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?
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.
Amen.
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.
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.
They also need to know your password to access it so at that point all bets are off.
I'm not sure if "forgetting" it is going to cut it - it much depends on a jurisdiction.
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. he. can..."
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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?
The spying has no excuse and in the 2000s we would’ve called this malware and spyware, appropriately.
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".
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.