QuadratureSurfer @ QuadratureSurfer @lemmy.world

Posts

27

Comments

494

Joined

2 yr. ago

+1 here.

I used the official Reddit app for some time before switching between Apollo and Joey (depending on whether I had an iPhone at the time or an Android).

I'm sorry, but he waited 26 years to tell everyone how it's pronounced... at this point you can go with the majority, or stick with however you want to pronounce it.

I've been reading through the links you posted as well as looking through other sources. I agree Apple is definitely taking more care with how they anonymize data compared to companies such as Netflix or Strava.

In Netflix's case they released a bunch of "anonymized data" but in just over 2 weeks some researchers were able to de-anonymize some of the data back to particular users: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html

I've already linked Strava's mistake with their anonymization of data in my above comment.

and tell me again why Apple isn’t serious about privacy,

I think you must have me confused with someone else, up to this point in our discussion I never said that. I do believe that Apple is serious about privacy, but that doesn't mean they are immune to mistakes. I'm sure Netflix and Strava thought the same thing.

My whole point is that you can't trust that it's impossible to de-anonymize data simply because some organization removes all of what they believe to be identifying data.

GPS data is a fairly obvious one which is why I brought it up. Just because you remove all identifying info about a GPS trace doesn't stop someone (or some program) from re-attributing that data based on the start/stop locations of those tracks.

I appreciate that Apple is taking steps and using "local differential privacy" to try to mitigate stuff like this as much as possible. However, even they admit in that document that you linked that this only makes it difficult to determine rather than making it impossible:
"Local differential privacy guarantees that it is difficult to determine whether a certain user contributed to the computation of an aggregate by adding slightly biased noise to the data that is shared with Apple." https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Overview.pdf

Now for some counter evidence and reading:

Here's a brief article about how Anonymized data isn't as anonymous as you think: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/24/researchers-spotlight-the-lie-of-anonymous-data/

And if you just want to skip to it, here's the link to the study about how anonymized data can be reversed: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3/

informing users of what they collect and how users can opt-out of it.

It would be great if users could just opt-out, however Apple is currently being sued for continuing to collect analytics even on users that have opted out (or at least it appears that way, we'll have to let the lawsuit play out to see how this goes).
https://youtu.be/8JxvH80Rrcw
https://www.engadget.com/apple-phone-usage-data-not-anonymous-researchers-185334975.html
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-privacy-settings-third-lawsuit-1850000531

That DigitalTrends article you linked was okay, but it was written in 2018 before Mysks's tests.

As for your TechRadar link to Apple's use of E2EE, that's great, I'm glad they are using E2EE, but that's not really relevant to our discussion about anonymizing data and risks running afoul of the #3 point you made for why you are frustrated with the majority of users in this post.

I understand it can be frustrating when people bring up random points like that, I'm assuming your comment for #3 was directed at other users on this post rather than myself. But feel free to call me out if I go too far off on a tangent.

I have tried to stick to my main point which is: just because data has been "anonymized" doesn't mean it's impossible to de-anonymize that data.

It's been a while since I've looked up information on this subject, so thank you for contributing to this discussion.

To add on to this, the title should really end with, "than being vegetarian", or else the title should be " Consuming animal products creates four time more greenhouse gases than being vegan,..."

It's not really a 1 to 1 comparison if you're comparing a meat eater with someone who doesn't consume milk, meat, eggs, or any other animal products. You can also have meat eaters that don't consume milk due to allergies and such.

Plus, technically speaking (with cultured meat on the rise), there could be vegans that aren't vegetarian, as vegans could still eat cultured meat.

Can you explain a bit more about Apple grouping their data into cohorts? I haven't heard much about this before. For example, how would grouping data into cohorts work with GPS data?

You sound like you know a lot more than everyone else on this subject so I thank you for your responses as a means to educate others.

Just a word of advice, be sure to treat others with respect rather than assuming the worst of their intentions or calling them idiots because they don't know as much as you.

My response is still relevant to the conversation as we are talking about "anonymized data". The link in my comment above proves that just because you are told your data has been "anonymized" does not truly mean that it's impossible to re-attribute it back to an individual.

So if you trust that Apple has great techniques for data anonymization, that's awesome, feel free to expand on that and explain why. Just don't go around telling others that simply having any sort of anonymization technique makes it so you don't have to worry.

Well, then there's also the people that don't realize that there are all sorts of programs out there that will try to take that "anonymized" data and then tie it right back to a persons profile.

For example, you can anonymize GPS location data, but just because you strip away identifying information doesn't mean that you're truly anonymous. It can still be obvious where you live and where you work. And once you figure out where they live (again based on anonymous data) you can tie that information right back into their profile and continue to track them as if nothing has changed. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a15927450/identify-individual-users-with-stravas-heatmap/

This has nothing to do with RCS from what I read on the article. It looks like the UK wants to be able to tell companies to disable security features such as End to End Encryption so that they can view the messages.

I think you were mixing it up with Google Chrome.

Google made an announcement sometime back that they wanted to improve the standards for advertising, and if there were any ads that didn't meet those standards they would have Chrome automatically block it.

What are you talking about? I use brave and haven't seen a single ad in ages.
If I ever accidentally open the wrong browser, I can tell immediately.

There is a way to "opt-in" to view ads from their own pool of ads in exchange for crypto... But that's automatically disabled, and there's a toggle to hide all of the crypto stuff anyway.

The main point people need to understand is that Chromium based browsers are heavily nerfing the ability for users to use ad-blockers. This isn't much of an issue in the case of Brave where the ad-blocking is built into the browser itself.

And personally, I would rather have some healthy privacy based competition between browsers. Having both Librewolf (Firefox) and Brave browser (chromium) lets us have options to switch between.

It also creates additional work on the advertising side in this cat and mouse game.

I'll take Approval Voting or Star Voting over Ranked choice voting... But I'll definitely take Ranked choice over what we have right now.

And this is precisely why we need to vote in candidates at lower level elections that support making modifications to how we vote.

Bring in Star Voting, Approval Voting, Ranked Choice Voting, etc... Pretty much anything but the current system. The Forward Party is primarily focused on this goal of overhauling our current voting system to help fix this problem of being force to vote for candidates that we don't really want.

To be fair, I think both sides blow it out of proportion and that can stifle discussion. It won't be the "end of the world" where everyone will die, but we will have the "end of the world" as we know it.

I think one of the main points that need to be stressed to the kind of people in your example would be droughts.

Droughts will continue to get worse and will affect everyone. With a bad enough drought, we won't be able to feed entire cities. And that's when things really start to fall apart.

This isn't really a "privacy concern" from a user standpoint. It isn't user data they're selling, it's data they've scraped from websites for use in machine learning. It's more of a legal grey area in the same way that OpenAI is being sued for their use of data in training ChatGPT.

I'm curious if you ever figured this out.

It looks like you're using an AM4 bracket on an AM5 CPU, was that the problem?

For a writer... You're not writing a whole lot or even really trying to break down why it's a bad story...

This article shouldn't affect Brave users themselves.

The content of the article deals with issues that only website owners/publishers have to be salty about. Much of what's left comes down to the legal grey area of how to treat LLMs like ChatGPT and whether they're allowed to scrape websites for training data or not.

Lol, I'm glad he at least included the full email response from them. You can tell he's a little salty and still misinterpreting things when you read about how he took their response to the Search Crawler part.

I haven't seen it happen on Brave browser yet. We'll see how long that holds up.