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Comment by elgertam | Hacker News Reader

> What if I told you that every Mac since 2022 ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you: who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, with whom, what you do and when.

I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends." And Calendar and Reminders knows where I go. And so forth.

The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.

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> The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.

Agreed. None of this is magic, and the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free. Many HN people even _build_ those platforms.

Would I like to see more controls around this? Yes, absolutely. Having some random app be able to read this data with only a single permission barrier is room for improvement. I would also like to see more tooling included to inspect and correct this data. Something like a Monica[1], but local and built on local data. Suddenly address book data is no longer a list of names and numbers, but a part of a data structure that you can use to surface information, like friend's preferences or vacation photos together. Not everything that collects data is insidious and a Black Mirror episode in the making.

[1]: https://www.monicahq.com/en/

>> the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free

This is truly disappointing to hear on HN.

You realize this site is run by a venture capital firm and startup accelerator whose alumni include companies like Flock and Delve, right?

On a side note, every few times I open Google's photo gallery on my android phone, it pops up a dark pattern "backup your photos" toast with a pre-selected radio box saying yes, and two or three delicate manual steps to AVOID having it start uploading all my photos right then.

Unbelievably invasive and offensive.

And what is your "Verify" procedure?

With proprietary software, you just have to take the company's word for it

> given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life.

Does it know this based on something other than you told it a name for a face at some point? I have plenty of people where Photos sees an unidentified person, and they remain unidentified as I have not named them. It also knows my pets because I've also named them. Until I manually set the name, Photos did not "know" them.

I think(?) it also figures it out from the contact photo you give someone and matching from that. Not everyone puts photos on their contacts though.

I don't trust people that push their contact info like that. That's something from an entirely different generation that I just can't grok

I would _LOVE_ an option in iOS to say "don't accept these from anyone, and regardless of what you think about in the future, never send one either" that is honored indefinitely.

> I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends."

I got inspired by the automatic “memories” videos/slideshows that Photo makes, and applied it to a video game of AI creatures. The creatures accumulate memories about their experiences, and then the game builds reels with little images or replays of their memories as they happened, with comments about their feelings. It’s pretty fun to watch

Great "just a user" feedback!

>it should be opt-in

And definitely not "cannot even turn this shit off" mode.

----

I just recently installed Microsoft Office 2011 on my 27" iMac (2009 i5), and it absolutely shocked me that the default "Send User Data to Microsoft" option was `OPT-OUT`, requiring the user to manually click a radio-button to `OPT-IN` to usage data collection.

This was in recent living memory. From Microsoft.

I wonder how they get around GDPR. Normally I'd expect the EU to dish out a pretty hefty fine for this sort of thing, but something tells me Apple lawyers and penpushers has been busy making sure this passes, even though it's technically illegal.

Might not be used in the EU

For the GDPR to have impact here, wouldn't they have to be collecting the information in the first place? If they're doing all the work on your own computer, that wouldn't trigger any GDPR issues.

Data collection is still data collection, it doesn't matter whether I am the one processing that data or a third party :)

Edit: I am not making any claims on what constitutes as data only what is considered as processing. And yes, data collection rules under GDPR can be quite absurd

It does matter. Your interpretation of “data collection” leads to absurd results.

How far does this go? Are the Bayesian spam filters that email clients have had for years that use your own classifications GDPR violations because they collect data about what you do or don’t mark as spam? Is your browser a GDPR violation because it collects data about your system that can be used to fingerprint you? Does your OS violate the GDPR when it displays your most recently accessed files in a file picker or as first suggestions when you search for something? Is the SMART monitoring built into your drives a GDPR violation? My understanding of the GDPR is that it applies to data the company is collecting about you. If the company never gets the data in the first place, then they haven’t collected it.

1. Spam filters. No, the data was collected explicitly for the spam filter to work. Anything else? Not unless you consent to it. 2. Browser collection. The browser itself? There's an agreement when installing it. The websites? There's the cookie banners. 3. OS. Is it your data? No permission needed. Your device, your data. Other people's data? Unclear. Depends on what you told the person when you collected said data. 4. SMART. I don't know a lot about how it works.

I was talking about the data you collect. Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed? You're agreeing, and it has to be an unambiguous. Sending the data outsids the EU? Explicit checkbox.

Is it absurd? Yes

Your uninformed opinion about what the GDPR requires is absurd, yes.

Fortunately your opinion bears no resemblance to reality, so the absurdity is confined to inside your head (except to the extent it leaks onto message boards, as here)

> Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed?

Ok, but that seems to contradict your original assertion that it doesn't matter where the data is processed. The processes we're talking about run on your computer, processing data about you so that the services your OS provides can use that data to make the services work. That sounds a lot to me like "your own data processed on your device"

You should admit it’d be a bit silly to give notice to yourself that you are processing your own data!

> Data collection is still data collection, it doesn't matter whether I am the one processing that data or a third party

It absolutely matters who collects or processes for who must be GDPR compliant.

If it is stored entirely on the machine you own, then you are processing and storing the data.

More and more companies will start to use this loophole...

Next, Google will be downloading a database of 2 billion ads to your PC to check against all your private data and decide which ad to show you for anything you search in the future.

And because its all on your PC, no GDPR issues - you are processing your own data.

in this hypothetical setup you're effectively downloading malware, I wouldn't really consider that a loophole. Regulation that concerns data ownership can do precisely what the name says, give you control over where your data lives.

If you have full sovereignty over your data and your computer and you decide to use software that downloads ads and blasts them to you, at some point even in the best jurisdiction you're responsible for what you install

This is how privacy-preserving advertising works, yes. To be entirely honest if this works I think I’d agree with that term!

It all lives on your device in order to make it work better. Apple literally doesn’t have custody of the data so it’s not relevant to the GDPR. It’s your data.

Also available to any other app with "full disk access" to just read and upload. A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).

Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user. That's hardly unique to this data, and is a well known issue when it comes to personal data and the applications you run under the unix permissions model. That this is at least behind the "full disk access" control makes it more protected than something like all of the tax and accounting data your financial software is storing in your Documents or home folder (well, technically under macOS your Documents folder also has its own permission, but it's the same sort of thing where anything with permission to read from your Documents folder can read anything in there).

It's an eternal balancing act because every time Apple implements some new restriction in their OS that prevents apps from doing whatever they want, whenever they want, people get mad at them. But without those restrictions, the ever increasing amount of personal data that is stored on your computer is exposed to the ever increasing number of data slurping applications that you run.

This drives me crazy. I'm slowly working on isolating every application into it's own sandbox but the fact that this wasn't built into the kernel drives me up the wall.

>Every piece of data on your computer that is owned by your user is available to any other app you run as your user.

That not being the case is the whole purpose of the per-app sandboxes which macOS has along with TCC. We're not discussing plain Unix permissions alone.

Ok, and the data is in a location that you need to grant full disk access to an application in order to access it. So what is the complaint here? Is it that if you run an application and give it access to the data that it has access to the data?

> A permission that make apps ask for and others need to work (e.g. a terminal replacement).

I assume you mean 'many' and not 'make'—this is untrue; you only need to grant FDA if you're trying to access protected areas, like the knowledge graph store.

Granting full disk access to an app that you don't trust not to surreptitiously exfiltrate your data is the kind of user error where the buck stops with PEBCAK.

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