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elgertam • today at 2:02 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

> What if I told you that every Mac since 2022 ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you: who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, with whom, what you do and when.

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." And Calendar and Reminders knows where I go. And so forth.

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.


Replies

kebman • today at 3:05 PM

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.

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ProllyInfamous • today at 2:06 PM

Great "just a user" feedback!

>it should be opt-in

And definitely not "cannot even turn this shit off" mode.

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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.