At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.

A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern.

If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat relentless transcription.

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. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401

> 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.

"Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly... Ask them. Ask them every time. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data." – Steve Jobs (2010)

__

moderators: "Let's talk about privacy, sorry Mark, who is here..."

Jobs: "We've always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleges in the Valley..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk_pLVQRNzg

The permissions system in iOS feels like it is following Jobs' ethos. Truly amazing all these years later. Kudos to the iOS team!

Who ever implemented what is called out in TFA, is clearly diverging from what makes Apple and AAPL very special. Please stop that.

Just spent 30 minutes poking around this. It's horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.

Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.

This is context for local LLMs like Siri so that when you say “Text James and tell him …” it knows which James you mean.

Likewise, you could say “Tell my boss I’m not coming in tomorrow” and it would have to know who your boss is.

We could get super angry about this, but seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device, it really doesn’t seem like a big deal. Is it much different to your car remembering who you call and where you go at what times for navigation purposes?

I am the author of the research. Please, feel free to ask me anything. Also, check out the followup research: https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-...

This is deeply troubling, this data is unnecessary collected and impossible to opt out from apparently and may be read at any point in the future by an attacker or by apple itself without notice

this is a class action lawsuit in the making

I don't understand how every post isn't incandescently furious about this? People just seem to be resigned! This is so far beyond what I'd consider ethical for a hardware company to do s that I will not ever buy an Apple product off the back of it.

I have a "flock" script that locks downs files that I do not want changed except for when I persoanlly "funlock" it.

It does the last 4 commands:

    cd ~/Library
    rm -rf IntelligencePlatform
    touch IntelligencePlatform
    xattr -w com.flock.mode 444 IntelligencePlatform
    chown root:wheel IntelligencePlatform
    chmod 444 IntelligencePlatform
    chflags schg IntelligencePlatform

Im still optimistic that Apple will do all this stuff on your device as opposed to in an opaque cloud somewhere you have 0 visibility into. Meta probably has 1000x this system in a data warehouse somewhere. If this info is not leaving the device that’s fine with me.

Something that is additionally concerning is that you apparently cannot read your own data:

    $ ls -la ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    total 0
    ls: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
    $ find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
    $ sudo find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
    find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted

Edit: I was wrong. The snarky comment below is right.

this is completely wild. i use a mac for my personal computer, but also a mac for work. i ran this on my personal and noticed it was picking up slack chans i participate in often for work. i don't use slack on my personal computer. it has combined both knowledge graphs between the two computers (obviously through the apple platform) once it figured out i am the same person on both laptops. i share very little between the two laptops other than occasionally forwarding an email from a work computer to personal and vice-versa and having the same first/last name on both.

i think this is even more concerning now that i know it is building this graph in a distributed manner across multiple devices.

fyi: slack shows up as com.tinyspeck.chatlyio - it is the internal bundle identifier (Bundle ID) for the official Slack iOS app on Apple devices.

for those that complain about punctuation -- i skip it b/c i have numbness in the left hand due to an injury.

A script to prevent daemons from writing to the file containing the graph https://pastecode.io/s/70pnir9y

The graph stored on my MacBook contains people I exclusively have contact with through WhatsApp. This means data from notifications (i.e. third-party-apps like WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) is also used to build the graph. Honestly crazy.

Funny enough, for me it doesnt seem to have a lot of data:

- call logs of my iPhone, who and how long/how often i called each person in the last 90 days

- group chat names that seem to have come from the Signal Mac OS app (how is that even possible?)

Horrifying, but also really interesting as a student of schema design, especially for probabilistic or inferential processes, and graph data.

It is really hard to get through articles with prose this bad. I don't know if it's because of LLM help or lack of practice, but man i have tried 3 times now to get through it and just can't.

Woah. Still on Sequoia with no intention to upgrade, but maybe the next laptop runs Linux.

Maybe the technical details weren’t available, but I thought that we already knew this was a thing? I was aware that my Mac and iPhone were indexing various sources like this on device for Siri.

One great thing of the LLM age is being able to task Opus to do a security audit of a random open source tool. Or indeed a closed source one with the help of Ghidra. I can audit every Chrome plugin every time there's a new version. Finally, enough eyes to catch the shallow bugs.

What this incident highlights is you can now poke around the insides of MacOS, Android, and Windows to see what awful collection and telemetry has slipped in. Modifying what happens is a bigger challenge. Trusted boot and system integrity protection also protects the surveillance code.

It wasn't that the AI writing style was a turn-off.

It's that AI writing tends to be dense and difficult to really parse, for humans.

Something about the writing style does not sit well with how my mind works. My mind cannot parse it very well.

You could try asking it to write in Simplified Technical English (STE100), which ends up being easier to understand for humans. Or, at least for me.

How does one best disable this (knoweledgeconstructiond et al)?

Saddened but not surprised.

This makes me glad. I do not own or use an iPhone. I have 2 iPads, one on iOS 9 and one on iOS 17, and neither can be updated. Neither talks to my email or anything: they're ebook readers, basically. Nobody in my immediate family uses iPhones either, nor Apple Watches or Apple TV or any of that.

I do not use Apple's App or Music stores, or their email, or calendar, or notes, or web browser, or even the text editor. I don't use Siri. I don't have a payment method on my 30Y old Apple account.

My email goes through Thunderbird, chat through Ferdium, web via Firefox. Office work is in Panwriter and occasionally LibreOffice.

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.

It's still possible to use a Mac as a prettier Linux box, and that's what I do. I have no OS newer than macOS 15 and I don't even use Homebrew to extend that.

Yikes. Luckily mine wasn't too bad - as I not on the Apple ecosystem for communication of any sort. I imagine Google's version of this for me would be even more horrifying though.

Since Apple goes through the trouble of invading my privacy like this, I would at least expect "Hey Siri, call mom" to do the right thing. But it does not. Either it calls the wrong person or asks me which of two particular number or email to use for FaceTime, when both lead to the same correct person anyway..so why bother asking? Apple makes the best hardware but its disappointing to see their software consistently fall short.

How does one disable this?

All of this seems to be using sqlite, not KuzuDB derived tech that apple acquired about a year ago.

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/waterloo-based-graph-database-s...

What about iphones?

I’m just mad how wrong the inferences are

Is this a way to query this from the command line? I'd rather not give a random piece of software deliberate access to personal data...

I understand why they collect this but: Why is this not encrypted?

I have a few questions:

Is it unencrypted and accessible by other applications without elevated permissions?

Can I modify it at will and does it persist if so?

More and more the obvious choice is Linux and some 3rd party dumb phone.

Stallman being upset about not having the source to printer drivers seems quaint these days.

This is exactly why we should not have closed source anything at the bottom.

If Microsoft didn't this, this wouldn't be interesting research, but a cause for uproar. And yes, I know they're probably already doing it, but in the cloud.

Apple makes money of your data as does anyone else. The just use your compute and energy for it too and convinced everyone that was privacy.

On a long enough timeline, all closed-source software turns into spyware.

Every day I thank Microsoft for making Windows 11 so bad and mandatory that I became a Linux acolyte, now preacher. All of these secret data collections you have to remember to turn off if even possible are appalling.

This isn’t even LLM, it’s just anti-reader noise. HN needs to filter this stuff out going forward.

Why is my computer so slow? Idk, maybe it's making a map of your socialsphere. Yeah right! Right?

Apple doesn't need you to not buy ram to make it work for them. Joke's on Sam.

"Is any of this sensitive? We'll leave that to you, since "sensitive" means different things to different people (though I think you have plenty to choose from here)."

What would a jury say

“Protected by the Full Disk Access permission”

Which of course we developers give to our tools and terminal emulators so they are not annoying to use! One npm install away from mining this sweet data via a postinstall script!

And Apple wants to sell us Privacy as feature. Isn't this a big red flag?

Decent work, if unreadable. I’ve disabled Apple Intelligence now.

Articles like this make me rethink my politics. I now think software tech monopolies need some 1950's style broadcast TV level regulation.

I remember reading about how in Norway (I don't remember which specific country it was) you could go and register as belonging to X category (I don't remember if it was religion) so when you die you could choose where you’ll be buried.

And of course how the information was used by Nazis to search for you and... you know the rest of the story... including why it should be dissalowed in first place.

all that knowledge and Siri is still pretty dumb.

I'm going to be very angry if my mac turns out to be doing this

This gives a whole new dimension to the notion that we're carrying spy software in our pockets all day long.

I like how there are all these worries about privacy, and then the conclusion is to download some random software, give it access to this entire database, and throw it into an LLM API too while you're at it.

Previously discussed in 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521306

Stop using Macs. Its pretty easy to switch to linux.

My understanding is that collecting these data and constructing the knowledge graph violates the European General Data Protection Directive (GDPR). According to the GDPR, personal data (such as an email's sender name and email address) are provided for a specific purpose (in the case of sending an email, for identifying the sender and facilitating email replies). Similarly, a calendar invitation is provided to organize a meeting. Processing that data for a different purpose (as described here, for constructing a knowledge graph) without the subject's explicit consent is unlawful.

I'm not sure if it's OP's software not being compatible with macOS 15/Sequoia, or if it's my habits and "cyber hygiene", but I get pretty much zeroes (read: no inferences) all across the board when digging through my data. Anyone else on "old" macOS seeing the same?

It’s not like Apple is actually hiding this. I mean it’s sitting there in perfectly readable structured format. I’m most surprised this isn’t known earlier, it indicates to me how little MacOS users investigate their own devices if we are talking about this 4 years after it rolled out.

this violates GDPR in so many ways, jeez

do i see that right - the data is unencrypted, the profile is built by an undocumented background profiler without consent or an option of opting out, it is consumed by cloud connected platforms like siri and apple intelligence and ANY application on my mac can access it?

Can we start a class action suit?

great, now how do I nuke it?

Fix available at https://www.debian.org/ ;) jk, I've got a Mac.

I'm glad I don't have any contacts/photos in iCloud or locally, don't use FaceTime/iMessage etc. Contacts are in DAV. Mail is webmail. Photos self hosted with Immich. I do have my Calendar on my Mac, that's it.

Mac is totally Windows-ified now. Have you seen the new user setup steps for MacOS 27? SO MANY CLICKS! And a plethora of debloating tools now, to disable Apple Intelligence etc. Sigh

(oh and MacOS 27.2 has SO many bugs I've lost count within just 24 hours of upgrading. Can't even trust x.2 releases now)

I hate this. On the plus side, it can't work out if my (age-appropriate, feminine) wife is more likely to be my son or daughter, but lists them as as-likely-to-be my partner as my deceased father.

Uh, am I the only one for whom my Mac apparently knows next to nothing about my social circles beyond my parents?

(MacOS Golden Gate 27.1, and yes some of the pages do say that the data isn't working, but the ones that do work are hilariously wrong once you get beyond my parents, which, since they are noted as "mom" and "dad", well, that's a freebie.

I'm definitely not your average user, but still. It has eight photos of me but since I generate random EXIF data when they get moved onto my hard drive and I use an Android phone, the identification between photo and me, - and I video chat, facetime with my mom who's on vacation in Egypt and my dad who's on business in China, among others, did not seem to get recorded. I also have a half-sister who is not mentioned anywhere, but it did identify an obviously fake entity in my contacts as my: family, partner, child, and sibling. None of that is true. It also identified a throwaway number that I control as part of my family, a friend of is dead as my family, my lawyer misses the cut at 0.47 for friends, my aunts, cousins, and uncles do not make the list. Some are mostly overseas - Canada, China, Hong Kong, but my father spends 6 months out of the year in China and makes the list. My partner, to whom I'm not married and have no plan to do so, but does live with me 6 months out of the year and works on her family's ranch in the state and we even share family plan for our phone service, is nowhere on the list, and she has an iPhone.

Johnny Appleseed features prominently in my FAF. One of my close friends is known only through an employer, even though I'm self-employed. I'm not much of a photo-taker and certainly not with my iPad, and so the photo clusters are mainly... baseball cards, which I process via a ADF scanner, since taking 5 digits worth of baseball cards, front and back, is ridiculous.But not more ridiculous than how it seems unable to fully or even partially beyond the most basic aspects of the data it can access to make connections with any sort of certainty that is correct. It identified half of my exes but only barely. It decided that obviously fake (555 area code, come on) entries in my contacts as close friends, and it seems to make the fundamental mistake of creating connections under the assumptions that seems ripped from Anna Karenina, but only made its way half through the epigraph and mistranslated it.My MacBook does not get turned off entirely unless I'm out and about with it, but it's easier to simply use my iPad Pro M4 and my Pixel - neither particularly known for privacy - instead of lugging my entire setup around unless I'm going on a trip, which happens twice a year usually.

I get the sense that this shows what my MacOS doesn't know what to do with the data it has. I'm not going to enrich it so, let it be, I guess. But just to be clear, I'm not the partner, father, and sibling of some entity that I have never had any contact with. I also do not use Apple Mail (eM Client is what I prefer). Although now I'm going to dig up an Almodovar movie or something I guess.

can we block these two processes using little snitch?

> One edge of the graph (synthetic data): a person and the organization the store holds as their employer. PS500 is the id predicate.json gives employer, and its range is not an organization but a relationship type — so one edge is two rows sharing a relationshipId, one naming the kind of relationship and one pointing at the other entity. The forty-six relationship type classes in the table below exist to carry exactly that, which is what lets an edge hold a confidence of its own and be retracted later.

That is easily the sloppiest and least helpful explanations of edges and predicates I've ever read.

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> who you know

Whom you know.