At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401</a>
I've also become totally exhausted by all these "someone is making your computer do X behind your back" revelations. Whether it's the app developer or OS vendor, it doesn't really matter. When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user, and instead start operating on behalf of the OS vendor and app developers? Every day there's a new case of this.
Largely, I believe, when phones crossed over from being basic communication devices to being smartphones, but retained their 'appliance' nature.<p>An entire generation thereby grew up with personal computing represented by vendor-controlled handheld appliances, and naturally regarded actual PCs in the same manner.<p>And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
I just don't want to have this ongoing relationship with my software vendor. When I buy an Apple computer, I don't want to have a relationship with Apple. I don't want to log in to iCloud. I don't want them deciding what software I can run and what I can't. I don't want them wagging their finger disapprovingly at me when I download and run something not "notarized" by them. I don't want them mediating my use of my own computer! When I buy a Windows PC it's even worse. Again, I don't want to log into a Microsoft account. I don't want them pushing other software on me via in-OS ads. I don't want to send telemetry back to them. I don't want them recording my screen and saving it god knows where for nebulous "features".<p>When I buy a table saw, I don't expect DeWalt to hang around my workshop telling me what I can and can't cut, watching and logging what wood I use and when I use it, what my finished product looks like, changing the features and buttons on the saw in the middle of the night. Why the fuck do we tolerate this from software??<p>It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions! Some of them are letting telemetry and metrics and A/B testing creep in. And some third part Linux software is just as intrusive and demanding as commercial Windows/Mac software.
It's even reflected in the language used by younger generations, asking if things are "allowed" or assuming things are illegal by default.
In some Linux distros like Debian, everything is illegal/prohibited until you explicitly allow it and only comes with the bare minimum of software necessary to make the OS work. Contrast that to other distros like Ubuntu where everything comes preinstalled and is very permissive. These obviously target different audiences. Smart phones are targeting different audiences too. The power users annoyed by the dumb things the device does just means you're not the target audience and are just bonus buyers for their bottom line.
Side effects of living in an authoritarian panopticon
> When did PCs stop being the user's computer / operating on behalf of the user<p>When we connected them to the internet.
As soon as they were connected to a network and capable of participating in the business OODA loop against their competitors in real time.
Richard Stallman told y'all when it happened that it was happening
I too would've found this fascinating at one point, but my jaded older self now just finds this incredibly creepy, unsettling and not at all surprising.
This thought path has been explored by the Black Mirror series in the episode The Entire History of You.<p><a href="https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You" rel="nofollow">https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_Y...</a>
I wouldn’t call black mirror an “exploration” of thought. It’s rather myopic.<p>It’s like going to the 1962 world fair but, instead of optimism, everyone just wants to tell you why everything in the future sucks.
No, it's an exploration of what could happen based on things we've already seen/experienced but with the knob turned to an 11. It's what should happen in pretty much what if round table situation. "Hey, would could build this thing that does something that we are specifically thinking about that would be cool/fun/benevolent" is only part of the discussion. "How could someone else turn and use it in a way not anticipated so they use it for their own gains in a way that is shocking/malevolent" should be the natural follow up. Can the thing be updated to not be used for unintended negative purposes or will the negative out weigh the positive so that it shouldn't be made in the first place??? Sadly, it seems the follow up questions are never asked. Instead, we get scifi people doing it and then getting reviews like yours instead of looking deeper into point
I go out as-a-fox as a street photographer using a shtick that makes sure people almost always remember my name and i find it a little embarrassing that I can't remember that many names or if it is a Megan how exactly I am supposed to spell it, etc.<p>I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot with zoom recordings. In office we used to have chats about a wide range of topics that were sometimes heated, but also respectful. Now with every meeting recorded, it’s all become pretty saccharine.
See also Ted Chiang's “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”.
Typos are now nessesary to convince people youre not an AI
Maybe a decade or so ago I had a discussion with a colleague about chat apps and he said, why would you want to have a conversation on snapchat if it is not saved, and I was like, why are you having this conversation now, you can't save it either.<p>I guess that those days are soon over.
Autocorrect has had the opposite effect IMO, there’s an expectation that like 1 in 8 words from an iPhone user are not what the sender intended.<p>Typos have just graduated from misspellings to sentences randomly being nonsensical.
I swear I know the difference and when to use their, there, they're, but based on my iPhone messages, you'd think I was an illiterate buffoon. There are plenty of examples where I could show where they're making me look dumb with their edits.
I turned autocomplete off for this reason
Amplifying the dystopia is that this feature was heavily written up by an AI. So we have a feature in which machines monitor our lives being described to us by another machine which comes with its own set of dystopian risks, and no genuine human to human interaction.<p>Evidence sample of native Claudish: “The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half.”
> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>Agreed. None of this is magic, and the vast majority of us have been handing this data out to SaaS providers of all sizes and shapes for decades now, for free. Many HN people even _build_ those platforms.<p>Would I like to see more controls around this? Yes, absolutely. Having some random app be able to read this data with only a single permission barrier is room for improvement. I would also like to see more tooling included to inspect and correct this data. Something like a Monica[1], but local and built on local data. Suddenly address book data is no longer a list of names and numbers, but a part of a data structure that you can use to surface information, like friend's preferences or vacation photos together. Not everything that collects data is insidious and a Black Mirror episode in the making.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.monicahq.com/en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.monicahq.com/en/</a>
> given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life.<p>Does it know this based on something other than you told it a name for a face at some point? I have plenty of people where Photos sees an unidentified person, and they remain unidentified as I have not named them. It also knows my pets because I've also named them. Until I manually set the name, Photos did not "know" them.
And what is your "Verify" procedure?
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.
If it is stored entirely on the machine you own, then you are processing and storing the data.
For the GDPR to have impact here, wouldn't they have to be collecting the information in the first place? If they're doing all the work on your own computer, that wouldn't trigger any GDPR issues.
Data collection is still data collection, it doesn't matter whether I am the one processing that data or a third party :)<p>Edit: I am not making any claims on what constitutes as data only what is considered as processing. And yes, data collection rules under GDPR can be quite absurd
It does matter. Your interpretation of “data collection” leads to absurd results.
How far does this go? Are the Bayesian spam filters that email clients have had for years that use your own classifications GDPR violations because they collect data about what you do or don’t mark as spam? Is your browser a GDPR violation because it collects data about your system that can be used to fingerprint you? Does your OS violate the GDPR when it displays your most recently accessed files in a file picker or as first suggestions when you search for something? Is the SMART monitoring built into your drives a GDPR violation? My understanding of the GDPR is that it applies to data the company is collecting about you. If the company never gets the data in the first place, then they haven’t collected it.
1. Spam filters. No, the data was collected explicitly for the spam filter to work. Anything else? Not unless you consent to it.
2. Browser collection. The browser itself? There's an agreement when installing it. The websites? There's the cookie banners.
3. OS. Is it your data? No permission needed. Your device, your data. Other people's data? Unclear. Depends on what you told the person when you collected said data.
4. SMART. I don't know a lot about how it works.<p>I was talking about the data you collect. Your own data processed on your device, it's fine. Your own data uploaded to be processed? You're agreeing, and it has to be an unambiguous. Sending the data outsids the EU? Explicit checkbox.<p>Is it absurd? Yes
Your uninformed opinion about what the GDPR requires is absurd, yes.<p>Fortunately your opinion bears no resemblance to reality, so the absurdity is confined to inside your head (except to the extent it leaks onto message boards, as here)
Might not be used in the EU
It all lives on your device in order to make it work better. Apple literally doesn’t have custody of the data so it’s not relevant to the GDPR. It’s your data.
Great "just a user" feedback!<p>>it should be opt-in<p>And definitely not "cannot even turn this shit off" mode.<p>----<p>I just recently installed Microsoft Office 2011 on my 27" iMac (2009 i5), and it absolutely shocked me that <i>the default "Send User Data to Microsoft"</i> option was `OPT-OUT`, requiring the user to manually click a radio-button to `OPT-IN` to usage data collection.<p>This was in recent living memory. From Microsoft.
I am the author of the research. Please, feel free to ask me anything. Also, check out the followup research: <a href="https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-the-wrong-hands" rel="nofollow">https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-...</a>
Please stop using AI to author your articles. It was really hard to read it despite how interesting the topic was. I dropped halfway because it was just too annoying.
I was bothered not so much by the slopful article as by the AI-written text in the dashboard that iKnow produces. I ran the program on my Mac and it did display charts and graphs with names of people and organizations I’ve interacted with over the years, but I couldn’t figure out what it all was supposed to mean.<p>One example: "323 people, 122 events and other records, 200 employers and 1 stored group — as the store on this Mac links them. Read live just now. Colour is what each node is to you: the stored group in red, family and closeness by iKnow’s rules on the kinship scorecard. Size is how many rows in the store name it."<p>Claude etc. can be prompted to produce clearer explanations than that.
Yeah seriously. Article becomes unreadable immediately after the intro. I believe this author probably could actually write two years ago, it's a shame people are just giving up on that and choose to turn out stuff like this instead.
I'm having more trouble spotting AI text these days. It used to jump out at me. I'm not sure if it's that the LLMs are better or it's just becoming so normal to see that I stop recognizing it. This one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read. Going back and scrolling deeper into the post, it does become much sloppier.
> quite long-winded for a blog post<p>That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protected. What does that even mean? Why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? I don't care that there's 51 database files and 181 other things and 278 doodads. Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and like you said, your eyes start to glaze over. Slop.<p>A human would've said something like "It's a database in Library/IntelligencePlatform with three columns" and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.
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My bad. In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough...
It's not possible to un-AI text, only replace it wholesale.<p>Suggestion for next time: "Review my prose for accuracy, grammar, appropriate strength of claims, etc. Flag any issues for my attention. Do not provide text; this work should not contain any AI-written content." That'll turn it into a very good check that doesn't take your voice away.
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It's already technically possible for LLMs to generate all kinds of styles of text. In fact older models are better at it. It's the newer models that are nearly impossible to steer. This makes me less hopeful for the future. There is apparently some incentive for Claude and ChatGPT to lock in these very recognizable patterns.
AI writing is fine in a constrained space.<p>If you create a strict template, like a PowerPoint deck or tightly formatted report, the LM does a really, really good job. at populating that template with good data.<p>If you give it an open license to just create stuff, it’s always terrible for the general audience — but it may be fine for you or a small group that is familiar with the subject.<p>I compare it to fast food. An uneducated teenager is quite capable of putting together a McDonald’s lunch within the constraints of the system. If you let the kid loose in a kitchen designed for trained chefs, the result would not be a good lunch.
> but it may be fine for you or a small group that is familiar with the subject.<p>One of the problems with LLM writing is that the "small group" is very often only itself, maybe including the prompter. Details of the prompts or implementation or internal chain-of-thought nits leak out into prose, divorced from context.<p>Many READMEs are now littered with proud declarations of the removal of Foo, with any explanation purged with it. It exists in this project, too. A header of one graph is "Where each fact came from, decoded out of the bitmask." Why should the audience care about this implementation detail at this location? Just label it "Sources" and move on.
>Complaints of AI are like a form of friction that eventually goes away.<p>This. Already there is evolution in AI-related comments here.<p>For example, a year ago they often featured remarks like "I know AI when I see it: here are unmistakeable 'tells.'"<p>Then there would be a lively back-and-forth about the validity of the stated giveaways.<p>Such "How I know it's AI"-type comments no longer appear.
"It's not X, it's Y" is still the most obvious one. Abuse of passive voice is another. We stopped talking about it because it gets boring to say the same things over and over.
This has not been my experience. People talk about LLM-isms (Claude-isms especially) all the time. "The absolute shape", "load bearing", "seams", "smoking gun", genuinely empty preambles, constant sloganesque phrasing. If you're seeing it less in conversation, it's not because it's improved.
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It is funny to me how slop enthusiasts argue from the past and the future to deny the present state.<p>"Slop is here to stay so you better get used to it because slop is inevitable and you will be left behind."<p>It is both already a cemented permanent presence and destined to arrive by an unbreakable prophecy at a date TBD.
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If you came away thinking I was enthusing about AI slop, it's probably because I was too subtle in comparing it to a food I abhor while saying there are tidbits, non-slop tidbits, that I could appreciate. Apologies for that human generated mischance!
I'm actually rather bemused to see many young folks, arguing against LLMs and ML, and seeing more experienced folks, embracing it.<p>I'm pretty experienced, and have found LLMs to be quite useful.<p>Like any new tool, there are deficits and peculiarities, but these are becoming less of a concern, and the utility of these tools is advancing rapidly.
We get it. You are saying that in the future there will only be mushrooms to eat and as a result everyone will enjoy mushrooms.<p>Now think about how much you hate mushrooms.<p>Do you see the problem with your argument?
> In my defense, only the technical parts are AI.<p>A defense would be "I just used it for spellchecking" not "I just used it for the meat and the important parts people care about, the rest is mine!"
So most of it?
So only the parts that matter, you ai slopped. Great work.
You can’t unslop A.I. prose. Once it’s written, the content is poisoned.<p>“Sure there was a turd in the punch bowl but I did my best to remove it, so you should be able to drink it.”<p>Nope.<p>And the technical parts are what matter, saying you did that with A.I. tells me “I don’t care about this part” so what the heck are we even doing here?
I disagree. Hand-authored articles can be slop too. This research is great, and your subjective feelings about word cadence don't affect the information. I guarantee you read AI output every day and don't know it.
Hand-authored engagement or clout (LinkedIn) farming articles and corporate press releases are usually slop, most others aren't. I'd be surprised if corporate press releases today weren't largely AI-written - no one would know the difference.
The criticism can be restated, then, as “you used AI to write it, and unlike others who use AI to write things, you did a bad job directing it and editing the work.”
This comment is not directed at you, but this is the best place I could find to insert my thoughts on this "nO LLm slOP" distraction:<p>----<p>The research is jaw-dropping enough <i>for the average reader to comprehend</i> (e.g: I am not a techie, but a former IBEW datacenter wiretwister).<p>It could be covered in pube-sprinkled-turds and would still be worth reading.<p>To me the "slopLOL" crew is akin to people who'll take their time to correct others' their/they're/there usage:<p>Just read the fucking sentence (LLMs <i>can</i> and <i>do</i> and aren't so poopy-you-suck-for-being-human).
We know there’s interesting information in there. That’s not the point.<p>How news is delivered matters. If you don’t believe that, why would news outlets compete with each other? Even if the facts are the same, would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?
>would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?<p>I am smart enough to not need perfection. I just want <i>the data</i>. Write however tf you want, good'll'be read.<p>And so will LLMs.<p>I'll suggest adaptation.<p>>why would news outlets compete with each other?<p>Competition for the masses' con$umption$?<p>It seems to <i>generally work</i>; shouldn't have to obfuscate the `man` pages for this always-running daemon... how many people even know what `man`pages are (obviously not here)? how to access them? why they would even want to?
Well, good for you for not caring, I suppose. The vast majority of society does.<p>> I am smart enough<p>Knock yourself down a peg, kid.
I will, sure, but I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic, despite being a bluecollar electrician.<p>Also, my IQ scares even me; I've chosen bluecollar <i>so I don't have to be evil</i> as much with it.<p>----<p>Companies do not give two shits about most users, with (e.g:) AMD <i>saying the quiet part out loud</i>, recently, with their recent gamers-last announcement.<p>Also see: Apple's invasive attempts to categorize all local data, by default; if you want to opt-out (some service, like OP's, you cannot!), it takes dozens of clicks for each new software – intentional dark-patterns to make opting-out cat-and-mouse.<p>----<p>>Well, good for you for not caring, I suppose.<p>I care too much, is the problem (at least from my POV). Companies are soulless, and only care for shareholder value (legal requirement).<p><i>Data is the new_oil is the new_steel is the new_tin is the...</i>
I second this. Unfortunately you just can’t just “unslop” it, much like you can’t just “shake the dirt away” from food that fell into a bucket of… you get my point, it won’t be good to eat anyway. Bonus additional ironic parallel could magically manifest if you can guess the bucket content.<p>Anyway, it’s a shame, this could have been excellent work. Instead, I find reading it unpleasant and part of my attention rots away wondering if you even checked what the LLM wrote for you. You probably did, and I could also do it myself, but still…
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Why? "There is gravel in the food" is a perfectly valid contribution. You don't need to write a compelling story about it.
> Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?<p>No.
I agree. One comment constructive is enough.
It feels like some guys pushing the topic away.<p>It annoys me as it takes my attention with them so with all respect: user aharmetz (and others) please keep it in one post that you’d prefer non-AI text. Point.<p>Thank you.
I’d rather this over the very long tradition in this site if people bellyaching about site design and layout on otherwise u related comment threads
> Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?<p>Criticism is a valid 'something interesting'. And growing numbers of us also don't want to feed the US mega-companies LLM training sets.<p>More and more people are keeping human-generated stuff to themselves, cause of that.
There was a very obvious and unnerving shift in style that happened early in the article where it went from human to LLM. I find such shifts really glaring. Agents, in their current state, simply cannot produce quality prose and are not good enough to write blog posts targeting a human audience.<p>I found the topic fascinating, but eventually I started skimming and then gave up on it.
It says there's 137 live/certain facts in my graph. I can see where they're sourced from/a statistical breakdown of type/the number of unique confidence values/how many citations they're using/how many ingests contributed no facts. Am I missing where I can see what the actual facts are?<p>A lot of these statistics aren't very useful for mining insights from the graph, from a technical standpoint of how the graph works or from a personal standpoint of how the graph is interacting with my personal data.
I'm on macOS 27.2 and there is no longer a "Full Disk Access" control. How do I use it in this case? ChatGPT is not helpful.
open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy_AllFiles" << this made it reappear in settings<p>The data I see from iKnow is a sloppy clusterfuck, I suspect from botched syncs and lazy bookkeeping on my part, and the fluctuating quality of Apple's "services" over the years. My Mac settings probably go back to the 1990s and Apple periodically did a bad job. Pain points I remember: Google contacts being separated and then with a new phone not syncing correctly, Mac address book burping on contact avatar images, importing lists of contacts from short-lived 3rd party apps, shared Photos fucking shit up, the iPhotos upgrade fiascos, transient contact info for my kids, moving onto/off of Gmail, etc.<p>If the FBI got ahold of my (and others'?) iKnow data, a lot of people might end up in a sloppy jail with a sloppy judge sloppily applying a sloppy law...
Thanks for the research. Have you looked into how to secure / disable the subsystem?<p>(I hate that a discussion on the OP has been hijacked by a discussion on AI writing; the substantive questions are all at the bottom. I wish mods would 'detatch and move' the AI subthread.)
You wrote that other apps can't access it because of TCC Full Disk Access. Presumably the OS itself can read it, so do you have any information on whether parts of the graph (or fingerprints, or inferences made with it) are ever sent to the cloud/apple servers?
This is context for local LLMs like Siri so that when you say “Text James and tell him …” it knows which James you mean.<p>Likewise, you could say “Tell my boss I’m not coming in tomorrow” and it would have to know who your boss is.<p>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?
It doesnt leave your device...until an authoritarian government extracts it without a warrant. Or a dozen other entities like divorce attorneys, business rivals, legal trolls, false accusers, nation states, teenage hackers, human traffickers.<p>How often is this endangering info available to anyone at my work or home when someone leaves their laptop open while going to the bathroom for 5 minutes?<p>It's irresponsible to collect and concentrate this much info on millions of people.
It’s not clear whether this still happens in the “Lockdown” mode that Apple specifically added for people who expect to be in this scenario.
It's a no win situation. All of this surveillance is happening on the internet right now. All the companies are doing this surveillance Apple happens to be doing it on device. This is the data Apple is trying to prevent from leaving the device. Apple is constantly fighting court battles to protect the data. Apple is always being accused of hampering developers freedom's while trying to safeguard access to this data.
All that said turning off Apple Intelligence should eliminate the collection.
I hate to break it to you, but the Government doesn’t need your device’s data to get all that information about you if it has the necessary warrants. If you think you can win a battle against any government over the collection of evidence needed to prosecute you, as long as they do it lawfully, you are sorely mistaken.
This makes zero sense, and is delivered in a silly tone. The government can even get information about you when it doesn't have warrants (good luck fighting it after the fact), or got warrants from a secret court. The government <i>cannot</i> get information about you which has not been collected, because that is impossible.
The point is that that information is already out there. It might not be on your laptop, but it exists.
Yeah they definitely need this data from your Mac to find out who your brother is.
"I hate to break it to you", but it's very rational to take imperfect measures against violation.
If my threat model realistically included all of those things, then I would be very careful about keeping any sort of address book or contact log/history at all. At that point the only defense really is just to try to memorize phone numbers. And only talk when walking together, mob-style.
Ha, fair. To me its about the concentration of "high quality' or juicy data that makes a person vulnerable. When the stakes get higher, threat, reward, and the temptation for bad action increase.<p>Btw on android it's easy to make contacts self maintained. And to use an open source messenger so texts dont go through Google's servers. Not same level you're describing, but a huge defense against these "social graph intrusions."
> And only talk when walking together, mob-style.<p>Both of you will be carrying microphones, walking past people who are carrying microphones, and being video recorded from every building and from the networked doorstops of family homes.
... I feel like if an authoritarian government could extract the family classifier info from local, they could just extract the damn messages.<p>And if you think that handful of megabytes is too much, they could extract a million other signals that tell them this, such as who you have pinned in the relevant apps.
> seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device<p>Running the tool on my Macbook (which I don't really use, but which is logged into my iCloud) shows tons of activity/names/contacts that's shared ("donated" in the system's terms) over from my iPhone, which I wouldn't have expected to synchronize to this laptop. The apps aren't installed on the laptop, I don't get notifications there or have any interaction with those people. I can even see some stats showing volume of activity on work apps installed on my phone inside a managed work profile, but it does seem to have filtered the actual contacts out.
So <i>why does it keep collecting data</i> when I have chosen to entirely disable Siri?
Microsoft had this solved with Cortana 12 years ago. I would tell Cortana to text my boss, and if it didn’t know who my boss was, they would ask me who my boss was then it would store it for later boss calls.<p>The spying has no excuse and in the 2000s we would’ve called this malware and spyware, appropriately.
What does it mean "fully local"? I have an old "kitchen Macbook" that I'm using pretty much exclusively for stuff like looking up cooking recepies. I don't have any photos there, any messaging apps, etc. But I'm logged in with my Apple account.<p>And guess what, that "local graph" sees everything I did on my iPhone - I see contacts from all messaging apps, including Signal. I see image-based people clusters, even though there are no local pictures to match faces against.
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.
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.<p>Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.
This makes me glad I already switched my desktop to Linux (from Windows) and am about to get a new laptop to run Linux on
>All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.<p>Wait until you discover that macOS <i>entirely ignores your manually-input DNS settings</i>, before every bootup, <i>to reach out to security.apple.com</i>.<p>Have a network-wide PiHole (allegedly) blocking the entire *.apple.com domain? No you don't, (at least) not at bootup, because APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use any network-discoverable DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings) to [attempt a] phone-home.<p>----<p>I finally made the full switch to Linux earlier this year. Been a (primarily) Apple user since 1992.
Job's biggest innovation was the word "no." I don't understand how everyone didn't jump ship once that word left Apple's vernacular.
> APPLE DOES NOT RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY and will use the router-supplied DNS (instead of your configured Network Settings).<p>is that for real? wow
Is for real.<p>I provided a "better DNS configuration" suggestion, a month ago, but at this point I doubt it will remain useful [†]:<p><<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574</a>> [have router's DHCP auto-issue DNS to your pi-hole].<p>[†] I am but an observant (on my DNS logs) bluecollar poweruser – my tip will reduce only one vector, and we probably live in a world where IPv6 DNS addresses are [about to be, if not already] being hardcoded into TVs, computer security chips, and phones<p>----<p>At an absolute minimum: LittleSnitch will NOT help you here (and isn't doing everything it claims to, under the hood); it is entirely impossible for LS to stop pre-boot DNS queries; even under normal operation (e.g: when a dialogue pops up to `ACCEPT/DENY` a DNS resolution) your ISP still sees every. single. URL resolution (even if you `DENY` the connection).<p>Before you write "no it doesn't" please check your own DNS logs. It do be like it is.
Wow!!
The above are facts.<p>----<p>Speculating out loud: sure, perhaps this userprofile data is stored locally; but perhaps also (like Apple's "advertising token") this local data can help remote servers better track your entire computing humanity. While still "locally stored."<p>(Language doesn't mean anything when EULAs are dozens of unreadable pages long; "stored locally" is just another set of weasle words, like "then just opt-out" [why is opt-in the default, if -out is even allowed at all?!]).<p>Wouldn't surprise me if every single webpage has an advertising option to exploit the local user data (via Apple$$$), if only by offering on-device scrubbing; one could then look to see what advertising content the localhost is requesting (and thus have essentially root access to all userdata, "locally stored," by detecting outbound queries) with the user's own host acting as Apple's backendserver (while Apple profits, not you).<p>¢¢
Added to the list of reasons I need to look at this seriously. Thank you!<p>Think I need a per-host approval mechanism for DNS as well. There are fewer domains I want my computer talking to than not.
Keep adding to your list, friend:<p><<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574</a>> [Spotlight's "helpfulness," which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)]<p>Apple's OS is toxic, at this point.<p>My two newest Macs are entirely offline (air-gapped) and used primarily for LLM – maybe Apple's secret (all along) has been to get people like me to purchase twice as much hardware (as would be necessary in a privacy-respecting world)?
> which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)<p>Are you sure? I've just inspected my macOS 27.2 machine with my firewall and I couldn't find requests to smoot.apple.com while typing in spotlight(show related content and help improve apple search are both disabled).
I am certain only up to Sequoia; there is a new mini with Tahoe on it sitting here so let me replicate that behavior (if hostname isn't smoot., it'll be something). I've been meaning to update to GoldenGate (since buying it last week it has been used for just 2 hours, playing with LLMs on the default Tahoe); so I'll do this too and then see what the latest macOS's behavior is.<p>While I'm doing that, pull up your *.apple.com outreaches.<p>If you are not seeing <security.apple.com> on any Silicon's boot, you are not seeing full logs (all Silicon, and macs since T2, do this reach-out pre-post).
I still can't figure out how to set Sequoia's firewall to enable logging.<p>I've also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to properly configure which DNS-server should be used, but while reading this thread I'm beginning to wonder: maybe the reason I'm having so much trouble understanding how to set this up properly could be that the OS is messing with me and my DNS-settings, and the lack of documentation describing how DNS-resolution is supposed to work on MacOS is really a feature meant to keep me from finding out that they are deliberately making it impossible to secure connectivity at a DNS-level?<p>Next thing you know, a similar explanation might pop up regarding configuration of the packetfilter. It has already been frustrating not being able to figure out these basics on my own for several years. It will be absolutely infuriating to find out this struggle has been pointless anyway, and it turns out they have been using mislabeling core components of their OS. The moment DNS-settings are not really settings the OS uses when doing DNS-lookups, I feel deliberately deceived.<p>It's like calling an OS Unix-based, and subsequently override standard Unix-rules seemingly at random and without consent of whoever is supposed to be the system's administrator, that people might start thinking the OS is merely intended as a tool to ruin any reputation of reliability that Unix may have once had. The great thing about a Mac is that it just works, they said. So far my experience has been the opposite. And whenever I get the illusion that something works as it is expected to work, I've learned to recognize it for what it is. An illusion. How is any of such behaviour even legally and ethically justified? How can they legally sell systems running MacOS to customers whose job includes working with classified information? How are such customers supposed to secure their system if it these 'features' are not properly documented?<p>I feel like I'm taking crazy pills! :(
Well fuck.<p>Just dug my old Xeon workstation out of the cupboard and am installing Debian on it.
My main desk has three Apple Silicons (two entirely airgapped, and am typing on third); sitting next to it is my beautiful 27" iMac (2009), with full Adobe CS4 (also offline); just purchased a pristine MacPro5,1 – seventeen year old computer! – for my main online Apple experience (using OS 10.14 from a decade ago), mostly because <i>it cannot AI/LLM/Siri</i>, even if it wanted to. Then I will have <i>three</i> offline Silicons.<p>Since the beginning of this year, I am now primarily running (online) a 9800X3D with a 5070Ti – Linux - which is only possible with LLM tutorials/help (mostly offline, on my own Silicon LLM).<p>----<p>Happy restomodding!
This is why throwing an extra DNS server on the network doesn't truly work. You have to actually remove the DNS protocol from existence entirely and perform TLS inspection if you want to filter effectively. This of course requires you to install a certificate authority on all devices connected to the network. Otherwise devices and applications will get around you with stuff like this, or DoT/DoH.<p>TLS inspection is starting to reach general availability but it's pricey. You could probably set something up if you own your router. The only vendor I know offering it OOTB is Ubiquiti/UniFi and only on their more expensive enterprise units that advertise "NeXT AI Cybersecurity". I have a hunch there is no actual AI or even ML involved, but this is the world we live in now.
I don’t even give a flying fuck about Apple itself. All they want is to sell me some macs and app store subscriptions. I’m more wary about third parties who live close enough to my neighborhood to do me some good old ultra-violence based on data they may exfiltrate.
>>[wrench_attack.gif]<p>I rent in a "historically minority" part of town (the former "segregated Tennessee state park" is literally in my hood), and the best investments I ever made here was installing CCTV cameras and being nice to the (mostly-)single-mothers (e.g: food donations, helping them move heavy items). Grandmama notices, and <i>she</i>in<i>charge, son</i>.<p>This is noticed by the entire neighborhood, and nobody fucks with the helpful <i>fat</i>bald<i>white</i>guy who is watching over everything in 4K (note: my cameras are entirely offline, local display/recording).
The good news is that with AI, nothing stops Linux desktops from looking and feeling like (Former) osx..
The bad news is the hardware. The most important parts of a laptop, to me anyway, is that it runs silent and doesn't get hot to touch. Not just to avoid sweaty fingers but because I usually have my laptop in or on my lap. Nothing I can find could replace my m1 8gb macbook air in that regard.<p>I can find some pretty cool linux laptops from framework or tuxedo, but they have fans and they get hot.
I'm quite frustrated with some aspects of macOS, particularly driving it from the keyboard, so I'm probably going to get a better experience out of it in the end.
one would think, but a lot of things stopped Linux to just fucking work with Wifi on my machine
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<p>this is a class action lawsuit in the making
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.
I have lost my faith in that
Yes, but having some kind of documentation and way to disable it would have been reasonable. Also, the thing is that it seems that apple intelligence models can query this information. So, you know, everything is a prompt injection away in theory.
I had faith in Apple until I saw the technology oligarchy and how they behaved around the current US administration.
Probably, but how much meta hardware do you own? Hell how much meta software do you have installed? I know people use varied amounts, but meta doesn't really make anything worth owning. I guess Apple is speedrunning the point where they don't either, which sucks, because I have no idea where to find a fanless linux laptop that doesn't get hot but has the performance of a m1.
Something that is additionally concerning is that you apparently cannot read your own data:<p><pre><code> $ 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
</code></pre>
Edit: I was wrong. The snarky comment below is right.
It wasn't that the AI writing style was a turn-off.<p>It's that AI writing tends to be dense and difficult to really parse, for humans.<p>Something about the writing style does not sit well with how my mind works. My mind cannot parse it very well.<p>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.
I have a "flock" script that locks downs files that I do not want changed except for when I persoanlly "funlock" it.<p>It does the last 4 commands:<p><pre><code> cd ~/Library
rm -rf IntelligencePlatform
touch IntelligencePlatform
xattr -w com.flock.mode 444 IntelligencePlatform
chown root:wheel IntelligencePlatform
chmod 444 IntelligencePlatform
chflags schg IntelligencePlatform</code></pre>
Saddened but not surprised.<p>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.<p>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.<p>My email goes through Thunderbird, chat through Ferdium, web via Firefox. Office work is in Panwriter and occasionally LibreOffice.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>I used to have similar thoughts. But then i realized everyone was emailing me from Gmail, sending me evites, posting pictures of events I attended but didn't RSVP to social media, etc. If you live in a moderately populated city in a western economy these apps know a ton about you. You should not give up your digital hygiene but don't lie to yourself and pretend that your friends and family are not feeding your data to the beast.
Horrifying, but also really interesting as a student of schema design, especially for probabilistic or inferential processes, and graph data.
Woah. Still on Sequoia with no intention to upgrade, but maybe the next laptop runs Linux.
I'm on Sequoia. Check out ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
It might depend on your needs and priorities, GhostBSD is a great option for people who like something more like Mac.<p>It's just a tuned FreeBSD distro using Mate.
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.
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...
What about iphones?
How does one disable this?
I expected the article to address that. Maybe it's obvious?:<p>Disable the daemons, delete the directory, lock down permissions to the database files / directory, lock down the daemons' permissions, delete the daemons, ...<p>I'm not recommending those things - I don't know what the consequence is for the system - but that's where I'd start.
you can't
"It's for you own good. It would be harmful to disable it. And you don't understand it so you shouldn't have an opinion. I trust Apple to do this safely, even if I don't want whatever this is."<p>Is how I'm generally greeted when I ask this sort of question.<p>Turn off your Mac and use a different operating system. Because it doesn't matter how you disable <i>this</i> feature in isolation. It is merely the current projection of Apple's opinion of its relationship with you. It's a hydra and you are going to lose the fight.
By using an OS that doesn't view you as cattle to be milked and eventually sent to the slaughterhouse.
I have a few questions:<p>Is it unencrypted and accessible by other applications without elevated permissions?<p>Can I modify it at will and does it persist if so?
It is in plaintext, but protected by TCC (so, only privileged apps / trusted by you can). Not sure about persistence. I believe it is rewritten periodically, possibly ignoring your edits
Previously discussed in 2023: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521306">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521306</a>
Decent work, if unreadable. I’ve disabled Apple Intelligence now.
Stop using Macs. Its pretty easy to switch to linux.
Stallman being upset about not having the source to printer drivers seems quaint these days.<p>This is exactly why we should not have closed source <i>anything</i> 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.<p>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.
And Apple wants to sell us Privacy as feature. Isn't this a big red flag?
This isn’t even LLM, it’s just anti-reader noise. HN needs to filter this stuff out going forward.
“Protected by the Full Disk Access permission”<p>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!
> who you know<p>Whom you know.
this violates GDPR in so many ways, jeez<p>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?
Yeah I could see that it correlated my WhatsApp calls with real person names (i.e. de-anonymizing WhatsApp), inferred my race based on face clusters (illegal under AI act), built a co-appearance network ("who stands beside whom in photos"), etc. etc.<p>None of this shit is legal, but the laws are toothless anyway: Apple can get "fined" a couple million and that's it. The fallout from the press would be a harder hit for them.
I'm going to be very angry if my mac turns out to be doing this
We also created a tool to inspect your graph: <a href="https://github.com/8rank/iKnow" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/8rank/iKnow</a>
Only tested on recent MacOS versions (last 26s, and early 27s), though
Works on Sequoia too fwiw
Ack. For what I could see, specific tables are added / removed across versions. So, some information might not be visualized (e.g., the graph is tiny with few nodes).
Also works on Sonoma.
This is really interesting and it seems to work on 27.2.<p>You might want to prune some of the descriptions though, as a lot of them are very Claude and hard to follow.
> Viz. Apple IntelligencePlatform store<p>Why did you abbreviate 'visualise'? You're not running up against a character limit.
><i>iKnow is fully LLM-generated and may not be 100% accurate.</i><p>"We" sounds pretty damn generous if you don't even know whether it works.
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?
Articles like this make me rethink my politics. I now think software tech monopolies need some 1950's style broadcast TV level regulation.
The problem is that most people don't know it's happening. If, when you first set up your Mac, you were asked "Do you want the OS to construct a social profile about you to help with ... (list of features)" and you could say yes or no.<p>When you do that, it's quite hard for it not to sound creepy. And most people would probably say no.<p>But I don't think it should be prohibited by regulation. Some people might want it, or genuinely find it useful.
Why the downvotes on this? Wish people would leave comments
great, now how do I nuke it?
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.
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. IMO when you buy a Mac (or use Windows or an Android phone) you have accepted so much that there is nothing which is not allowed.<p>But nevertheless: as far as I have understood it everything is built on your computer and is still used on your computer. You - as the user of the Mac - has took and saved the information. Your Mac is then only working for you - if Apple doesn't load the information in their enviroment.
As a general rule you cannot override national law by accepting service terms.
Unlike Americans seem to think, terms of use don’t override law.
Someone should start a company with terms mentioning that whoever agrees to it will live forever.<p>If we are overriding federal laws, might as well make people immortal too.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873517">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47873517</a>
This is going to depend on the holder's relationship with the data subject.<p>If you send a friend an email, they may add you to their address book and set a reminder for your birthday while they're at it. They don't need your permission to do that, so why would a device acting on their behalf?<p>On the other hand, if a customer of mine asks for the data I have on them, do I have to send them my Personal Knowledge Graph facts about them? That's less obvious, and I'd lean towards Apple's helpful database being a liability even if it's local.
It's on the person's Mac so it is a little more complicated. The person you send your data to is the Data Controller, and fails you by not publishing their privacy policy. But Apple isn't a Sub-Processor here, because they aren't sending the data to Apple.<p>I'm saying that because I wish the GDPR also covered the software providers who perform Data Processing against the will of all parties, but it isn't the case. Lastly, they're a person and not a business.<p>It is however clear that building a database of people which may contain race, religion or political opinions is illegal, even if it's just a person doing it.
GDPR applies to persons and businesses. The fact that you're violating GDPR, because without your knowledge Apple has deployed software on your computer that compiles this knowledge graph makes Apple complicit. Imagine violating a speed limit, because your car's speed indicator has a software flaw that causes it to show a lower speed.
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.
Fix available at <a href="https://www.debian.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.debian.org/</a> ;) jk, I've got a Mac.<p>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.<p>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<p>(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)
Can we start a class action suit?
The output stays local on your disk (in theory). So I’m not sure that breaks any rule. But in theory, Apple Intelligence can query it. Again, close to 0 documentation, so it is hard to know how this is consumed.
In Germany, it breaks TDDDG §25 verbatim, storage of data not explicitly consented to and not technically necessary is already illegal.
I'm from the US, but I did do some research after I saw other commenters claiming it violates GDPR. I tend to agree with them after reading up a bit on it and asking a couple of AIs. Apple can avoid some of the cross-border entanglements, but GDPR does not care where the processing happens, just what the scope of it is, what its purpose is, whose information is being used.<p>It'll be interesting to see if anybody goes after Apple for this.
can we block these two processes using little snitch?
But you can probably (as root) remove execute permissions and kill the running daemons. Until the next OS update.
No.<p>1) Before macOS boots, LittleSnitch ("LS") does not have any ability to block hostnames, e.g: on every boot, any modern Apple product ignores any manually-configured DNS IP and attempts to phone-home<p>2) Allegedly, this user profile information is stored locally (so LS wouldn't see any outgoing connection attempt to Apple servers)<p>3) LS does not block DNS-resolution, only IP-connection (i.e. your ISP sees all DNS queries, whether you click `ACCEPT` or `DENY` when LS popup asks)<p>4) If you're using LS <i>with intentions of primary DNS blockage</i>, you have failed; try pi-hole (or other local hardware DNS resolver); use physically-dedicated hardware (e.g: Raspberry Pi) to run your PiHole, not a Docker/Prox/&c<p>5) I am investigating another user's comment on using TLS certs to DENY-all DNS, but need to research further on this (new info to me!)
The processes aren't (as far as anyone knows) slinging data over the network.
[dead]
Uh, am I the only one for whom my Mac apparently knows next to nothing about my social circles beyond my parents?<p>(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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.