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.

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.

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...

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.

I think of privacy as the right to be myself, because I get to choose which parts of my persona(s?) to expose.

People change over time, and those I care about will be part of the journey. We don’t remember each other’s mistakes all the time.

And then, of course, there is the effort we put into these relationships. I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises than their LLM of choice automatically sends me a carefully crafted messaged based on our interactions.

Maybe we’re the weird ones.

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.

> 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.

As this becomes normalized, people will retreat to a safer persona even in private conversations. This does not solve the problem at all; a great many mental illnesses and dynamics around pathological abuse are tied to the details of how each of us has a private and public-facing persona.

Already I see Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are heavily resenting the demands placed on them to be always in 'branding'/'self-marketing' modes, and are seeking ways to retreat from the relentless expectations of being always in 'public persona', and are suspicious that this way of living is harmful.

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.

I don't understand what's wrong with the tech industry in the past 20 years. It feels like every time there is an opportunity to do the wrong thing, there is a mad rush towards that opportunity. Quickly! Do the wrong thing _first_ so some other company doesn't get to profit from evil instead of us. No company seems to consider abstaining from evil practices; burying the knowledge, or building systems which cannot be used for evil. The question only seems to be, how can _our_ evil succeed and benefit us.

Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI

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.

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.

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

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.”

> 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/

On a side note, every few times I open Google's photo gallery on my android phone, it pops up a dark pattern "backup your photos" toast with a pre-selected radio box saying yes, and two or three delicate manual steps to AVOID having it start uploading all my photos right then.

Unbelievably invasive and offensive.

> 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.

And what is your "Verify" procedure?

> 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

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.

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.

https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/

>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.

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.

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

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

> 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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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).

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

It’s local to your device and provides a useful service?

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.

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)

I have lost my faith in that

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Looking at my graph the information seems to come from: 1. The native Mails App 2. Notifications

When WhatsApp/Signal send you a notification they seem "leak" the message to the OS. Actually the suspected source 1 (Mail App) could also just be a case of the OS scraping the notifications API.

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

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.

But it does this even when siri is disabled

> 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.

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

By buying a linux computer

you can't

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.

"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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

It will still collect this data.

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

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

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.

Why the downvotes on this? Wish people would leave comments

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

True, Apple is competing with Microslop now on shittiness and user abuse. Linux really is the only viable OS that remains.

Same - If anything, this made me feel better by showing how little my Mac knew about me, and how weak its data collection capabilities were.

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!)

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