Hacker News

Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier(8rank.ai)

653 points by infwhispers 19 hours ago | 362 comments

At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.

A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern.

If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat relentless transcription.

With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401

[–] ryandrake 13 hours ago

I've also become totally exhausted by all these "someone is making your computer do X behind your back" revelations. Whether it's the app developer or OS vendor, it doesn't really matter. When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user, and instead start operating on behalf of the OS vendor and app developers? Every day there's a new case of this.

[–] dingaling 12 hours ago

Largely, I believe, when phones crossed over from being basic communication devices to being smartphones, but retained their 'appliance' nature.

An entire generation thereby grew up with personal computing represented by vendor-controlled handheld appliances, and naturally regarded actual PCs in the same manner.

And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.

[–] ryandrake 10 hours ago

I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor. When I buy an Apple computer, I don't want to have a relationship with Apple. I don't want to log in to iCloud. I don't want them deciding what software I can run and what I can't. I don't want them wagging their finger disapprovingly at me when I download and run something not "notarized" by them. I don't want them mediating my use of my own computer! When I buy a Windows PC it's even worse. Again, I don't want to log into a Microsoft account. I don't want them pushing other software on me via in-OS ads. I don't want to send telemetry back to them. I don't want them recording my screen and saving it god knows where for nebulous "features".

When I buy a table saw, I don't expect DeWalt to hang around my workshop telling me what I can and can't cut, watching and logging what wood I use and when I use it, what my finished product looks like, changing the features and buttons on the saw in the middle of the night. Why the fuck do we tolerate this from software??

It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions! Some of them are letting telemetry and metrics and A/B testing creep in. And some third party Linux software is just as intrusive and demanding as commercial Windows/Mac software.

[–] mixmastamyk 6 hours ago

Sounds like you’d like our group: https://trustworthy.technology/

There’s an invite link to a chat group as well, at the bottom of the page.

[–] Obscurity4340 1 hour ago

Great resource!

[–] skinfaxi 12 hours ago

It's even reflected in the language used by younger generations, asking if things are "allowed" or assuming things are illegal by default.

[–] dylan604 12 hours ago

In some Linux distros like Debian, everything is illegal/prohibited until you explicitly allow it and only comes with the bare minimum of software necessary to make the OS work. Contrast that to other distros like Ubuntu where everything comes preinstalled and is very permissive. These obviously target different audiences. Smart phones are targeting different audiences too. The power users annoyed by the dumb things the device does just means you're not the target audience and are just bonus buyers for their bottom line.

[–] hparadiz 3 hours ago

Complete nonsense. You get passwordless root upon install.

[–] gf000 8 hours ago

> In some Linux distros like Debian, everything is illegal/prohibited until you explicitly allow it

Bit of a nitpick, but this is certainly not true of their userspace, where an `npm install` can just install a keylogger or read your ssh keys, or do whatever it wants -- except for updating your video card driver.

[–] dylan604 7 hours ago

I would hope that someone deliberately choosing to run a headless Debian install would be wise enough to not go around running `npm install` willy nilly. In my personal experience, I've never once needed an `npm install` in Debian environment. I've only ever used them in server environments and to be honest thinking about it, that was all pre-npm when javascript was kept where it belonged in your browser and not my server. Someone screwed us all allowing JS on the server, but that's an entirely different conversation.

[–] direwolf20 10 hours ago

Side effects of living in an authoritarian panopticon

[–] sellmesoap 9 hours ago

I always thought the quote "you're not the customer you're the product" originated with RMS, I went to look it up before I commented and it turns out it was Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman in 1973! Just as true now as then. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/

[–] imglorp 2 hours ago

Yes, and if the OS maker is not mining you for data, they are leaving mountains of cash on the table. So mine they must and mine they will. The financial incentives are overwhelming.

We should be removing those incentives at every level: legislative, societal, government and private.

[–] SoftTalker 11 hours ago

> When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user

When we connected them to the internet.

[–] coldtea 10 hours ago

We connected them to the internet a full decade or more before this happened.

[–] antiframe 9 hours ago

My computer has been connected to the Internet since the 90s and it's also constantly been my computer. The trick is, run software that is free.

[–] SoftTalker 7 hours ago

But it was the internet that made all the spying, profiling, and tracking possible. Before that, there was no motivation, so all software was developed and sold solely on its benefits to the user.

Today, even free software can have telemetry and ulterior motives.

[–] jabroni_salad 5 hours ago

for me it was around the time of windows 8, that I felt my computer had a lot of things to do that weren't the application I actually wanted to use. Before that I would just occasionally feel that the system could be a little kludgy.

[–] gimlichgu 12 hours ago

Richard Stallman told y'all when it happened that it was happening

[–] wat10000 9 hours ago

People want the features that these things drive. PCs stopped being a purely "user says X, do X" thing at approximately the moment they became powerful enough to run things in the background. The idea that the computer would be helpful and do things for you beyond what you explicitly asked for is pretty attractive. People don't like being spied on, but good news, this one is all local. This isn't like Facebook building a social graph for you so they can sell the data to advertisers.

[–] sandworm101 8 hours ago

Every bad day for Apple-Microsoft is another great day for switching to Linux.

You have choices. Make them.

[–] direwolf20 10 hours ago

As soon as they were connected to a network and capable of participating in the business OODA loop against their competitors in real time.

[–] ctippett 17 hours ago

I too would've found this fascinating at one point, but my jaded older self now just finds this incredibly creepy, unsettling and not at all surprising.

[–] II2II 7 hours ago

I suspect a lot of the fascination is because the information can be used to improve our quality of life. I suspect the cynicism comes from those who have the most access to this information using it to improve their quality of life at our expense. (That, and actually making use of the information takes more effort than most people are willing to expend.)

I have always been leery of data collection, but I have my own parallel: there was a lot of optimism about the benefits of personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course, that was pushed by the industry itself. I have since realized that what was happening then was not all that different from what is happening today. The outcomes were different because the tools were different, but it basically reduced/reduces to a bunch of people trying to enrich themselves by promising one thing and delivering another.

[–] tclancy 14 hours ago

Add me to the list. This feels like a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” item.

[–] jerf 13 hours ago

That saying is what it is for good reasons, but the path to post-capitalist dystopian hell is paved with bad intentions covered with plausible deniability.

I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.

[–] Nevermark 3 hours ago

The system could work just as well for the user, stored only on the users devices, syncing in encrypted form only.

The plausibility in plausible deniability evaporates instantly with device/service/software provider's accessibility.

But faux plausible deniability seems to be just as effective of a fig leaf.

[–] sdeframond 14 hours ago

This thought path has been explored by the Black Mirror series in the episode The Entire History of You.

https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_Y...

[–] r3trohack3r 12 hours ago

I wouldn’t call black mirror an “exploration” of thought. It’s rather myopic.

It’s like going to the 1962 world fair but, instead of optimism, everyone just wants to tell you why everything in the future sucks.

[–] dylan604 12 hours ago

No, it's an exploration of what could happen based on things we've already seen/experienced but with the knob turned to an 11. It's what should happen in pretty much what if round table situation. "Hey, would could build this thing that does something that we are specifically thinking about that would be cool/fun/benevolent" is only part of the discussion. "How could someone else turn and use it in a way not anticipated so they use it for their own gains in a way that is shocking/malevolent" should be the natural follow up. Can the thing be updated to not be used for unintended negative purposes or will the negative out weigh the positive so that it shouldn't be made in the first place??? Sadly, it seems the follow up questions are never asked. Instead, we get scifi people doing it and then getting reviews like yours instead of looking deeper into point

[–] ddj231 4 hours ago

Adjacent to this I think it’s becoming clear that these technologies also change the signals we receive from one another. For example remembering details in a conversation is a signal that you were listening. If some system makes a breach into that social interaction you lose that signal. Now remembering details is no longer a signal.

I’m seeing it with polished websites. A polished site used to be a signal that a product was somewhat well thought out—at least it was worth the creators time to polish its marketing page. While now that AI products spit those out with AI speak that signal is lost.

I wonder if we’ll find out that the signal itself was more important than the means of sending the signal.

[–] PaulHoule 13 hours ago

I go out as-a-fox as a street photographer using a shtick that makes sure people almost always remember my name and i find it a little embarrassing that I can't remember that many names or if it is a Megan how exactly I am supposed to spell it, etc.

I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.

[–] josephg 12 hours ago

There’s a very big difference between opting in to using a tool and having the tool silently start analysing you in the background.

[–] UltraSane 12 hours ago

I'm really trying to understand what as-a-fox means.

[–] gnabgib 6 hours ago

It's in his profile https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PaulHoule -> https://gen5.info/fox/ -> User's Manual for the Fox-Photographer

[–] nehal3m 11 hours ago

Same. A furry photographer?

[–] zargon 11 hours ago

In context, I interpreted it as a furry costume.

[–] pizzafeelsright 6 hours ago

You could text Paul. He is but a Google search away to see the shtick.

[–] kayodelycaon 10 hours ago

Based on the second paragraph, I’d assume a person in a fox fursuit with a camera. I can only imagine how hot that costume would be.

[–] matwood 10 hours ago

I’ve been thinking about this a lot with zoom recordings. In office we used to have chats about a wide range of topics that were sometimes heated, but also respectful. Now with every meeting recorded, it’s all become pretty saccharine.

[–] boredatoms 13 hours ago

Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI

[–] dylan604 12 hours ago

phew, I knew not spending a lot of effort in skool for learning proper grammar would be worth it as an adult

[–] sellmesoap 9 hours ago

The credibility of the lazy is going up, what could go wrong!

[–] wodenokoto 17 hours ago

Maybe a decade or so ago I had a discussion with a colleague about chat apps and he said, why would you want to have a conversation on snapchat if it is not saved, and I was like, why are you having this conversation now, you can't save it either.

I guess that those days are soon over.

[–] dasyatidprime 13 hours ago

See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.

[–] neutronicus 16 hours ago

Autocorrect has had the opposite effect IMO, there’s an expectation that like 1 in 8 words from an iPhone user are not what the sender intended.

Typos have just graduated from misspellings to sentences randomly being nonsensical.

[–] dylan604 12 hours ago

I swear I know the difference and when to use their, there, they're, but based on my iPhone messages, you'd think I was an illiterate buffoon. There are plenty of examples where I could show where they're making me look dumb with their edits.

[–] boringg 16 hours ago

I turned autocomplete off for this reason

[–] layer8 16 hours ago

Did your autocorrect correct “autocorrect” to “autocomplete”?

[–] QuantumNomad_ 14 hours ago

Autocorrect and autocomplete are two slightly different things IMO. Both of them are in the wordlist on my iPhone also btw.

Autocorrect is when you type a whole word, and then when you hit space the word changes to something else. When it works like it should, it changes typo’d words to the correct spelling. When it doesn’t work, it changes what you wanted to fucking say into something you didn’t mean to ducking say.

Autocomplete is when you type the beginning of a word and the remainder of that word is suggested. And also when you are starting a new word and there are suggestions for the next word to put.

Autocorrect used to be very unreliable many years ago. But to say these days that 1 in 8 words are wrong because of autocorrect or autocomplete, is very far from true. If you see that frequent typos and mistakes like wrong words, it’s because your friends are sloppy texters, not because iOS is corrupting every 8th word they type.

This whole comment was written by me on iOS just like almost all of my other HN comments btw, for reference. And I’m not trying to say I’m some kind of expert writer, far from it. But my mistakes are by the vast majority my own, not because of iOS worsening my words by autocorrecting/autocompleting things in a strange way that somehow degrades the content of my comments. What I do do however, is that I take time to read through what I have written both before and after posting, and editing as necessary. But even those edits are mostly and by a huge margin about fixing my own mistakes or adding more to say, not to fix something iOS messed up in what I wrote.

[–] dnpls 12 hours ago

Swiping the keyboard used to be unreliable on iOS, then it improved enough to be usable. Then some updates ago it started to be nonsensical. Now I swipe to type something trivial, it writes the correct word, I swipe for the next word, it replaces the previous one with some uncommon word I've never used before and makes absolutely no sense to add in a sentence. It's maddening and it happens all the time.

[–] jvogt 11 hours ago

Yes! Why is the keyboard on iOS still sooooo frustrating to use? Sometimes I wonder if it’s been intentionally nerfed to push us to use siri or apple intelligence.

I’m just waiting for the next iOS release with “Next-gen Swipe powered by Apple Intelligence Pro” (that conveniently only works on the latest 2 generations of iPhone)

[–] panta 14 hours ago

I considered it intentional, since as a matter of fact "autocomplete" is more correct.

[–] coldtea 10 hours ago

Same difference

[–] heikkilevanto 14 hours ago

Autocorrupt

[–] antonvs 12 hours ago

Amplifying the dystopia is that this feature was heavily written up by an AI. So we have a feature in which machines monitor our lives being described to us by another machine which comes with its own set of dystopian risks, and no genuine human to human interaction.

Evidence sample of native Claudish: “The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half.”

[–] coldtea 10 hours ago

LLM writing makes me puke

[–] elgertam 15 hours ago

> 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.

[–] ndegruchy 12 hours ago

> 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/

[–] SoftTalker 11 hours ago

And what is your "Verify" procedure?

[–] pizzaiolo 6 hours ago

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

[–] nico 6 hours ago

> 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

[–] dylan604 12 hours ago

> 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.

[–] judge2020 12 hours ago

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.

[–] dylan604 7 hours ago

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

[–] ProllyInfamous 15 hours ago

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.

[–] kebman 14 hours ago

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.

[–] snowwrestler 13 hours ago

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

[–] londons_explore 5 hours ago

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.

[–] Barrin92 4 hours ago

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

[–] tpmoney 13 hours ago

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.

[–] 4thguy 13 hours ago

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

[–] semiquaver 13 hours ago

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

[–] tpmoney 12 hours ago

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.

[–] 4thguy 12 hours ago

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

[–] tpmoney 9 hours ago

> 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"

[–] semiquaver 12 hours ago

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)

[–] 1123581321 9 hours ago

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

[–] semiquaver 13 hours ago

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.

[–] coldtea 10 hours ago

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).

[–] astafrig 4 hours ago

> 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.

[–] tpmoney 9 hours ago

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.

[–] coldtea 3 hours ago

>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.

[–] hparadiz 3 hours ago

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.

[–] MattDamonSpace 14 hours ago

Might not be used in the EU

[–] consumer451 8 hours ago

"Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly... Ask them. Ask them every time. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data." – Steve Jobs (2010)

moderators: "Let's talk about privacy, sorry Mark, who is here..."

Jobs: "We've always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleges in the Valley..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk_pLVQRNzg

The permissions system in iOS feels like it is following Jobs' ethos. Truly amazing all these years later. Kudos to the iOS team!

Who ever implemented what is called out in TFA, is clearly diverging from what makes Apple and AAPL very special. Please stop that.

[–] infwhispers 17 hours ago

I am the author of the research. Please, feel free to ask me anything. Also, check out the followup research: https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-...

[–] asdfsa32 17 hours ago

Please stop using AI to author your articles. It was really hard to read it despite how interesting the topic was. I dropped halfway because it was just too annoying.

[–] tkgally 16 hours ago

I was bothered not so much by the slopful article as by the AI-written text in the dashboard that iKnow produces. I ran the program on my Mac and it did display charts and graphs with names of people and organizations I’ve interacted with over the years, but I couldn’t figure out what it all was supposed to mean.

One example: "323 people, 122 events and other records, 200 employers and 1 stored group — as the store on this Mac links them. Read live just now. Colour is what each node is to you: the stored group in red, family and closeness by iKnow’s rules on the kinship scorecard. Size is how many rows in the store name it."

Claude etc. can be prompted to produce clearer explanations than that.

[–] wpm 6 hours ago

Yep I cannot fathom why people feel OK shipping anything like that publicly. The headers are also all completely stupid.

> Every node as a list — the graph is not the only way in

> Family, as the scorecard has it

> Reachable, exactly as stored

Oh good I was worried it was going to show me something altered

> WHY RESOLVABLE MATTERS

Oh fuck off. This isn't Axios! I hate these pathetic brainrot stupid phrases Why it matters What Happened What Changed, how patronizing. Instaclosed, instakilled python, what a fucking waste of my time and a waste of an article too

[–] coldpie 16 hours ago

Yeah seriously. Article becomes unreadable immediately after the intro. I believe this author probably could actually write two years ago, it's a shame people are just giving up on that and choose to turn out stuff like this instead.

[–] SoftTalker 10 hours ago

I'm having more trouble spotting AI text these days. It used to jump out at me. I'm not sure if it's that the LLMs are better or it's just becoming so normal to see that I stop recognizing it. This one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read. Going back and scrolling deeper into the post, it does become much sloppier.

[–] coldpie 10 hours ago

> quite long-winded for a blog post

That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protected. What does that even mean? Why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? I don't care that there's 51 database files and 181 other things and 278 doodads. Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and like you said, your eyes start to glaze over because there's so much irrelevant information. No human would've chosen to write all that tedious detail in their post about something much more interesting. It's bad writing. It's slop.

A human would've said something like "It's a database in <Library/IntelligencePlatform> with three columns that contain..." and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.

[–] infwhispers 17 hours ago

My bad. In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough...

[–] JoshTriplett 16 hours ago

It's not possible to un-AI text, only replace it wholesale.

Suggestion for next time: "Review my prose for accuracy, grammar, appropriate strength of claims, etc. Flag any issues for my attention. Do not provide text; this work should not contain any AI-written content." That'll turn it into a very good check that doesn't take your voice away.

[–] embedding-shape 17 hours ago

> In my defense, only the technical parts are AI.

A defense would be "I just used it for spellchecking" not "I just used it for the meat and the important parts people care about, the rest is mine!"

[–] NewsaHackO 13 hours ago

Yes, that was a weird defense; essentially, he used it for the actual interesting parts of the article.

[–] Hamuko 17 hours ago

So most of it?

[–] fatata123 16 hours ago

So only the parts that matter, you ai slopped. Great work.

[–] sick_of_slop 16 hours ago

You can’t unslop A.I. prose. Once it’s written, the content is poisoned.

“Sure there was a turd in the punch bowl but I did my best to remove it, so you should be able to drink it.”

Nope.

And the technical parts are what matter, saying you did that with A.I. tells me “I don’t care about this part” so what the heck are we even doing here?

[–] rowanG077 14 hours ago

Interesting for me it's the opposite. I care about this so I let AI do it since LLM are better writers than the majority of people. I'm not so arrogant to think I'm a writer of that caliber.

[–] amenhotep 13 hours ago

You are. I promise you. Almost every single person is a better writer than an LLM. You're wilfully sabotaging yourself.

[–] InsideOutSanta 11 hours ago

Maybe LLMs are better writers than the majority of people, but that's only because the majority of people just don't write. If you have any level of competency, you are a better writer than an LLM, because good writing requires empathy. It required thinking about what the audience knows, what they want to know, what kind of writing they are comfortable with, and so on.

LLMs fail at those things.

[–] asdff 13 hours ago

LLM are terrible writers though. Worse than most humans unless they have some mental disability.

[–] burnte 8 hours ago

Agreed, I haven't read most of it because it's poorly written: too verbose, points are buried, it's three times longer than it should be. I still don't know what this database is used for and don't want to go through that writing to find out.

[–] n0on3 17 hours ago

I second this. Unfortunately you just can’t just “unslop” it, much like you can’t just “shake the dirt away” from food that fell into a bucket of… you get my point, it won’t be good to eat anyway. Bonus additional ironic parallel could magically manifest if you can guess the bucket content.

Anyway, it’s a shame, this could have been excellent work. Instead, I find reading it unpleasant and part of my attention rots away wondering if you even checked what the LLM wrote for you. You probably did, and I could also do it myself, but still…

[–] ecto 14 hours ago

I disagree. Hand-authored articles can be slop too. This research is great, and your subjective feelings about word cadence don't affect the information. I guarantee you read AI output every day and don't know it.

[–] ahartmetz 13 hours ago

Hand-authored engagement or clout (LinkedIn) farming articles and corporate press releases are usually slop, most others aren't. I'd be surprised if corporate press releases today weren't largely AI-written - no one would know the difference.

[–] otterley 14 hours ago

The criticism can be restated, then, as “you used AI to write it, and unlike others who use AI to write things, you did a bad job directing it and editing the work.”

[–] ProllyInfamous 13 hours ago

This comment is not directed at you, but this is the best place I could find to insert my thoughts on this "nO LLm slOP" distraction:

----

The research is jaw-dropping enough for the average reader to comprehend (e.g: I am not a techie, but a former IBEW datacenter wiretwister).

It could be covered in pube-sprinkled-turds and would still be worth reading.

To me the "slopLOL" crew is akin to people who'll take their time to correct others' their/they're/there usage:

Just read the fucking sentence (LLMs can and do and aren't so poopy-you-suck-for-being-human).

[–] otterley 13 hours ago

We know there’s interesting information in there. That’s not the point.

How news is delivered matters. If you don’t believe that, why would news outlets compete with each other? Even if the facts are the same, would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?

[–] ProllyInfamous 13 hours ago

>would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?

I am smart enough to not need perfection. I just want the data. Write however tf you want, good'll'be read.

And so will LLMs.

I'll suggest adaptation.

>why would news outlets compete with each other?

Competition for the masses' con$umption$?

It seems to generally work; shouldn't have to obfuscate the `man` pages for this always-running daemon... how many people even know what `man`pages are (obviously not here)? how to access them? why they would even want to?

[–] atombender 16 hours ago

There was a very obvious and unnerving shift in style that happened early in the article where it went from human to LLM. I find such shifts really glaring. Agents, in their current state, simply cannot produce quality prose and are not good enough to write blog posts targeting a human audience.

I found the topic fascinating, but eventually I started skimming and then gave up on it.

[–] yubblegum 9 hours ago

Hi there. Thanks for this!

So my questions regarding security implications of running your code, my LLM friend reviewed the code and expressed possible concerns over (a) malicious browser extensions now get to see what they couldn't before; (b) you are not using https. There was bunch more but they can all be addressed on my end. Your thoughts?

[–] infwhispers 8 hours ago

You don’t need https for a web running locally; nothing goes into the network. Malicious browser extension can be real, but if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph

[–] yubblegum 8 hours ago

> if that is true, you might have bigger problems than leaking the apple graph

That is certainly true, and it is equally true that that possibility places a responsibility on you to put that in a section in your readme.

So yeah, I may have a bad extension but that thing never had access to the possibly aptly named 'IntelligencePlatform' that's keeping tabs on my digital activities, until I ran your code. Correct?

[–] thomascountz 7 hours ago

I would go further and suggest that you do not access any website or open any files via your browser while you have malicious browser extensions installed. You do not need this project's README to tell you this.

[–] yubblegum 7 hours ago

That is a categorical error.

My evil extension|browser may know what porn I watch or which sites I am visiting or possibly lift some bits it is not supposed to have. But it does not have access to Apple's comprehensive graph of my digital activities on their devices. Only Apple Inc. has that access.

So in fact the OP needs to put in the readme that "malicious browser extensions are a potential attack surface."

As a matter of fact, one could argue that a posting like this on Hackernews could potentially be a very sophisticated 'human engineering' effort by parties that have backdoors to browsers but have been defeated by Apple's security features.

[–] eks391 6 hours ago

When you install a browser extension, your browser will notify you if it can read or modify page content before you enable it the first time. Using OPs tool is not unique in that it becomes vulnerable when paired with nefarious browser extensions, because all pages are. Https doesn't even solve that.

This is akin to some medicine saying that if paired with another specific medicine, you won't get desired results, and you are upset that it doesn't include a warning against combining the medicine with cyanide because you might die. The pairing with cyanide is irrelevant to the medicine and is just a side effect of cyanide.

[–] thomascountz 6 hours ago

I don't think your request is reasonable because I don't agree with your (or your LLM's) categorical assertion and risk assessment, not because I misunderstand the mechanics of the threat model, as niche as it is.

Also, small correction: any app with Full Disk Access can access this data.

[–] jdiff 15 hours ago

It says there's 137 live/certain facts in my graph. I can see where they're sourced from/a statistical breakdown of type/the number of unique confidence values/how many citations they're using/how many ingests contributed no facts. Am I missing where I can see what the actual facts are?

A lot of these statistics aren't very useful for mining insights from the graph, from a technical standpoint of how the graph works or from a personal standpoint of how the graph is interacting with my personal data.

[–] abandonliberty 7 hours ago

I liked the start of the article, but glazed over once it switched to an AI voice. AI;DR.

It's a shame because I really appreciate your work here. Could be resolved as trivially as providing a copy of your writing style and having it adapt to that.

[–] jamienk 12 hours ago

I'm on macOS 27.2 and there is no longer a "Full Disk Access" control. How do I use it in this case? ChatGPT is not helpful.

[–] jamienk 12 hours ago

open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy_AllFiles" << this made it reappear in settings

The data I see from iKnow is a sloppy clusterfuck, I suspect from botched syncs and lazy bookkeeping on my part, and the fluctuating quality of Apple's "services" over the years. My Mac settings probably go back to the 1990s and Apple periodically did a bad job. Pain points I remember: Google contacts being separated and then with a new phone not syncing correctly, Mac address book burping on contact avatar images, importing lists of contacts from short-lived 3rd party apps, shared Photos fucking shit up, the iPhotos upgrade fiascos, transient contact info for my kids, moving onto/off of Gmail, etc.

If the FBI got ahold of my (and others'?) iKnow data, a lot of people might end up in a sloppy jail with a sloppy judge sloppily applying a sloppy law...

[–] mmooss 13 hours ago

Thanks for the research. Have you looked into how to secure / disable the subsystem?

(I hate that a discussion on the OP has been hijacked by a discussion on AI writing; the substantive questions are all at the bottom. I wish mods would 'detatch and move' the AI subthread.)

[–] slickytail 17 hours ago

You wrote that other apps can't access it because of TCC Full Disk Access. Presumably the OS itself can read it, so do you have any information on whether parts of the graph (or fingerprints, or inferences made with it) are ever sent to the cloud/apple servers?

[–] aetherspawn 17 hours ago

This is context for local LLMs like Siri so that when you say “Text James and tell him …” it knows which James you mean.

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?

[–] diydsp 17 hours ago

It doesnt leave your device...until an authoritarian government extracts it without a warrant. Or a dozen other entities like divorce attorneys, business rivals, legal trolls, false accusers, nation states, teenage hackers, human traffickers.

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.

[–] astafrig 4 hours ago

> available to anyone at my work or home when someone leaves their laptop open

They also need to know your password to access it so at that point all bets are off.

[–] detourdog 16 hours ago

It's a no win situation. All of this surveillance is happening on the internet right now. All the companies are doing this surveillance Apple happens to be doing it on device. This is the data Apple is trying to prevent from leaving the device. Apple is constantly fighting court battles to protect the data. Apple is always being accused of hampering developers freedom's while trying to safeguard access to this data. All that said turning off Apple Intelligence should eliminate the collection.

[–] ProllyInfamous 16 hours ago

>All that said turning off Apple Intelligence should eliminate the collection.

Amen.

[–] proneb1rd 7 hours ago

Does it?

[–] wpm 4 hours ago

No. As far as I remember you cannot disable or kill the background daemons without disabling SIP either.

[–] detourdog 6 hours ago

Does what?

[–] aetherspawn 16 hours ago

It’s not clear whether this still happens in the “Lockdown” mode that Apple specifically added for people who expect to be in this scenario.

[–] otterley 14 hours ago

I hate to break it to you, but the Government doesn’t need your device’s data to get all that information about you if it has the necessary warrants. If you think you can win a battle against any government over the collection of evidence needed to prosecute you, as long as they do it lawfully, you are sorely mistaken.

[–] pessimizer 13 hours ago

This makes zero sense, and is delivered in a silly tone. The government can even get information about you when it doesn't have warrants (good luck fighting it after the fact), or got warrants from a secret court. The government cannot get information about you which has not been collected, because that is impossible.

[–] otterley 13 hours ago

The point is that that information is already out there. It might not be on your laptop, but it exists.

[–] phoghed 13 hours ago

Yeah they definitely need this data from your Mac to find out who your brother is.

[–] gilrain 13 hours ago

"I hate to break it to you", but it's very rational to take imperfect measures against violation.

[–] otterley 13 hours ago

No it isn’t. It’s a waste of time and energy.

[–] petcat 16 hours ago

If my threat model realistically included all of those things, then I would be very careful about keeping any sort of address book or contact log/history at all. At that point the only defense really is just to try to memorize phone numbers. And only talk when walking together, mob-style.

[–] diydsp 15 hours ago

Ha, fair. To me its about the concentration of "high quality' or juicy data that makes a person vulnerable. When the stakes get higher, threat, reward, and the temptation for bad action increase.

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."

[–] pessimizer 13 hours ago

> And only talk when walking together, mob-style.

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.

[–] jasomill 8 hours ago

If I were a mobster under government surveillance, why would I carry a mobile phone while discussing the family business, or intentionally allow anyone in my vicinity to do so, any more than I'd have such a conversation with someone I knew was wearing a wire?

[–] tekacs 16 hours ago

... I feel like if an authoritarian government could extract the family classifier info from local, they could just extract the damn messages.

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.

[–] ProllyInfamous 16 hours ago

So why does it keep collecting data when I have chosen to entirely disable Siri?

[–] jungturk 9 hours ago

Because its also used by other apps (e.g. Photos has a feature to identify faces and catalog people in your photo library, Messages has a feature to allow important messages through Do Not Disturb and infers importance from these stores).

[–] hashstring 14 hours ago

Yes, this is the right question to ask.

[–] ProllyInfamous 14 hours ago

>>"Why does a dog lick its balls?"

>>"Because. he. can..."

----

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?

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50194833#50208521

[–] macNchz 12 hours ago

> seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device

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.

[–] xerox13ster 12 hours ago

Microsoft had this solved with Cortana 12 years ago. I would tell Cortana to text my boss, and if it didn’t know who my boss was, they would ask me who my boss was then it would store it for later boss calls.

The spying has no excuse and in the 2000s we would’ve called this malware and spyware, appropriately.

[–] ricardobeat 4 hours ago

Doesn't that mean you end up with a similar database of facts about yourself, what's the difference?

[–] cyclopeanutopia 16 hours ago

What does it mean "fully local"? I have an old "kitchen Macbook" that I'm using pretty much exclusively for stuff like looking up cooking recepies. I don't have any photos there, any messaging apps, etc. But I'm logged in with my Apple account.

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.

[–] phoghed 13 hours ago

If you had to try your best to interpret what they mean, what would you say? I’m willing to bet that you could get there.

[–] Ungh 17 hours ago

Just spent 30 minutes poking around this. It's horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.

Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.

[–] ProllyInfamous 16 hours ago

>All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.

Wait until you discover that macOS entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings, before every bootup, to reach out to security.apple.com.

Have a network-wide PiHole (allegedly) blocking the entire *.apple.com domain? No you don't, (at least) not at bootup, because APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use any network-discoverable DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings) to [attempt a] phone-home.

----

I finally made the full switch to Linux earlier this year. Been a (primarily) Apple user since 1992.

[–] r_lee 16 hours ago

> APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use the router-supplied DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings).

is that for real? wow

[–] ProllyInfamous 16 hours ago

Is for real.

I provided a "better DNS configuration" suggestion, a month ago, but at this point I doubt it will remain useful [†]:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574> [have router's DHCP auto-issue DNS to your pi-hole].

[†] I am but an observant (on my DNS logs) bluecollar poweruser – my tip will reduce only one vector, and we probably live in a world where IPv6 DNS addresses are [about to be, if not already] being hardcoded into TVs, computer security chips, and phones

----

At an absolute minimum: LittleSnitch will NOT help you here (and isn't doing everything it claims to, under the hood); it is entirely impossible for LS to stop pre-boot DNS queries; even under normal operation (e.g: when a dialogue pops up to `ACCEPT/DENY` a DNS resolution) your ISP still sees every. single. URL resolution (even if you `DENY` the connection).

Before you write "no it doesn't" please check your own DNS logs. It do be like it is.

[–] Ajoha 15 hours ago

Wow!!

[–] ProllyInfamous 15 hours ago

The above are facts.

----

Speculating out loud: sure, perhaps this userprofile data is stored locally; but perhaps also (like Apple's "advertising token") this local data can help remote servers better track your entire computing humanity. While still "locally stored."

(Language doesn't mean anything when EULAs are dozens of unreadable pages long; "stored locally" is just another set of weasle words, like "then just opt-out" [why is opt-in the default, if -out is even allowed at all?!]).

Wouldn't surprise me if every single webpage has an advertising option to exploit the local user data (via Apple$$$), if only by offering on-device scrubbing; one could then look to see what advertising content the localhost is requesting (and thus have essentially root access to all userdata, "locally stored," by detecting outbound queries) with the user's own host acting as Apple's backendserver (while Apple profits, not you).

¢¢

[–] Ungh 16 hours ago

Added to the list of reasons I need to look at this seriously. Thank you!

Think I need a per-host approval mechanism for DNS as well. There are fewer domains I want my computer talking to than not.

[–] ProllyInfamous 16 hours ago

Keep adding to your list, friend:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574> [Spotlight's "helpfulness," which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)]

Apple's OS is toxic, at this point.

My two newest Macs are entirely offline (air-gapped) and used primarily for LLM – maybe Apple's secret (all along) has been to get people like me to purchase twice as much hardware (as would be necessary in a privacy-respecting world)?

[–] kvuj 14 hours ago

> which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)

Are you sure? I've just inspected my macOS 27.2 machine with my firewall and I couldn't find requests to smoot.apple.com while typing in spotlight(show related content and help improve apple search are both disabled).

[–] ProllyInfamous 13 hours ago

I am certain only up to Sequoia; there is a new mini with Tahoe on it sitting here so let me replicate that behavior (if hostname isn't smoot., it'll be something). I've been meaning to update to GoldenGate (since buying it last week it has been used for just 2 hours, playing with LLMs on the default Tahoe); so I'll do this too and then see what the latest macOS's behavior is.

While I'm doing that, pull up your *.apple.com outreaches.

If you are not seeing <security.apple.com> on any Silicon's boot, you are not seeing full logs (all Silicon, and macs since T2, do this reach-out pre-post).

[–] chronogamous 11 hours ago

I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging.

I've also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to properly configure which DNS-server should be used, but while reading this thread I'm beginning to wonder: maybe the reason I'm having so much trouble understanding how to set this up properly could be that the OS is messing with me and my DNS-settings, and the lack of documentation describing how DNS-resolution is supposed to work on MacOS is really a feature meant to keep me from finding out that they are deliberately making it impossible to secure connectivity at a DNS-level?

Next thing you know, a similar explanation might pop up regarding configuration of the packetfilter. It has already been frustrating not being able to figure out these basics on my own for several years. It will be absolutely infuriating to find out this struggle has been pointless anyway, and it turns out they have been using mislabeling core components of their OS. The moment DNS-settings are not really settings the OS uses when doing DNS-lookups, I feel deliberately deceived.

It's like calling an OS Unix-based, and subsequently override standard Unix-rules seemingly at random and without consent of whoever is supposed to be the system's administrator, that people might start thinking the OS is merely intended as a tool to ruin any reputation of reliability that Unix may have once had. The great thing about a Mac is that it just works, they said. So far my experience has been the opposite. And whenever I get the illusion that something works as it is expected to work, I've learned to recognize it for what it is. An illusion. How is any of such behaviour even legally and ethically justified? How can they legally sell systems running MacOS to customers whose job includes working with classified information? How are such customers supposed to secure their system if it these 'features' are not properly documented?

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! :(

[–] Ungh 16 hours ago

Well fuck.

Just dug my old Xeon workstation out of the cupboard and am installing Debian on it.

[–] ProllyInfamous 15 hours ago

My main desk has three Apple Silicons (two entirely airgapped, and am typing on third); sitting next to it is my beautiful 27" iMac (2009), with full Adobe CS4 (also offline); just purchased a pristine MacPro5,1 – seventeen year old computer! – for my main online Apple experience (using OS 10.14 from a decade ago), mostly because it cannot AI/LLM/Siri, even if it wanted to. Then I will have three offline Silicons.

Since the beginning of this year, I am now primarily running (online) a 9800X3D with a 5070Ti – Linux - which is only possible with LLM tutorials/help (mostly offline, on my own Silicon LLM).

----

Happy restomodding!

[–] zamalek 11 hours ago

Job's biggest innovation was the word "no." I don't understand how everyone didn't jump ship once that word left Apple's vernacular.

[–] LoganDark 16 hours ago

This is why throwing an extra DNS server on the network doesn't truly work. You have to actually remove the DNS protocol from existence entirely and perform TLS inspection if you want to filter effectively. This of course requires you to install a certificate authority on all devices connected to the network. Otherwise devices and applications will get around you with stuff like this, or DoT/DoH.

TLS inspection is starting to reach general availability but it's pricey. You could probably set something up if you own your router. The only vendor I know offering it OOTB is Ubiquiti/UniFi and only on their more expensive enterprise units that advertise "NeXT AI Cybersecurity". I have a hunch there is no actual AI or even ML involved, but this is the world we live in now.

[–] ProllyInfamous 16 hours ago

Can one not just use their router's firewall to drop all DNS queries which do not originate from your PiHole?

[–] jen20 14 hours ago

Only if there a) is a DNS request, b) it does not use DNS over HTTPs.

PiHole is not and never has been a reliable way to guarantee anything, regardless of how you configure it - just gets the low-hanging fruit. Plenty of devices hard-code their own DNS servers ("smart" TVs are a good example) and will happily ignore whatever DHCP gives them if they have a route to the internet.

[–] LoganDark 16 hours ago

This does work for unencrypted DNS and DoT over port 853, but it fails for DoT over any other port and DoH, which looks just like a website visit. You can't tell whether a website is acting as a DoH server without TLS inspection, and you can't differentiate between multiple domains on the same IP address either (unless a client is stupid enough to use SNI). Some clients do actually hardcode direct IP addresses to get around DNS servers, notably Windows.

[–] ProllyInfamous 16 hours ago

>notably Windows

At least they're honest, using host <spynet2.microsoft.com> to replicate Apple's <smoot.> & <security.> subdomains.

>This does work for unencrypted DNS and DoT over port 853, but it fails for DoT over any other port and DoH

My task for today is to learn more about this (I'm only doing the unencryptedDNS part) and then implement an entire subnet that is whitelist-only (for all DNS). I think what you wrote will help solve this better, thanks.

[–] LoganDark 15 hours ago

Oh hey, found you in a 2024 HN thread while searching for info on that smoot subdomain. I guess you've been at this for a while.

FWIW, Microsoft hardcodes many subdomains, not just that one. Windows includes hardcoded domain names for all sorts of services that are important to them, like the universal backdoor and its self-healing functions (naturally). They really wanna make sure nothing stops them from uploading your disk encryption keys to their servers! (or something)

[–] jasomill 7 hours ago

If you intend to use PiHole, why is your DHCP server configuring a non-PiHole DNS server?

And why would you expect the pre-boot environment to respect OS network configuration?

Just like every non-Apple system I’ve ever seen with pre-boot network support, it has its own configuration, which defaults to DHCP.

I’d honestly be more suspicious if the firmware tried to grovel through OS data to find a working network configuration you may not want it to use.

Not that it would have very good luck doing so on a security-conscious user’s system, given that, on most systems at least, pre-boot networking is configured long before encrypted boot volumes are unlocked, since at that point you’re already well on your way to booting a specific OS with its own network stack and the pre-boot networking environment is no longer required.

[–] astafrig 4 hours ago

> Wait until you discover that macOS entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings, before every bootup, to reach out to security.apple.com.

Good! I sure hope when I disable my stolen laptop that you can't defeat it with a simple DNS server.

[–] WesolyKubeczek 14 hours ago

I don’t even give a flying fuck about Apple itself. All they want is to sell me some macs and app store subscriptions. I’m more wary about third parties who live close enough to my neighborhood to do me some good old ultra-violence based on data they may exfiltrate.

[–] ProllyInfamous 14 hours ago

>>[wrench_attack.gif]

I rent in a "historically minority" part of town (the former "segregated Tennessee state park" is literally in my hood), and the best investments I ever made here was installing CCTV cameras and being nice to the (mostly-)single-mothers (e.g: food donations, helping them move heavy items). Grandmama notices, and sheincharge, son.

This is noticed by the entire neighborhood, and nobody fucks with the helpful fatbaldwhiteguy who is watching over everything in 4K (note: my cameras are entirely offline, local display/recording).

[–] afpx 8 hours ago

Also watch out for BLE. I had to disable bluetooth on my mac studio that I disconnnected from the LAN / WAN because it was discovering iOS devices nearby and relaying data through them.

[–] threecheese 7 hours ago

How? I'm curious.

[–] ufmace 10 hours ago

This makes me glad I already switched my desktop to Linux (from Windows) and am about to get a new laptop to run Linux on

[–] apples_oranges 17 hours ago

The good news is that with AI, nothing stops Linux desktops from looking and feeling like (Former) osx..

[–] Quothling 15 hours ago

The bad news is the hardware. The most important parts of a laptop, to me anyway, is that it runs silent and doesn't get hot to touch. Not just to avoid sweaty fingers but because I usually have my laptop in or on my lap. Nothing I can find could replace my m1 8gb macbook air in that regard.

I can find some pretty cool linux laptops from framework or tuxedo, but they have fans and they get hot.

[–] gf000 8 hours ago

Asahi Linux is said to be pretty good on an M1.

[–] Ungh 17 hours ago

I'm quite frustrated with some aspects of macOS, particularly driving it from the keyboard, so I'm probably going to get a better experience out of it in the end.

[–] eddyg 16 hours ago

Have you looked at Karabiner Elements⁽¹⁾? It’s extremely capable; see a config like this⁽²⁾ for inspiration.

⁽¹⁾ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

⁽²⁾ https://github.com/pdelfino/karabiner-config

[–] Ungh 16 hours ago

Yes I'm using it because I don't use a standard Apple keyboard with my Mac.

The issue is mostly the user interface design is mouse first, not keyboard first. Windows was more than a little better on that front.

[–] eddyg 16 hours ago

With Hammerspoon⁽³⁾ and the Accessibility API, I’ve found there’s not really much I can’t do.

For example, I use the Claude desktop app, but when I copy something from it, the Clipboard gets multiple content types, including RTF and Markdown, but I usually want the latter. So I wrote a quick snippet in Hammerspoon so that when Claude.app is the active app and the Clipboard changes, strip all the parts from the Clipboard except the “UTF8” part so I get just the Markdown (unless the Shift key is held down, which leaves it as-is). No more “formatted text” when I want to paste the Markdown.

My biggest problem now is that when I help somebody else on their Mac, I’m so used to “my controls” that I have to stop and think how to do things the normal way.

⁽³⁾ https://www.hammerspoon.org/

[–] jazzypants 14 hours ago

This would be much more interesting if it just exposed an API and didn't force Lua on you.

[–] lproven 14 hours ago

I have it, regularly updated, from my efforts 10-15Y ago to try to get a Compose key working on OS X.

I failed.

I just haven't bothered to remove and clean up again.

[–] brainzap 17 hours ago

one would think, but a lot of things stopped Linux to just fucking work with Wifi on my machine

[–] NooneAtAll5 9 hours ago

> Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.

don't wait

your impulse will be gone in a day or two if you wait, miraged away into "eh, doesn't matter"

do. not. wait.

that's a trap

switch now

[–] sjpb 6 hours ago

I don't understand how every post isn't incandescently furious about this? People just seem to be resigned! This is so far beyond what I'd consider ethical for a hardware company to do s that I will not ever buy an Apple product off the back of it.

[–] coldfloor 1 hour ago

Worse than resigned, people are happy about it. There's discussions about this over on Reddit too, where the users are even more overwhelmingly in favor of it. "If it didn't do this, 'Siri, call Jenny' wouldn't work! And it wouldn't be able to automatically tag Jenny in photos!" etc. People think this is fun and not creepy?

This lazy give-me-convenience-or-give-me-death thinking is so weird. I want my devices to be completely dumb. I don't want them to know anything about me. I don't want them to think for me or make decisions for me. I store data so I can retrieve it, not for the computer to "learn" from it. Leave me the hell alone.

[–] xg15 6 hours ago

Well, this is HN, not the general population. Half of the people here probably helped build something like this at some point... (Purely for the technical challenge of course)

(And the other half are Apple vassals)

[–] oldfuture 17 hours ago

This is deeply troubling, this data is unnecessary collected and impossible to opt out from apparently and may be read at any point in the future by an attacker or by apple itself without notice

this is a class action lawsuit in the making

[–] ricardobeat 4 hours ago

It cannot be read by any other apps unless you explicit give them Full Disk Access.

If you use iCloud, all the data in this db can be derived from other data already stored (messages, logs, etc).

[–] jftuga 12 hours ago

I have a "flock" script that locks downs files that I do not want changed except for when I persoanlly "funlock" it.

It does the last 4 commands:

    cd ~/Library
    rm -rf IntelligencePlatform
    touch IntelligencePlatform
    xattr -w com.flock.mode 444 IntelligencePlatform
    chown root:wheel IntelligencePlatform
    chmod 444 IntelligencePlatform
    chflags schg IntelligencePlatform

[–] bayganyo 7 hours ago

Good call; just applied this myself. What other files do you lock down?

[–] jftuga 7 hours ago

    .gitconfig
    .claude/settings.json (same for codex)
    .zprofile and .zshrc
    .ssh/config and id_ed25519*

[–] zaptheimpaler 17 hours ago

Im still optimistic that Apple will do all this stuff on your device as opposed to in an opaque cloud somewhere you have 0 visibility into. Meta probably has 1000x this system in a data warehouse somewhere. If this info is not leaving the device that’s fine with me.

[–] apples_oranges 17 hours ago

I have lost my faith in that

[–] infwhispers 17 hours ago

Yes, but having some kind of documentation and way to disable it would have been reasonable. Also, the thing is that it seems that apple intelligence models can query this information. So, you know, everything is a prompt injection away in theory.

[–] Ungh 17 hours ago

I had faith in Apple until I saw the technology oligarchy and how they behaved around the current US administration.

[–] Quothling 15 hours ago

Probably, but how much meta hardware do you own? Hell how much meta software do you have installed? I know people use varied amounts, but meta doesn't really make anything worth owning. I guess Apple is speedrunning the point where they don't either, which sucks, because I have no idea where to find a fanless linux laptop that doesn't get hot but has the performance of a m1.

[–] hoherd 13 hours ago

Something that is additionally concerning is that you apparently cannot read your own data:

    $ ls -la ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    total 0
    ls: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
    $ find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
    $ sudo find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted

Edit: I was wrong. The snarky comment below is right.

[–] kccqzy 13 hours ago

Yet another person who is unaware of TCC. I guess you are one of the lucky ten thousand today.

You misconfigured your security settings for your terminal app. You need to give it full disk access, or otherwise just open the folder in Finder.

[–] contingencies 10 hours ago

Giving a browser full disk access is definitely not a good idea: I think it is you who has misconfigured.

[–] wpm 4 hours ago

I think it is you who needs to read more carefully. They said "terminal" not browser.

[–] contingencies 3 hours ago

At the time of my reply they wrote Firefox. Now it says Finder. Snarky edit!

[–] zenocon 9 hours ago

this is completely wild. i use a mac for my personal computer, but also a mac for work. i ran this on my personal and noticed it was picking up slack chans i participate in often for work. i don't use slack on my personal computer. it has combined both knowledge graphs between the two computers (obviously through the apple platform) once it figured out i am the same person on both laptops. i share very little between the two laptops other than occasionally forwarding an email from a work computer to personal and vice-versa and having the same first/last name on both.

i think this is even more concerning now that i know it is building this graph in a distributed manner across multiple devices.

fyi: slack shows up as com.tinyspeck.chatlyio - it is the internal bundle identifier (Bundle ID) for the official Slack iOS app on Apple devices.

for those that complain about punctuation -- i skip it b/c i have numbness in the left hand due to an injury.

[–] Zenbit_UX 1 hour ago

You probably have slack signed in on your iPhone and that iPhone shares a personal account with your Mac. Most of the data they have on me seems to be meta data from push notifications that exist on my phone.

[–] justinclift 1 hour ago

This data probably isn't backed up to iCloud. But if it were, that'd make for an interesting (Facebook-esque?) intelligence resource at scale.

[–] ethansinjin 8 hours ago

Are you signed into the same iCloud account on both laptops? If not I don’t see how they could reliably combine the graphs

[–] angry_octet 3 hours ago

One great thing of the LLM age is being able to task Opus to do a security audit of a random open source tool. Or indeed a closed source one with the help of Ghidra. I can audit every Chrome plugin every time there's a new version. Finally, enough eyes to catch the shallow bugs.

What this incident highlights is you can now poke around the insides of MacOS, Android, and Windows to see what awful collection and telemetry has slipped in. Modifying what happens is a bigger challenge. Trusted boot and system integrity protection also protects the surveillance code.

[–] stmw 4 hours ago

How does one best disable this (knoweledgeconstructiond et al)?

[–] code_biologist 17 hours ago

Horrifying, but also really interesting as a student of schema design, especially for probabilistic or inferential processes, and graph data.

[–] gattilorenz 18 hours ago

Woah. Still on Sequoia with no intention to upgrade, but maybe the next laptop runs Linux.

[–] veonik 17 hours ago

I'm on Sequoia. Check out ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform

[–] rustyhancock 16 hours ago

It might depend on your needs and priorities, GhostBSD is a great option for people who like something more like Mac.

It's just a tuned FreeBSD distro using Mate.

[–] jdiff 11 hours ago

What similarities do you find between macOS and GhostBSD? The Mate desktop by itself isn't super mac-like.

I also see it defaults to the growing pile of bugs known as XLibre.

[–] rustyhancock 10 hours ago

The similarity is predominantly between the userland. (The Freebsd kernel and XNU is mostly historical as far as I know)

A typical Linux user will be used to GNU conventions and probably have a lot of annoyances.

GhostBSD is simply a beginner friendly distro of FreeBSD.

In one line both MacOS users and BSD broadly will squirm at the likes of things like `ls src/ -la`

But honestly, I was interdicting in the idea that Linux is the only alternative really.

[–] joshAg 9 hours ago

It is really hard to get through articles with prose this bad. I don't know if it's because of LLM help or lack of practice, but man i have tried 3 times now to get through it and just can't.

[–] lproven 14 hours ago

Saddened but not surprised.

This makes me glad. I do not own or use an iPhone. I have 2 iPads, one on iOS 9 and one on iOS 17, and neither can be updated. Neither talks to my email or anything: they're ebook readers, basically. Nobody in my immediate family uses iPhones either, nor Apple Watches or Apple TV or any of that.

I do not use Apple's App or Music stores, or their email, or calendar, or notes, or web browser, or even the text editor. I don't use Siri. I don't have a payment method on my 30Y old Apple account.

My email goes through Thunderbird, chat through Ferdium, web via Firefox. Office work is in Panwriter and occasionally LibreOffice.

I suspect, but don't know, that Apple doesn't know much about me and I suspect I wouldn't care about what it did.

It's still possible to use a Mac as a prettier Linux box, and that's what I do. I have no OS newer than macOS 15 and I don't even use Homebrew to extend that.

[–] dfc 14 hours ago

> I suspect, but don't know, that Apple doesn't know much about me and I suspect I wouldn't care about what it did.

I used to have similar thoughts. But then i realized everyone was emailing me from Gmail, sending me evites, posting pictures of events I attended but didn't RSVP to social media, etc. If you live in a moderately populated city in a western economy these apps know a ton about you. You should not give up your digital hygiene but don't lie to yourself and pretend that your friends and family are not feeding your data to the beast.

[–] cwoolfe 10 hours ago

Since Apple goes through the trouble of invading my privacy like this, I would at least expect "Hey Siri, call mom" to do the right thing. But it does not. Either it calls the wrong person or asks me which of two particular number or email to use for FaceTime, when both lead to the same correct person anyway..so why bother asking? Apple makes the best hardware but its disappointing to see their software consistently fall short.

[–] ianmf 10 hours ago

I have been using "Hey Siri, call my {mom, dad,wife}" with zero issues for years now.

[–] jwilcoxson 12 hours ago

Maybe the technical details weren’t available, but I thought that we already knew this was a thing? I was aware that my Mac and iPhone were indexing various sources like this on device for Siri.

[–] procaryote 11 hours ago

But it does this even when siri is disabled

[–] adsharma 10 hours ago

All of this seems to be using sqlite, not KuzuDB derived tech that apple acquired about a year ago.

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/waterloo-based-graph-database-s...

[–] monarchwadia 12 hours ago

It wasn't that the AI writing style was a turn-off.

It's that AI writing tends to be dense and difficult to really parse, for humans.

Something about the writing style does not sit well with how my mind works. My mind cannot parse it very well.

You could try asking it to write in Simplified Technical English (STE100), which ends up being easier to understand for humans. Or, at least for me.

[–] rubyfan 17 hours ago

How does one disable this?

[–] mmooss 13 hours ago

I expected the article to address that. Maybe it's obvious?:

Disable the daemons, delete the directory, lock down permissions to the database files / directory, lock down the daemons' permissions, delete the daemons, ...

I'm not recommending those things - I don't know what the consequence is for the system - but that's where I'd start.

[–] rbn3 16 hours ago

you can't

[–] verytrivial 16 hours ago

"It's for you own good. It would be harmful to disable it. And you don't understand it so you shouldn't have an opinion. I trust Apple to do this safely, even if I don't want whatever this is."

Is how I'm generally greeted when I ask this sort of question.

Turn off your Mac and use a different operating system. Because it doesn't matter how you disable this feature in isolation. It is merely the current projection of Apple's opinion of its relationship with you. It's a hydra and you are going to lose the fight.

[–] bel8 16 hours ago

or "grandma needs this to just work, Apple knows better"

[–] kibwen 16 hours ago

By using an OS that doesn't view you as cattle to be milked and eventually sent to the slaughterhouse.

[–] inatreecrown2 4 hours ago

I understand why they collect this but: Why is this not encrypted?

[–] angry_octet 4 hours ago

It is almost certainly on a disk with full disk encryption turned on, and password/biometric unlock. Unlike iOS, MacOD hasn't gone down the path of separate encryption keys, secured by the secure coprocessor, for each category of secrets.

The best solution to not losing confidentiality is not to collect it, and not to process it or store it. Relatedly, why does this daemon have access without permission being granted? If it was a third party tool it would not.

[–] fudged71 7 hours ago

I’m just mad how wrong the inferences are

[–] axismundi 17 hours ago

What about iphones?

[–] ptdorf 7 hours ago

More and more the obvious choice is Linux and some 3rd party dumb phone.

[–] waiwai933 13 hours ago

Is this a way to query this from the command line? I'd rather not give a random piece of software deliberate access to personal data...

[–] infwhispers 13 hours ago

It is a sqlite db, so you can load it with that

[–] hmokiguess 13 hours ago

I have a few questions:

Is it unencrypted and accessible by other applications without elevated permissions?

Can I modify it at will and does it persist if so?

[–] infwhispers 13 hours ago

It is in plaintext, but protected by TCC (so, only privileged apps / trusted by you can). Not sure about persistence. I believe it is rewritten periodically, possibly ignoring your edits

[–] titzer 14 hours ago

Stallman being upset about not having the source to printer drivers seems quaint these days.

This is exactly why we should not have closed source anything at the bottom.

[–] ig-88ms 16 hours ago

If Microsoft didn't this, this wouldn't be interesting research, but a cause for uproar. And yes, I know they're probably already doing it, but in the cloud.

Apple makes money of your data as does anyone else. The just use your compute and energy for it too and convinced everyone that was privacy.

[–] IAmGraydon 8 hours ago

I’ve often wondered if Windows 11 might do the same thing. Surely, any low Apple has stooped to, Microsoft has stooped to as well.

[–] arcanemachiner 17 hours ago

On a long enough timeline, all closed-source software turns into spyware.

[–] MonkeyClub 14 hours ago

That’s a Law; is it christened yet, or should we name it ArcaneMachiner’s Law?

[–] cite_please 11 hours ago

This isn’t even LLM, it’s just anti-reader noise. HN needs to filter this stuff out going forward.

[–] teekert 9 hours ago

Why is my computer so slow? Idk, maybe it's making a map of your socialsphere. Yeah right! Right?

Apple doesn't need you to not buy ram to make it work for them. Joke's on Sam.

[–] WesolyKubeczek 14 hours ago

“Protected by the Full Disk Access permission”

Which of course we developers give to our tools and terminal emulators so they are not annoying to use! One npm install away from mining this sweet data via a postinstall script!

[–] masonwan 11 hours ago

And Apple wants to sell us Privacy as feature. Isn't this a big red flag?

[–] xlayn 6 hours ago

I remember reading about how in Norway (I don't remember which specific country it was) you could go and register as belonging to X category (I don't remember if it was religion) so when you die you could choose where you’ll be buried.

And of course how the information was used by Nazis to search for you and... you know the rest of the story... including why it should be dissalowed in first place.

[–] mfro 13 hours ago

Decent work, if unreadable. I’ve disabled Apple Intelligence now.

[–] procaryote 10 hours ago

It will still collect this data.

Source: have never had Apple Intelligence enabled, have these files anyway

[–] IAmGraydon 8 hours ago

Someone else said it and I’ll echo it. This is invasive and cannot be disabled by disabling Apple Intelligence.

[–] willmadden 15 hours ago

Articles like this make me rethink my politics. I now think software tech monopolies need some 1950's style broadcast TV level regulation.

[–] SoftTalker 10 hours ago

The problem is that most people don't know it's happening. If, when you first set up your Mac, you were asked "Do you want the OS to construct a social profile about you to help with ... (list of features)" and you could say yes or no.

When you do that, it's quite hard for it not to sound creepy. And most people would probably say no.

But I don't think it should be prohibited by regulation. Some people might want it, or genuinely find it useful.

[–] sufficientsoup 12 hours ago

Why the downvotes on this? Wish people would leave comments

[–] classified 8 hours ago

This gives a whole new dimension to the notion that we're carrying spy software in our pockets all day long.

[–] conartist6 18 hours ago

I'm going to be very angry if my mac turns out to be doing this

[–] infwhispers 18 hours ago

We also created a tool to inspect your graph: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow Only tested on recent MacOS versions (last 26s, and early 27s), though

[–] veonik 17 hours ago

Works on Sequoia too fwiw

[–] infwhispers 17 hours ago

Ack. For what I could see, specific tables are added / removed across versions. So, some information might not be visualized (e.g., the graph is tiny with few nodes).

[–] sunaookami 17 hours ago

Also works on Sonoma.

[–] ectoloph 13 hours ago

This is really interesting and it seems to work on 27.2.

You might want to prune some of the descriptions though, as a lot of them are very Claude and hard to follow.

[–] iamtedd 14 hours ago

> Viz. Apple IntelligencePlatform store

Why did you abbreviate 'visualise'? You're not running up against a character limit.

[–] Hamuko 17 hours ago

>iKnow is fully LLM-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

"We" sounds pretty damn generous if you don't even know whether it works.

[–] wat10000 9 hours ago

I like how there are all these worries about privacy, and then the conclusion is to download some random software, give it access to this entire database, and throw it into an LLM API too while you're at it.

[–] sneak 11 hours ago

Previously discussed in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521306

[–] BatchJob 11 hours ago

Stop using Macs. Its pretty easy to switch to linux.

[–] daneel_w 15 hours ago

I'm not sure if it's OP's software not being compatible with macOS 15/Sequoia, or if it's my habits and "cyber hygiene", but I get pretty much zeroes (read: no inferences) all across the board when digging through my data. Anyone else on "old" macOS seeing the same?

[–] infwhispers 13 hours ago

I could test on old OSs. Information might be there, but under different names / DBs that the tool does not catch

[–] DSpinellis 17 hours ago

My understanding is that collecting these data and constructing the knowledge graph violates the European General Data Protection Directive (GDPR). According to the GDPR, personal data (such as an email's sender name and email address) are provided for a specific purpose (in the case of sending an email, for identifying the sender and facilitating email replies). Similarly, a calendar invitation is provided to organize a meeting. Processing that data for a different purpose (as described here, for constructing a knowledge graph) without the subject's explicit consent is unlawful.

[–] mimotomo2009 17 hours ago

I'm not sure. IMO when you buy a Mac (or use Windows or an Android phone) you have accepted so much that there is nothing which is not allowed.

But nevertheless: as far as I have understood it everything is built on your computer and is still used on your computer. You - as the user of the Mac - has took and saved the information. Your Mac is then only working for you - if Apple doesn't load the information in their enviroment.

[–] harvey9 16 hours ago

As a general rule you cannot override national law by accepting service terms.

[–] Sharlin 16 hours ago

Unlike Americans seem to think, terms of use don’t override law.

[–] bel8 16 hours ago

Someone should start a company with terms mentioning that whoever agrees to it will live forever.

If we are overriding federal laws, might as well make people immortal too.

[–] yubblegum 17 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873517

[–] jadamson 16 hours ago

This is going to depend on the holder's relationship with the data subject.

If you send a friend an email, they may add you to their address book and set a reminder for your birthday while they're at it. They don't need your permission to do that, so why would a device acting on their behalf?

On the other hand, if a customer of mine asks for the data I have on them, do I have to send them my Personal Knowledge Graph facts about them? That's less obvious, and I'd lean towards Apple's helpful database being a liability even if it's local.

[–] eastbound 17 hours ago

It's on the person's Mac so it is a little more complicated. The person you send your data to is the Data Controller, and fails you by not publishing their privacy policy. But Apple isn't a Sub-Processor here, because they aren't sending the data to Apple.

I'm saying that because I wish the GDPR also covered the software providers who perform Data Processing against the will of all parties, but it isn't the case. Lastly, they're a person and not a business.

It is however clear that building a database of people which may contain race, religion or political opinions is illegal, even if it's just a person doing it.

[–] DSpinellis 11 hours ago

GDPR applies to persons and businesses. The fact that you're violating GDPR, because without your knowledge Apple has deployed software on your computer that compiles this knowledge graph makes Apple complicit. Imagine violating a speed limit, because your car's speed indicator has a software flaw that causes it to show a lower speed.

[–] alchemist1e9 16 hours ago

It’s not like Apple is actually hiding this. I mean it’s sitting there in perfectly readable structured format. I’m most surprised this isn’t known earlier, it indicates to me how little MacOS users investigate their own devices if we are talking about this 4 years after it rolled out.

[–] rbn3 16 hours ago

this violates GDPR in so many ways, jeez

do i see that right - the data is unencrypted, the profile is built by an undocumented background profiler without consent or an option of opting out, it is consumed by cloud connected platforms like siri and apple intelligence and ANY application on my mac can access it?

[–] fschuett 15 hours ago

Yeah I could see that it correlated my WhatsApp calls with real person names (i.e. de-anonymizing WhatsApp), inferred my race based on face clusters (illegal under AI act), built a co-appearance network ("who stands beside whom in photos"), etc. etc.

None of this shit is legal, but the laws are toothless anyway: Apple can get "fined" a couple million and that's it. The fallout from the press would be a harder hit for them.

[–] amelius 18 hours ago

Can we start a class action suit?

[–] infwhispers 17 hours ago

The output stays local on your disk (in theory). So I’m not sure that breaks any rule. But in theory, Apple Intelligence can query it. Again, close to 0 documentation, so it is hard to know how this is consumed.

[–] fschuett 16 hours ago

In Germany, it breaks TDDDG §25 verbatim, storage of data not explicitly consented to and not technically necessary is already illegal.

[–] otterley 14 hours ago

So sue them. You will then learn whether you are right or not.

[–] nephihaha 7 hours ago

If you have the time and money.

In the meantime the German government probably uses that info.

[–] rpdillon 14 hours ago

I'm from the US, but I did do some research after I saw other commenters claiming it violates GDPR. I tend to agree with them after reading up a bit on it and asking a couple of AIs. Apple can avoid some of the cross-border entanglements, but GDPR does not care where the processing happens, just what the scope of it is, what its purpose is, whose information is being used.

It'll be interesting to see if anybody goes after Apple for this.

[–] exabrial 11 hours ago

great, now how do I nuke it?

[–] gib444 12 hours ago

Fix available at https://www.debian.org/ ;) jk, I've got a Mac.

I'm glad I don't have any contacts/photos in iCloud or locally, don't use FaceTime/iMessage etc. Contacts are in DAV. Mail is webmail. Photos self hosted with Immich. I do have my Calendar on my Mac, that's it.

Mac is totally Windows-ified now. Have you seen the new user setup steps for MacOS 27? SO MANY CLICKS! And a plethora of debloating tools now, to disable Apple Intelligence etc. Sigh

(oh and MacOS 27.2 has SO many bugs I've lost count within just 24 hours of upgrading. Can't even trust x.2 releases now)

[–] petesergeant 14 hours ago

I hate this. On the plus side, it can't work out if my (age-appropriate, feminine) wife is more likely to be my son or daughter, but lists them as as-likely-to-be my partner as my deceased father.

[–] hdb385 17 hours ago

can we block these two processes using little snitch?

[–] ProllyInfamous 15 hours ago

No.

1) Before macOS boots, LittleSnitch ("LS") does not have any ability to block hostnames, e.g: on every boot, any modern Apple product ignores any manually-configured DNS IP and attempts to phone-home

2) Allegedly, this user profile information is stored locally (so LS wouldn't see any outgoing connection attempt to Apple servers)

3) LS does not block DNS-resolution, only IP-connection (i.e. your ISP sees all DNS queries, whether you click `ACCEPT` or `DENY` when LS popup asks)

4) If you're using LS with intentions of primary DNS blockage, you have failed; try pi-hole (or other local hardware DNS resolver); use physically-dedicated hardware (e.g: Raspberry Pi) to run your PiHole, not a Docker/Prox/&c

5) I am investigating another user's comment on using TLS certs to DENY-all DNS, but need to research further on this (new info to me!)

[–] SoftTalker 10 hours ago

But you can probably (as root) remove execute permissions and kill the running daemons. Until the next OS update.

[–] daneel_w 16 hours ago

The processes aren't (as far as anyone knows) slinging data over the network.

[–] jimz 16 hours ago

Uh, am I the only one for whom my Mac apparently knows next to nothing about my social circles beyond my parents?

(MacOS Golden Gate 27.1, and yes some of the pages do say that the data isn't working, but the ones that do work are hilariously wrong once you get beyond my parents, which, since they are noted as "mom" and "dad", well, that's a freebie.

I'm definitely not your average user, but still. It has eight photos of me but since I generate random EXIF data when they get moved onto my hard drive and I use an Android phone, the identification between photo and me, - and I video chat, facetime with my mom who's on vacation in Egypt and my dad who's on business in China, among others, did not seem to get recorded. I also have a half-sister who is not mentioned anywhere, but it did identify an obviously fake entity in my contacts as my: family, partner, child, and sibling. None of that is true. It also identified a throwaway number that I control as part of my family, a friend of is dead as my family, my lawyer misses the cut at 0.47 for friends, my aunts, cousins, and uncles do not make the list. Some are mostly overseas - Canada, China, Hong Kong, but my father spends 6 months out of the year in China and makes the list. My partner, to whom I'm not married and have no plan to do so, but does live with me 6 months out of the year and works on her family's ranch in the state and we even share family plan for our phone service, is nowhere on the list, and she has an iPhone.

Johnny Appleseed features prominently in my FAF. One of my close friends is known only through an employer, even though I'm self-employed. I'm not much of a photo-taker and certainly not with my iPad, and so the photo clusters are mainly... baseball cards, which I process via a ADF scanner, since taking 5 digits worth of baseball cards, front and back, is ridiculous.But not more ridiculous than how it seems unable to fully or even partially beyond the most basic aspects of the data it can access to make connections with any sort of certainty that is correct. It identified half of my exes but only barely. It decided that obviously fake (555 area code, come on) entries in my contacts as close friends, and it seems to make the fundamental mistake of creating connections under the assumptions that seems ripped from Anna Karenina, but only made its way half through the epigraph and mistranslated it.My MacBook does not get turned off entirely unless I'm out and about with it, but it's easier to simply use my iPad Pro M4 and my Pixel - neither particularly known for privacy - instead of lugging my entire setup around unless I'm going on a trip, which happens twice a year usually.

I get the sense that this shows what my MacOS doesn't know what to do with the data it has. I'm not going to enrich it so, let it be, I guess. But just to be clear, I'm not the partner, father, and sibling of some entity that I have never had any contact with. I also do not use Apple Mail (eM Client is what I prefer). Although now I'm going to dig up an Almodovar movie or something I guess.

[–] penguin_booze 13 hours ago

> who you know

Whom you know.

[–] bayganyo 7 hours ago

Makes me cringe too.