]: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/nitro-enclaves/ [3]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.04123
No. Most People just shrugged. Gag order, they were forced, not their fault.
Why would you even remotely believe that they are not under a similar situation with the current admin? It's just ridiculously naïve.
In fact, with the recent ledger scandal we know you can bypass good hardware security in clever ways if you are an external actor.
But in this case the actor is just Apple, they can do whatever they want. And Tim Cook offered a gold bribe to trump in public, so we know for a fact they are under pressure.
We know Apple have cheated in the past (the home button scandal). We know they have a lied about privacy (turned out 3rd party contractors had access to your siri conversation).
Your position is just not credible in 2026. It's the xkcd wrench vs encryption type of argument, and it ignores two decades of history.
Reading such argument on HN tells me Snowden did throw away his life for nothing, damn.
> What bad PR?
It literally changed Apple's marketing and privacy features for years to come [1] and at the next request of the FBI forced them to choose privacy and security as something the would like to be known for and incorporate into their products long term. [2] Snowden made a note how effective Apple's encryption had become in 2016. [3]
> Why would you even remotely believe that they are not under a similar situation with the current admin? It's just ridiculously naïve.
Multiple aspects of the larger program was done without the knowledge of the tech companies, PRISM was no where near the level of pervasiveness as Upstream. [3]. They inserted a man in the middle on the fiber lines leaving data centers to copy traffic, functionally making backdoors unnecessary.
> 3rd party contractors had access to your siri conversation
I'm glad that one was leaked, it's something that a lot of us thought was happening with many voice assistants, and it shows just why sensitive quality control should not be outsourced.
> Your position is just not credible in 2026 . . . ignores two decades of history. . . Reading such argument on HN tells me Snowden did throw away his life for nothing, damn.
Same goes to you, you ignored all improvements related to this discourse over that time. I'm highly skeptical of many corporations, including Apple, but my goals are to understand the whole picture and direction. Overall Apple has been up and down in terms of security and privacy commitments, but significantly better compared to companies such as Google, Huawei, and Meta.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ6PpX6xg-E&t=1808s [4]: https://www.eff.org/pages/upstream-prism
So...no voice command? Or, is accessible by operating system or Apple?
correction: AI to backdoor vibe-coded designs
if anyone has read the trusting trust paper, one will know you can theoretically create code where vulnerabilities are hidden in plain sight. But that would mean its designed and reviewed by people who don't understand it in the first place.
The point of a secure enclave is to reduce the attack surface to something you can actually reason about the entire thing.
Sticking more and more in there is asking to defeat the whole purpose.
For those following along, the Secure Enclave is a separate core that runs most of the security stuff (including hardware like the fingerprint scanner), and Secure Exclaves are essentially virtual machines on the main AP cores used as a security boundary for specific tasks, kind of like Qubes does.
without the context of your disability or disorder, if you confidently spout nonsense, then from an outside perspective, you are the problem. externally, i have no knowledge into your disabilities or disorders, or even if you're lying for sympathy (to be clear, i do not think you are lying). however, i will not accept you making it my problem that, when you confidently spout nonsense and lies, you were corrected
maybe, in the future, you will be less willing to publicly make statements confidently chastising people and products for things they are not doing
feel free to have the last word, but i don't see any value to continuing this conversation
On top of all of that, the neural network for FaceID currently runs in the secure enclave, and directly controls the fingerprint reader hardware, so it wasn't exactly a leap to think they moved the hardware pathway for the camera there too. My admonishment for doing too much in the secure enclave exists for the current state of the world.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/apple-buys-israeli-startup-rep...
Anyone who thinks Apple is going to fight for their users if their revenue slips targets and stock tanks is an idiot.
Money talks.
Least of all with home rolled solutions. Contrary to popular belief.
2. Set up TLS MITM between the device and the Internet. Install the cert on the device.
3. On the device, disable certificate pinning for Apple's apps.
4. Use the device normally, observe all the telemetry flowing to Apple.
You might be a little shocked at the amount of... personal and usage details sent to Apple FQDNs.
Remember: Privacy is a feature of the Apple Marketing dept -- not SWE!
1. https://security.apple.com/research-device/I think it's actually a very good approach. Obviously depends on actual implementation details, but the premise is good.
> The only realistic way to guarantee this sort of thing is to reverse engineer the entire chain between the two and then never install any software updates.
Reverse engineer the hardware and not change it, that's the whole point, it's not in the software, only queries after the keyword are passed forward (if I'm understanding correctly, gee I don't even like apple much, things I choose to spend my time on..)
So Apple can ship whatever update they want, doing whatever with no oversight or independent review. No thanks - you folks are forgetting the US a surveillance state.
A device with no physical switch for it's microphone and cameras worries me and it's just not worth whatever minor convenience this adds.
This is exactly why Apple emphasizes they lack the ability (keys) to decrypt your data stored on iCloud or in transit. US courts will demand it, and this way Apple can say it literally is unable to comply no matter what the court orders. You can certainly choose not to believe them, but at least they are making the legal argument in actual court cases. I don’t see the other big tech companies doing that.
Does any third party periodically verify and audit this claim?
— or —
Do we blindly "just trust Apple, bro"?