"Consumer choice" is not how you stop hostile all-pervasive monopoly machine learning algorithms. The number of times I've heard from smart people: "Don't use Google"; "Don't use Amazon"; "Microsoft are evil" (true) - now "Don't buy it". Running into the hedgerows and away from the mainstream of digital life is not an option for all but a tiny fraction of people. "Just get an Android phone!" is an even worse idea.
I have to disagree - privacy requires openness. Indeed, "just get an Android phone" from Google, OnePlus and several other major manufacturers is a viable solution - they allow you full control over the device without their permission.
You don't want Google? No problem, blow the ROM away and install Lineage without GApps, you can even mess with MicroG if you're reliant on some app that needs Play Services.
Apple became the biggest corporation in the world because they worked out how to build humane interfaces into the technologies that shape the future. That you believe Grandma will be just fine nerding around with system internals, or will care what ROM is(!) shows just how far out of touch so many hackers really are. I'm sorry, but no: Android is not a solution.
Of course! I'm not suggesting it's a solution for everyone at all. Just realize that Grandma will never have privacy like that.
Corporations and governments combine to basically make privacy a niche thing for tinkerers only, you simply cannot mass-market the development attitudes nor technical and opsec skills needed to achieve a real degree of privacy on the user side.
It's impossible to have privacy just for you in a society that otherwise doesn't have privacy. Think Facebook: even if you don't share much details, you friends certainly do. They will post your photos together and happily tag you on them, they will write how you hung out together, they will geo-tag your shared commutes, etc. Even if you don't share too many details with Apple/Google/Amazon/etc, your mobile carrier certainly does. Your Facebook/Twitter/TikTok does. Everyone around you does.
The solution to this problem does not lie in a technical plane, nor does it in digital escapism.
In terms of avoiding CSAM detection they give you no more control than Apple. If you use Google’s Photo Library, your photos have already been scanned.
I want an option that is "grandma" compatible. In other words, it isn't really viable if you can't just buy it off the shelf, or have to dig into settings to opt out. Right now if I go to Best Buy (or insert your favorite retailer here), I can't buy hardware off the shelf that won't send my data to a remote server by default.
Well, almost. Both of them have their "fuck the user" quirks. Oneplus spent a goodly amount of time exfiltrating private data to their own servers until they got caught and Google has a bad habit of disabling features like HDMI-out to force you to buy their other products like Chromecast.
You’re not running away from a mainstream digital life by buying a different computer, that’s just FUD. I’m nearly all Linux run and this has not decreased my ability to have a mainstream digital life…whatever those qualifications are, which seem to be specifically tied to software Apple allows you to use. These companies only want you to think life will be worse off by not buying their products.
Meanwhile in the real world, my brilliant friend, who cares about privacy, called me in a panic because she couldn't work out how to shift/right-click a video in her browser to download it to her hard drive, and you believe Linux is a viable alternative to the vast majority of ordinary people?
My representative is behind the charge to undo the app store monopoly. We can also push for less surveillance, less centralization of power, etc.
It seems if the OS vendor doesn't get to have a default browser, default app store, and default cloud store, that they don't get access to scan your files without asking either.
Agreed. Democratically decide where the lines are, or ought to be, then move those lines with amendments and revisions as needed. Judge those lines in the broader context of our legal system. We balance these issues in the physical world with warrants and judicial oversight - that's what we need here - sensible middle ground the democracy can live with.
> Mazda intends to fortify our initiatives of development of fundamental software technology in order to be able to accommodate for next-generation Mobility as a Service (Maas) and update vehicle functions Over the Air (OTA)
> Five Japanese OEM companies 3 including Mazda will jointly develop standard engineering specifications of next-generation in-vehicle communication devices to push for a standardized communication system in order to provide safer and stress-free connected services sooner.
Assuming the marketplace is functioning, the demand for these sort of "features" (aka: non-features) would assume there would be a rational supplier to give it.
The next step in that debate is "yeah but the big monopolies are making it impossible for a little guy to get in." Which is true.
We can agree the regulatory capture is bad.
In the meanwhile, Google is not openly saying they will run ML on your images on your phone. With Android, you don't have to sync to the cloud, and you could even replace or add your own camera option. You can side-load without jailbreaking, etc.
Now, not that most consumer friendly option, but the advice for this crowd is still good - if you still have an iPhone and this is the last straw for you, there are plenty of good options that still exist, today. And then - let's fight regulatory capture and big government so a more dynamic marketplace can take root.
> Assuming the marketplace is functioning, the demand for these sort of "features" (aka: non-features) would assume there would be a rational supplier to give it.
The assumption that a "functioning" market will do a good job of catering to even fairly popular wishes does not seem to hold true in the real world, including for cases in which I'm pretty damn sure it's not some kind of government interference causing it not to. It's utterly common for plain ol' commodities subject to no special government scrutiny or control and with many suppliers to provide no option for features or product-types that would surely have many buyers, simply because no-one expects the returns to be as high as doing something else with the same capacity.
AFAIK this happens for a bunch of reasons, including that information is very, very far from being perfectly shared in all parts of the market, that there are significant costs associated with quality information-gathering, and efficient use of capital tending to cause production to cluster around tiny little bits of the possible product space (similar to how pharmacies like to build right next to each other, rather than spreading out to reduce travel-time-to-a-pharmacy in an area)
Sure, but I already have an android. The concern I have is that the regulatory landscape will change if Apple opens Pandora's box. Google could just as easily do the same thing, hampered only by their complete inability to keep androids updated. I have a pine phone but what happens if the Congress critters decide everyone should have this feature and networks should ban devices that don't.
The point is that we're REALLY playing with fire here.
You seem to be confused about what Apple is doing.
Nothing anywhere says that Apple scans the pictures you store on your own device. They only scan the pictures you upload to their cloud service.
The scanning is done on device before upload in Apple’s case, and in the cloud after upload in Google’s case, but either way it is only done to photos that are uploaded to their cloud services.
If you are really claiming Apple scans the photos you don’t upload to iCloud Photo Library, then you are lying or dissembling.
It's splitting hairs in the end. You're arguing that they only pre-scan it for bad stuff if you decide to upload it, so they don't end up with that material on their servers.
BUT THE CAPABILITY TO SCAN CONTENT OF PHOTOS ON DEVICE EXISTS. The argument is tomorrow they can simply start sending scan meta data or captions of image content up to a server without you opting into cloud storage.
The capability exists on device. It's all baby steps.
It’s not splitting hairs to point out a lie about what Apple is doing. If you are also trying to say that Apple is scanning files that are only stored locally, then you are also a liar. If you support the spread of that false information, then you are dishonest.
As to the capability on the device, the capacity to scan for CSAM is very narrow and is very hard to repurpose.
The capacity to upload images to iCloud Photo Library on the other hand has been there for years.
At any time Apple could add some other kind of scanner if they want to, and there is no reason for it to use this mechanism. It would be terrible if they did but it has nothing to do with this.
Anyone with programming experience can tell you that if all they wanted to do was check arbitrary files against a list of hashes, they would be a simple mechanism to write.
There is no way that this mechanism helps them scan for other things. It isn’t even a step in that direction, let alone a baby step.
Ok - if we are going to narrow the scope of the debate to the nature of the scanning, that is the core of my argument to begin with.
I'm not an expert in how CSAM works, but if it only as a block list against certain images it will be very ineffective.
The way I would expect it to work, is to recognize the content of images. The SOTA on this is pretty impressive. Knowing the content of the images is what Google does in the cloud, and its great. I can search my images for "Green taxi" and it will find it. Water. Sunsets. Anything.
If apple is introducing the ability to recognize photo content on the device (even if right now it is destined for the cloud as a pre-scan), it doesn't really matter that the model is only tuned to find child abuse, as an example.
Tomorrow, the hyper-parameters or the ontology could be expanded to search for anything. Political affiliations, location and timestamps (this doesn't even need modeling!), illegal objects or substances, etc.
The deal is that Apple is saying "we are going to use your device to determine what is in your pictures." The circumstances and scope of those determinations can change, but the expectation that Apple will be doing it is now publicly established.
So it’s worse. They don’t wait until they’ve had several hits before they get any knowledge of it, they have a list of people who might have these images in their library.
