Comment by api

Comment by api 4 days ago

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Not wrong, but it’s interesting that Apple gets so much flak for this when Google and Microsoft don’t even try. If anything they try to invade privacy as much as possible.

Of course maybe that question has its own answer. Apple markets itself as the last personal computing company where you are the customer not the product so they are held to a higher standard.

What they should do Is do the processing locally while the phone is plugged in, and just tell people they need a better phone for that feature if it’s too slow. Or do it on their Mac if they own one while that is plugged in.

j2kun 3 days ago

FWIW, I work on homomorphic encryption at Google, and Google has all kinds of other (non-FHE) privacy enhancing tech, such as differential privacy, federated learning, and https://github.com/google/private-join-and-compute which are deployed at scale.

Perhaps it's not as visible because Google hasn't defaulted to opt-in for most of these? Or because a lot of it is B2B and Google-internal (e.g., a differential-privacy layer on top of SQL for internal metrics)

[edit]: this link was a very vague press release that doesn't say exactly how Google uses it: https://security.googleblog.com/2019/06/helping-organization...

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  • keeganpoppen 3 days ago

    uhhh yeah it's not visible because it's not used for anything. because it runs contrary to Google's entire raison d'être. if it's not turned on by default, what is even the point of doing it at all other than to pacify engineers who are perfectly happy to miss the forest for the trees? it's kind of like saying that you have the power of invisibility, but it only works if no one is looking at you.

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BlackFly 4 days ago

Well when you are building a feature that can only be appreciated by a subculture of people (privacy advocates), and they complain about the most basic faux pas that you could do in their culture (not asking them before you phone home with data derived from their data)... you have invited these people to criticise you.

Most people I know of wouldn't care about such a feature other than a breathless sort of "Wow, Apple tech!" So they are building something which is intended to win over privacy conscious people, kudos to them, everyone stands to benefit. But the most basic custom in that subculture is consent. So they built something really great and then clumsily failed on the easiest detail because it is so meaningless to everyone except that target audience. To that audience, they don't bother criticising google or microsoft (again) because it goes without saying that those companies are terrible, it doesn't need to be said again.

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  • ylk 4 days ago

    > a feature that can only be appreciated by a subculture of people (privacy advocates)

    Just because it can’t be “appreciated” by all users doesn’t mean it’s only “for” a small sub-group.

    It seems to me they’re just trying to minimise the data they have access to — similar to private cloud compute — while keeping up with the features competitors provide in a less privacy-respecting way. Them not asking for permission makes it even more obvious to me that it’s not built for any small super privacy-conscious group of people but the vast majority of their customers instead.

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  • gigel82 3 days ago

    "not asking them before you phone home with data" is a basic faux pas for privacy advocates? LOL; that's a fundamental breach of trust of the highest degree, not basic by any means.

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    • Dylan16807 3 days ago

      Are you under the impression that "basic" and "fundamental" are not synonyms?

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lapcat 3 days ago

> just tell people they need a better phone for that feature if it’s too slow. Or do it on their Mac if they own one while that is plugged in.

The issue isn't slowness. Uploading photo library data/metadata is likely always slower than on-device processing. Apparently the issue in this case is that the world locations database is too large to be stored locally.

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  • phkahler 3 days ago

    >> Apparently the issue in this case is that the world locations database is too large to be stored locally.

    What kind of capacity can ROM chips have these days? And at what cost?

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yard2010 4 days ago

In other words: don't hate the player hate game, but the point still stands.

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  • drawkward 4 days ago

    The game, unlike Apple's policy, is opt-in. Hate the player and the game.

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okamiueru 4 days ago

Whataboutisms aren't all the great you know. Google and MS also get flak, and they also deserve it.

But now that we're talking about these differences, I'd say that Apple users are notoriously complacent and defend Apple and their practices. So, perhaps in some part it is in an attempt to compensate for that? I'm still surprised how we've now accepted that Apple receives information pretty much every time we run a process (or rather, if it ran more than 12 hours ago, or has been changed).

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victorbjorklund 4 days ago

You can always find someone worse. Does not mean we should not critise people/organizations.

You think Trump is bad? Well, Putin is worse. You think Putin is bad? Kim Jong Un is worse.

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