alt Hacker NewsIt 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.
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?
It's irresponsible to collect and concentrate this much info on millions of people.
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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.
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.
... I feel like if an authoritarian government could extract the family classifier info from local, they could just extract the damn messages.
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.
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.