I don't understand replies like this one I keep seeing on HN. I thought the controversy around what apple wanted to do was that it was happening on device and not in the cloud. The user you're replying to made that distinction so what gives?
Note that they're not pushing it to devices that consumers have purchased, just running it on their cloud services. I think it's an important distinction here with what Apple is doing.
Sure, but then don't pretend that this is not something every other cloud provider is doing (and has been doing) for years. This is only such a hot-button issue because 1) people love bashing Apple, and 2) Apple actually solicited feedback instead of implementing it silently behind the scenes.
As a followup, to be clear on the intentions in my post, while I do think that a lot of the reactions have been over the top (there are numerous comments claiming outright falseshoods about this system, out of either ignorance or to prejudice), that Apple decided to do the CSAM stuff on device is incredibly ill considered.
Do it in the cloud just like every other service does. None of this anger would have happened if they just kept it in the cloud, and I truly can not fathom how this made it this far. I would peg overwhelming odds that they abandon the on device idea as it makes no sense and has brought incredible ill will.
In fairness don't you always have to prepare for your user’s device to be unable to sync with the cloud? I wonder if apple imposed this limitation just to force developers to consider it even in the best of conditions.
> Am I missing something more than "but it's happening on-device!"?
People think that this kind of capability was not there already, while it was. The simplest example case is normal iCloud sync. It scans your files and gets metadata, finally comparing to cloud to know which files to sync.
Other concern is, that this can be easily expanded to other kind of content, or whole device (outside of iCloud files). While, this sounds like valid concern, government who can force this change, could have forced it already. "Technology does not exist" is not valid excuse, never was. There are pretty expensive consults used by politics to prove these excuses otherwise.
People always respond with "cloud storage is a thing" as you have, but the point that people are trying to make is: Apple is hella overcharging for memory and storage.
And instead of everyone going "Apple, stop this" and creating change, they'd rather defend the $1T company by spouting "but the cloud".
I have defended Apple because they like everyone else in the industry were already doing this server side. Their getting backlash because they are open about what they are doing not because it’s in anyway unusual.
The actual negative implications are slightly worse battery life and more network traffic if you use iCloud. The upside is people can inspect the perceptual hash. Also, the phone isn’t reporting anything it doesn’t have the database to compare it to.
But Apple chooses to implement things in ways that make it way harder for them to do this. Eg Touch ID and facial recognition on the device only, not in the cloud.
Please explain why you think that’s apples new goal? The link doesn’t
There is nothing I am aware of that Apple has done indicating this and plenty to show they are not (e2e cloud backups, on device llm) they continually find ways to provide services without needing access to your data or keeping your data on device
Apple's literal marketing message is that they do all the processing on device. It's not a shift for Apple, as apple has never done this analysis in the past, and only started doing the analysis once it could do it locally.
The use cases we're talking about also don't work on a cloud based analysis, as you can't have text selection block on network uploads (generally slower than downloads), and it would require uploading every image you open to apple which would presumably be a lot of traffic, and an obvious privacy nightmare. It would also break for users who turn on the e2ee everything mode for iCloud.
> If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken.
The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud compute resources?
Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud, and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users would use this, and offering it for free assuming the majority of people won't use it is just asking for some popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it through metered compute with some given free, that's bad optics).
> It baffles me that people start frothing at the mouth about Apple "forcing" people to use iCloud when damn near nothing on the device requires a paid iCloud account and there's pretty decent integration with open standards based systems...
Mind to elaborate on that? I just surrendered and started to shell out 4€/month for extra GBs in iCloud because I couldn't find another way to easily and OTA backup iPhone/iPad photos to my local Linux NAS and then my cloud of choice. With Android I do it easily with SyncThing.
reply