Anatomy of Apple's Personal Knowledge Graph — Eighth Rank
8rank.ai
Every Mac since macOS 13 (2022) ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about 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, what you do and when. In this post, we look into how this system works and give you a tool to peek into your own graph.
  • LeftReddit2@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Not surprising. This era of capitalism is built around spying on you in order to find out how to sell you stuff better. We love it.

    • cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      32·
      9 hours ago

      Linux is great for any of the Intel series max, but apple silicone is so new that they’ve barely cracked the surface of M3 full capabilities with any Linux distro.

      • NovaVeles@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 hours ago

        I will not post a link to it for privacy reasons, but I wrote an article on this the day before the original M1 was announced warning of this situation. Apples move to their own chipset meant that any attempts at maintaining compatibility would always end up behind the curve.

        I am surprised that Apple manage to keep their chips constantly changing as much as they do between generations. Most others seem to be on the ‘same but more’ path nowadays but Apple is still shifting the baseline almost yearly.

        The real issue will come if they lock down the boot loader.

        • cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          1 hour ago

          I will say this, I love my M5 Air and it doesn’t have An Apple Account. Like, at all. Nor did my last M2. Apple allows me more desktop privacy than Ms or Google will, and I don’t have to gut the OS. I’m not motivated to because they make the horsepower available to me.

          Every other machine is running some debian/Ubuntu variant today, principally. I got tired of the cat-and-mouse and all of the uosells under the hood of MS, and I just can’t trust Google in this era.

        • cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          3 hours ago

          You know I thought about that as I was commenting, and also kind of rolled the dice on someone calling it out. And ancient Apple equipment are built like tanks.

          But I remember running Minecraft Beta on an ancient iMac G5, and it was too choppy even back in the day. I can’t imagine you being pleasant on one in the modern era.

          So I think looking back, I would put a hard limit at only putting machines in service that were manufactured at or after 2012 or so. Get a cute Haswell Mac Mini and call it a day.

          If you insisted on vintage Apple hardware older than that, I would recommend getting the system and throwing a Raspberry Pi in there instead. I really wish the G4 lamp Macs would make a come back.

    • Farid@startrek.website
      48·
      15 hours ago

      Apparently you lose a lot of functionality. I wanted to install Linux on my old Intel Mac but the research showed I’m gonna struggle even getting the kb to work, cause it goes through the T2 security chip. This was about a year ago. Hopefully by now people have worked around those issues with Claude.

        • NovaVeles@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 hours ago

          I had always wondered why so many people have had compatibility issues with Linux systems, that was until I realized that because I am basically a computer scrap-man, I almost always a decade behind and everything had been long hardened by then.

        • Farid@startrek.website
          1·
          3 hours ago

          I know about the patch, but I think back when I checked last, it was in rudimentary state and not very reliable. Hopefully it’s better now. I remember there were more issues, like for sure touchID doesn’t work, but I think there was other stuff, too.

        • Farid@startrek.website
          1·
          3 hours ago

          I’m aware of Asahi Linux. It was mostly unusable for the first few years. Nowadays it runs, I think on up to M2 chips.

  • dropdrip@lemmy.ml
    952·
    1 day ago

    B-b-but Apple cares about privacy. They would never spy on you like the filthy Microsoft. That’s why I brought an iPhone.

    • NovaVeles@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      For all the problems of Steve jobs, he at least kept the company fairly honest in this sense. But the instant he died, Tim cook immediately rush ed to install PRISM backdoors into all their systems while still carrying the image of privacy.

    • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
      431·
      1 day ago

      Apples odd in that they are pretty protective of your personal information, as in they won’t sell it or lets 3rd parties come even remotely close to it, but have very little qualms in abusing it themselves.

      • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
        9·
        10 hours ago

        Not even Google sells any of your data. They collect data and sell advertising spots but not the data itself.

        Selling data only works as a business model if you cannot sell ad spots. That is why news websites have cookie banners with 1000 partners but Google, Facebook, Apple, et al. do not.

        • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          4 hours ago

          Even Apple is going to listen to the government. They have done things to limit what they can tell them but most people don’t use it. And to be fair so has Google it is why location data is now on device instead of on the cloud with Google.

      • dropdrip@lemmy.ml
        221·
        1 day ago

        I read that Apple was implementing ads in their maps software now. Quick search seems to confirm it. Below is a page blurb originating from Apple’s domain.

        Now businesses can run ads on Apple Maps — right where customers are deciding where to go.

        My initial comment was just satire, but reading through the document I’m just… tired. This sort of analysis originates from America’s intelligence organizations. It’s not surprising that the technique’s bled into private-business–it always happens. Intel. orgs. create a software solution that solves one of their problems and entrepreneurs within those organizations realize private-businesses have similar problems.

        (I will state–because it’s tangentially related–the matrix-protocol originates from individuals linked to mossad. I encourage users not to use matrix.)

        Apples not odd. It’s the same as every other technology corporation.

    • CoconutLove@lemmy.today
      9·
      21 hours ago

      I mean… they did market this as having your personal context, so I don’t think it is a surprise. The idea is it’s not accessible to anyone but you.

      • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        Is it? Remember when you couldn’t launch an app on OSX because apple was down for some reason.

        • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          4 hours ago

          No I don’t remember that, but codesigning doesn’t require all of your data to be shared remotely, just a few encryption keys. Not even enough to know what exactly you are running (although it’s likely something from the App Store in which case they have records of what you bought or downloaded in the App Store of course).

  • P. Montegomery Hat (he)@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    1 day ago

    As soon as Asahi ships M4 support I’m relegating macOS to an as-needed partition or VM. I can’t wait, I love the GNOME UI aesthetic. Unforkable software needs to die.

    I’d love to contribute to OSS but breaking in to a community, learning a codebase, its dependencies, its build systems, its docs, its community rules, its politics all at once by myself is too much.

      • boonhet@lemmy.zip
        1·
        10 hours ago

        The easy fixes usually get picked up really quickly for projects that magnitude. The hard ones are tough for someone new to the project.

        • kuerbiskernoel@feddit.org
          1·
          9 hours ago

          They just said they want to contribute to OSS, there are plenty of smaller projects that need simpler bugs fixed. Then you can keep moving to bigger and bigger projects.

  • Zeus@feddit.orgEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    for as long as iCloud has been a thing, actually.

    The only one who can control apple devices is apple

    • NovaVeles@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Have said it for ages, it is End to end encryption, the question is if they are the end or you are? Is it Your end to Apple, Apple to them? Plausible but hard to verify.

      • Zeus@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Apple has always been lying about their “pro-privacy” features. For as long as iCloud has been a thing, they’ve been spying on their users almost as invasively as facebook does

    • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Yep when they control the keys they control the conversation also.