- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
I have never liked Apple and lately even less. F… US monopolies
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Where’s the “Apple is the only tech giant that respects your privacy” crowd? Just because your data isn’t being publicly auctioned doesn’t mean they aren’t harvesting it and infringing on your privacy.
I switched to iPhone from Android because I was tired of Google making changes to their security and APIs that were killing my macros I’d write for my phone. I was also tired of Google sending everything good to the graveyard. Finally, I hated that Google would promise features or support for x number of years and then pull the rug out from under me (although, lack of support was usually caused by the manufacturer)
Before spending $1000 on my iPhone, I told my wife that it was a good investment because of Apple’s proven history of supporting devices with 5 years of updates; so we agreed that I’d keep this iPhone as my daily driver for 5 years because of the exuberant cost.
Well, my wish came true and here we are. I’ve got a phone that doesn’t respect my privacy, doesn’t respect my settings, has a frustrating UI/UX, and has low compatibility with most of my existing infrastructure. I gotta admit, though, my experience is far more consistent now, but not in a good way.
I have used both iOS and Android for more than a decade. After every update on both systems I have to go through and delete/disable junk I don’t need/privacy issues.
The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.
iOS’s UI is terrible to use with everything taking twice as long as it should. So many illogical hidden commands.
Everything has gotten randomly harder to get basic things done.
My win 10 business computer with classic shell will stop being supported the end of the year… Oh joy…
While I’m still struggling to find an appropriate replacement for my photo editing apps, I’m happy to report that support and usability for most popular Linux distros have improved to the point that I now find Linux not only more stable, but easier to navigate than Win 10 was even at its best.
The amount of noise associated with Windows, generally due to people answering questions about the wrong version of windows or the wrong application, searching for any help topics is like trying to run through mud. It’s literally quicker now to learn a totally new skill on Linux than to try to update your knowledge base on Windows.
Gimp and inkscape where great replacement for me (amateur)
But maybe this is something for you:
Gimp has been alright for me and (I hate to admit it) Illustrator is unparalleled when it comes to intuitive vector design.
I love Photopea and was an early-adopter/small-donor, although I’ve mostly moved to Canva for my design needs.
No, I’m looking for a solution to Lightroom and Camera Raw. I’ve tried Darktable and Rawtherapee, but, especially in Rawtherapee, I find that I quickly destroy my raw images and end up with something somehow simultaneously washed out and with crushed blacks. I’m sure it’s primarily user-error, but on my deadlines, I haven’t had a chance to learn these new platforms.
Rip ufraw.
I don’t believe that Win10 will die, due to the huge amount of users and companies. I think that it will be the same a with Win7, which survived several years it’s announced end. There are still users which can’t even update to Win11 with a relative new computer (without tricks), not because the lack of sources, but because it’s specs don’t appear in the list made by M$ of supported specs, as in my case with a 3 years old Laptop, because my AMD Radeon 9425 don’t appears in this idiotic list, offering to buy a new PC to use Win11 🤬💩
The stock android pixel UI has gotten so full shit I have to use a launcher.
What? I use a stock Pixel Pro and there’s no fluff. It’s very vanilla, but does everything I need it to do without fuss. I was using Nova Launcher Pro, but they sold it to an advertising company a while ago, so I went back to the stock launcher.
I am typing this on a pixel 8
Try disabling and removing the Google search bar. Can’t be done. Since Google search has gone down hill I never use it.
How about removing the the news feeds? You have to disable the Google app to get rid of it. If I want to read the news, I do a quick search. It’s not hard to do. I don’t need a news feed on my phone.
What about the stupid at a glance at the top of the home screen? It just takes up space for no benefit over the notification bar. It can’t be fully removed.
I also never us any voice assistant etc because it’s faster to type it in than repeat myself.
I currently have 19 apps on this phone disabled that I can’t uninstall… No fluff huh…
All of my apps are organized into folders and I am never more than one swipe and two taps away from opening the app I want. I don’t scroll, I don’t search, I know where everything is and have it opening in under a second.
That’s true about the search bar. I do actually use that to find and open apps though, so I hadn’t considered it fluff. I don’t use Google to search the web though. I forgot about the news feed because I don’t have it. I uninstalled the news app and a bunch of other crap I don’t need. Idk what At A Glance feature you’re talking about. I don’t think I have that. Overall you are right. There’s some initial fluff that I forgot about because I removed it years ago.
It’s a pixel, you’re in c/Privacy for whatever reason, have you considered just putting GrapheneOS on it? All those annoyances go bye bye, you can have a full fat google alternate user and an approximately private main user…
I honestly would love to. Unfortunately my banking and accounting apps for my business won’t run on it.
Also the reason I have an iPad for two apps that are not on Android that I have to have for business.
M business laptop is W10 instead of Linux mint like my personal one for the same reason…
Fair cop. Keep a weather eye out for better alternatives for the blockers, but as noted the full fat gOS play store and google services are pretty good, and the bootloader gets re-locked, might be worth trying it for a weekend to see how close you get, many people have good experiences, but it’s all down to cases.
I tried the new iPhone 16 Pro. They should be ashamed of what they’ve created. If that’s their flagship phone, then I can’t even imagine how glitchy their base models are. It felt like a Fisher Price OS compared to Android. I returned it after two weeks. My several year old Pixel Pro can do more stuff more reliably than Apple’s brand new flagship device.
I have the 14 pro and my sister recently got the 16 base model. I don’t know why, but the pictures from her newer phone looked like a major leap backwards in quality. Also, the latest OS does feel like its features were written in crayon and that its waiting to kick off its training wheels. I can’t fully describe it: it’s not clunky or clumsy, it just feels like something is missing from the experience. I’ve never really felt this way from a phone version upgrade before.
There’s that, but it was really glitchy too. Siri only worked half the time. The subtitles would start and then stop after a couple sentences and need to be restarted constantly. There were a never ending stream of glitches. Text selection is still awful. It’s just not a good phone compared to the competition. I will say that it looked and felt nice though. The build quality of the actual hardware seemed good.
That’s so funny, I found it so light that I was somewhat scared to touch it. Then again, I’ve been known to yell at clouds concerning my age.
I heard that they were the first test-audience Apple used to test their new product, the IRope. Apple designed it to go around their user’s necks. The other end of the IRope is designed to attach to a proprietary cryptographic dongle to work called the Lynch-Key. Apple says it’s like a lynch-pin because it’s critical to the function the IRope.
Apple never did hear back from the test-audience. -I think this product will be a real winner!
It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed. The data is sent encrypted and not decrypted by the remote system performing the analysis.
From the link:
Put simply: You take a photo; your Mac or iThing locally outlines what it thinks is a landmark or place of interest in the snap; it homomorphically encrypts a representation of that portion of the image in a way that can be analyzed without being decrypted; it sends the encrypted data to a remote server to do that analysis, so that the landmark can be identified from a big database of places; and it receives the suggested location again in encrypted form that it alone can decipher.
If it all works as claimed, and there are no side-channels or other leaks, Apple can’t see what’s in your photos, neither the image data nor the looked-up label.
It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed.
Narrator: It doesn’t.
Oh they’re here, just seething about this and their precious green texts or whatever the fuck else false sense of security they’ve been clinging to
- seething
- precious
- fuck
- sense
- clinging
we are logical chad and they are emotional wojak amirite
If you’re an apple fanboy, you’ve got a lot of secret closet cries these days
- fanboy
- secret closet
- cries
Doubling down on emotional Wojak framing I see.
Right I’m the one here turning life into a shitty boring meme
In case anyone came to the comments looking for directions on how to opt out:
- Go to Settings. 2) Scroll down and select “Photos.” 3) Locate the “Enhanced Visual Search” option. Turn off the toggle.
In case that you be aware that it is activated by default, 90% of the users are not. No advice by Apple
sorry, i think you had typo or two. what did you mean to say?
aware*
For my iPad it was:
- Settings
- Apps
- Photos
- Scroll down to Enhanced Visual Search
Seems like this is on phones that are Apple Intelligence capable?
I’m on a 12 Pro, and I don’t have this option. Guess I’m safe, for now…
Yep, I don’t see it either but that might be because I’m on an older iOS.
Maybe you ‘need’ an update. I see it on a 12 pro
I’m on iOS 18, hmm. Maybe it’s region specific? Or just hasn’t been rolled out to me yet, for whatever reason.
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Might be an 18.1 or 18.2 feature
Thanks
It will just reset itself eventually plus they already trained on it, it’s too late.
“Apple is being thoughtful about doing this in a (theoretically) privacy-preserving way, but I don’t think the company is living up to its ideals here,” observed software developer Michael Tsai in an analysis shared Wednesday. “Not only is it not opt-in, but you can’t effectively opt out if it starts uploading metadata about your photos before you even use the search feature. It does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud.”
Reading the article, the service itself is interesting and it sounds like Apple might have found a way to process the data while preserving user privacy, but the fact that they unilaterally opted everyone in without giving them a choice is the biggest problem.
That’s Apple though. “We know what you want better than you do” is almost a company mantra.
Not almost, it just is. It is the winning strategy right now. Everyone who is doing it gains massive profits somehow. Money speaks for itself, isn’t it?
I doubt every company who shits on it’s user’s privacy and their preferred experience is gaining massive profits right now, we’re just discussing the successful ones. I think the two leading factors in this scenario are “Brand Recognition” and “double dipping into as many aspects as possible with your user’s data.” The whole ‘if it’s free’, apple is definitely getting a kick back sending all this data to them even if it’s “secure”.
An opt-out that you can’t opt out of because Apple already opted you in and took your photos?
This seems like it is going to be a huge lawsuit. Since a class action won’t deter them or help us, let’s all sue Apple individually in small claims court and kill them by death from a billion cuts.
Not saying that it shouldn’t be illegal and it’s shady as fuck, but GDPR opt-outs are usually retroactive, meaning you can remove consent from data they’ve already processed, and they have to retroactively scrub your personal data out.
How do they retroactively remove the knowledge the AI has gained from analyzing all of our personal information?
They don’t need to.
They only have to remove your personal data. So the company / AI model is not allowed to have data specifically on you, but it can have the average age of people living in your town even if your data contributed to calculating that average.
That said, Apple here never had affirmative consent, so they can’t get away with just doing this.
If they did this in Europe, I would argue it is a GDPR violation and it would be impossible for Apple to remove the data they collected. I hope the EU fines Apple out the nose for this.
According to another comment, the photos never leave your device, that part of the processing is done on-device. The global index is on Apple servers.
Apple opted customers in, got sued, and will now prompt customers if they want to be opted in or out.
And if there’s a class action lawsuit then it’ll be $95 million settlement spread out over 1.46 billion customers (this just happened over Siri spying).
To what end? They claim they can’t read the data, nor the output, nor where it originated from. So… what’s the point? If their claims are true then what is the point of all that data transfer, processing, and the massive engineering efforts they’ve put into it? If it’s just so they can tag a location, then they could have just used geo location on the device without sharing anything. If it’s to be able to search for " Eiffel Tower" and see pictures you have of it, well, haven’t they already been able to do this before this feature with on-board AI processing that doesn’t require the data to be shipped to Apple? Something seems off to me, but maybe because I’m not clear on the purpose.
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That was my suspicion too, but I didn’t want to come right out and say it without more information
Remember, when you buy an apple product, you’re directly supporting Trump.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/03/tim-cook-apple-donate-1-million-trump-inauguration
What a great picture 😃 and true on so many controversial topics…
I agree. Definitely.
However, your money actually just went to Trump, via Apple, and their hardware and services.
And it would go to him if I bought an android.
In pretty sure Xiaomi don’t pay Trump. But, you never really know.
What we do really know, is Apple do. Spending with Apple is spending with Trump, guaranteed.
So are a lot of other companies.
And, we can try and avoid them. Or, we can pay trump through them.
There are so many android manufacturers that wouldn’t even spit in trumps direction. The choice is there. It can be taken. Or, we can shrug, find excuses, and just give Trump our money through apple (in this example).
Yes, this is bigger than just phones. PLENTY of other combines donated to him.
You are avoiding those companies too, right?
Don’t they mean Tim Apple?
and google isnt? and meta / facebook isnt? etc
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Then he should also pay everyone else’s ransom for being gay in America.
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I think it was his end run around Apple donating the money directly which would have been a complete disaster. I don’t think Cook supports trump in a “rah rah” sort of way, but knows if the company doesn’t pay him suck up money, it will come back to haunt them later.
Either way, it’s still gross.
Nothing but depressing news for common people all around.
Never accept the technology just because it is optional. Eventually it will become default and eventually maditory.
Oops didn’t mean to! /$
Although this is terrible, once again a headline on lemmy made me paranoid only to find out that my phone probably doesn’t even support this.
Going through the settings and turning things off is second nature to me by now, it’s not unique to Apple (looking at your Microsoft).
What we need is an opt out mode on every device. Similar to the accept necessary cookies only, we need every device to let you fully opt out from everything it can when you boot it up for the first time.
I don’t think it’s fair to say “once again a headline on lemmy”, by connotation you’re vaguely suggesting Lemmy is responsible.
I’m a big settings person as well but honestly Apple is a fucking evil genius at hiding options in menus within menus. Plus this was an opt-change done randomly in the middle of “nobody knows”, I don’t check all of my settings and their subsequent menus daily for any changes being made.
I’m just flabbergasted by the whole apple industry though. Like it’s obvious when a company wants to offer a new user experience (their newest innovative design!), and it’s obvious when a company wants to only tailor to “Their preferred vision of what an apple user and their experience should be”. No one asked for this shit, and it’s being shoved down everyone’s throats.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I still watch people walk into a Dollar General knowing how crappy that company acts and how much more costly everything is. We’re all slowly being pigeon holed into a “unified user experience” and it’s the shittiest outcome.
$1m to Trump and now this!
Tim Apple was going to kick $1M to whomever won. For a guy with a net worth in the tens of billions, this is just a tip to the wait staff at the Table Of Success.
But the Apple photo library is a huge potential source of revenue. Its worth significantly more than $1M. This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images. If you’re not the client, you’re the product.
This is, incidentally, why you don’t need to pay Apple to host those images
Huh? You pay for anything above 5 GB or so. It’s standard for most cloud providers to offer a free tier to get you hooked. Their storage after that isn’t all that cheap even.
I have an iPad, now I am scared… Should I do something about this?
Enhanced Visual Search in Photos allows you to search for photos using landmarks or points of interest. Your device privately matches places in your photos to a global index Apple maintains on our servers. We apply homomorphic encryption and differential privacy, and use an OHTTP relay that hides [your] IP address. This prevents Apple from learning about the information in your photos. You can turn off Enhanced Visual Search at any time on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Apps > Photos. On Mac, open Photos and go to Settings > General.
Apple did explain the technology in a technical paper published on October 24, 2024, around the time that Enhanced Visual Search is believed to have debuted. A local machine-learning model analyzes photos to look for a “region of interest” that may depict a landmark. If the AI model finds a likely match, it calculates a vector embedding – an array of numbers – representing that portion of the image.
So it’s local. And encrypted. How is this really news? Am I missing something?
Local and encrypted according to the company that just lost a lawsuit saying Siri totally wasn’t listening to you
Well they settled for $95 million to avoid a trial… which probably speaks more about what they are hiding tbh
I love how Apple advertises “Privacy by default” but they do this
