this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Privacy

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175
Do you think people would be okay with 'Recall' if Apple did it? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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With the recent WWDC apple made some bold claims about privacy when it comes to so called Apple Intelligence. This makes me wonder if they did something to what Microsoft did with Recall feature, would people be less concerned and to an extend praise their effort?

Do you trust apple with their claims?

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Apple's PR is better. With Microsoft all news titles were like "OMG Windows will take screenshots of all you do and send it to AI", and with Apple it's more like "Apple is carefully adding AI to their products, respecting user privacy as they always have been".

Of course, when one looks into technical details they would find that MS Recall is strictly local and runs only on special hardware that people don't even have yet.

Apple Intelligence does send your data to cloud and scans everything you have in Apple ecosystem, not just screenshots. Of course they say it's done in very privacy respecting ways, and provide a lot of technical information to back this claim. But at the end it's closed source and is subject to change at any time.

Having said that, Apple users are used to and value that Apple magically takes care of everything, so they are happy to pay premium for Apple's products whatever the company does.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

As far as we know, apple's system does not take screenshots automatically, storing them unencrypted, likely revealing secrets to other programs.

[–] jose1324 -1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Recall doesn't either.. it's encrypted with Windows Hello Auth

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

But once a process is running its trivial to get weeks of extremely detailed history and lots of secrets you thought were ephemeral

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Makes a lot of sense until the closed source affirmation. The source code of the OS they develop is closed source, but a lot of what they do is open source and independantly audited by experts, so there's that in the balance.

Windows is just a pile of trash.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

What that Apple does is Open Source? This is the first time I've read this.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Swift, Webkit, Researchkit, Carekit, FoundationDB, CUPS, Darwin, LLVM and Clang, SwiftNIO, Turi Create, Homekit ADK,

Its one thing to be against a product but its essential to be well informed and not base our perceptions on biased informations.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not familiar with all of them, but I know several of them are tools. Isn't it in apple's best interest to open source the tools if people use and improve them, and subsequently it means they get more money from the app store? And if these are the only things they open source, they still have a tight fist on the vast majority of their code base.

While on the subject of apple and FOSS. They may open source some tools, but do they give back to other projects? I.e. does apple push upstream? Substantially less than google and ms. And I would go so far to say almost never.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

You're diverging from the main subject from what is open source to what you find acceptable behaviour from a corporation, which i do not involve in.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yup, that's why I asked. I still hate Crapple and everything they stand for, but this is good data to start doing some in-depth research. Thanks.

[–] Quique 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Damn hating a product. You are damaged man.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Who says I am a man? Just kidding, I am. I do hate Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta and every other company out there that operate business on a predatory model. Am I damaged? Absolutely, at so many levels it's hard to count them. But that makes me just human, as you will find there is not 1 single human out there that is not damaged at some or other. On the brighter side, I am doing what I can to heal.

[–] matthewc 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Darwin. Their BSD and the foundation of MacOS and therefore all the current OSes they produce.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I have heard of Darwin, and went back to read up on it to refresh my memory. While it is considered open source, it is also useless unless it is used for Apple's closed source operating systems, as can be appreciated in this explanation:

In the beginning, Apple used to make Darwin available as a separate OS, including compiled binaries, installers, ISOs, etc. that you could install on Apple hardware. However, for many years now, Apple only provides a source code dump, every time a new release of macOS comes out. It isn't even possible to compile this source code, because it depends on Apple's internal build tools and build pipeline. There have been some projects trying to patch Darwin to compile it with publicly available tools, but those projects have all died from lack of interest.

Open Source should be compilable and able to be used, at least that's my perspective, and I just may be wrong.

Here's the article this came from on StackExchange:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/401832/why-is-macos-often-referred-to-as-darwin

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, but that's just the kernel. Anything above that (window manager, the utilities that they didn't outright copy from BSD, apps, ...) is basically closed source.

[–] matthewc 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

I guess there is a chance to see some of code, but I doubt about it being properly open sourced.

While we’re publishing the binary images of every production PCC build, to further aid research we will periodically also publish a subset of the security-critical PCC source code.

Source: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/