Apple opts everyone into having their Photos analyzed by AI

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Typical big tech playbook

Do something controversial, gets backlash for it, suspend the project until the controversy dies down, do it again under a different name

This is to Apple CSAM scanning what Google Topic is to FLoC

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I agree that this should be opt-out by default. However, may I go off topic here, excessive “opt-in” pop-up is bad for privacy of the average consumers. We may be teaching users to mindlessly click “Yes” at every prompt. This is literally one of the reason why many people think GDPR’s requirement for cookies is bad/useless.

We have to figure out a better way. Unfortunately, I’m not smart enough to invent an alternative. I just want to point out the issue.

Assuming this statement is true, I feel they did a good job here. I don’t currently have plans to disable the feature.

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.

@Clitus_Og - Good point. I know this as “alarm fatigue”, but I wonder if tech has a different name for this event. Alarm fatigue - Wikipedia

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In this scenario, it is called “consent fatigue”. It’s a relatively new term coined after GDPR was implemented.

It’s a very real thing. In this community, macOS is praised for having extensive permission controls for apps. However, other people are fed up with it, as demonstrated by this and this article. iOS is facing the same issue.

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Misleading title, already discussed.

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It does seem like it’s the best way they could’ve implemented something like this, although in the future I hope they lean more toward on-device processing. I wonder now that we have OHTTP and homomorphic encryption etc companies like Apple are going to add more features like this that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

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