A lot of you are falling for a clickbaity article without understanding how this works. Your photo data is still encrypted when apple is seeing it, thats what “homomorphic encryption” allows. You can perform specific tasks against a specific type of encrypted data that alters the data (in this case gives you information about photo content) without ever having to see the photo.
I disagree about having it turned on automatically, but most people already use the icloud photo search thing and this is a better and more private way of doing that.
well i did mis-speak. however the part that happens on the server is FHE so from privacy POV it is effectively device-only, meaning the servicecannotcompromise your privacy. This is guaranteed by the technical underpinnings of FHE, not a policy decision or corporate controls. The only way this can compromise your privacy is if they are lying about the implementation. it's safe even from bugs, because they are never in possession of privacy-compromising data.
You're literally the first and only person I've seen on this subreddit to make that claim. Nobody else has said this for any other client-side encrypted tool. Not Ente, not Signal, not Proton Drive.
those tools don't use FHE nor do "processing" on the opaque data.
i am not sure exactly what claim you mean, but just a quick look at what i imagine proton drive is: remote storage like mega. maybe it adds "required" client-side encryption. proton can still learn how many files you have, the sizes of each, yes? this metadata could glean something. not much but something.
this is in contrast to how the image matching feature works.
Correct. Their servers don't process your data, so they don't need FHE. Apple does. Which means that calling Apple's data collection "device only" is even more disingenuous than I suggested.
You're proving my point for me; you don't have to keep dying on this very silly hill.
He’s saying your unencrypted data never leaves your device. Just an encrypted version that can be processed snd sent back to you. They can never unencrypt it.
I can plainly see the attempt to bastardize language, I just don't like it. Especially when other things like Ente already perform actual device-only tagging.
As long as you understand how well or how badly it's encrypted. Nobody was given the option for informed consent. And it does make me wonder, why is Apple's so excited about doing something that can only run on their servers, costs them money, but doesn't cost you anything?
Especially because the last time they wanted to do this, they wanted to scan photos for way more than landmarks.
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u/YeetBoiPrime 7d ago
A lot of you are falling for a clickbaity article without understanding how this works. Your photo data is still encrypted when apple is seeing it, thats what “homomorphic encryption” allows. You can perform specific tasks against a specific type of encrypted data that alters the data (in this case gives you information about photo content) without ever having to see the photo.
I disagree about having it turned on automatically, but most people already use the icloud photo search thing and this is a better and more private way of doing that.