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points by aetherspawn 18 hours ago | 0 comments

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 18 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 5 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 18 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 17 hours ago

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

Amen.

[–] proneb1rd 8 hours ago

Does it?

[–] wpm 5 hours ago

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

[–] detourdog 7 hours ago

Does what?

[–] aetherspawn 17 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 15 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 15 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 15 hours ago

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

[–] phoghed 14 hours ago

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

[–] gilrain 15 hours ago

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

[–] otterley 15 hours ago

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

[–] petcat 18 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 16 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 15 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 9 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 18 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 17 hours ago

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

[–] jungturk 10 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 15 hours ago

Yes, this is the right question to ask.

[–] ProllyInfamous 15 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 13 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 14 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 5 hours ago

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

[–] cyclopeanutopia 17 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 14 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.