According to Bloomberg, Apple is in talks with Google to license Gemini, Google’s generative AI for iOS.

Apple has spent decades building a brand on the foundation of privacy and now they want to let google in through the backdoor. I think it’s a horrible move. I’m sure Apple will say they’re doing it in a “privacy preserving” way, but I don’t believe them.

I’ve been suspicious of Apple for a while and here’s why.

1. Apple was part of the Prism program, this is the infamous Ed Snowden leaked domestic spying program. They joined the program in 2012, a few months after Steve Jobs died. Google was also a part of that program. Apple denies that they were, but the slides released in the leak said that they were, so either they’re lying or they don’t know what’s going on at their own company.

2. Apple claim to be privacy focused but most of their privacy features require you to trust them and they bury some of the most sensitive settings deep in menus. For example, there is no way to disable the microphone or camera on an iphone. In fact, since rolling out FaceID, you cannot use your iphone and keep the camera covered unless you want to use a pin. TouchID at least enabled you to cover the camera. On my Google Pixel 6A, I can disable system access to mics and cameras with a control panel setting, and I can disable location services in much the same manner.

Bluetooth is another dicey privacy black hole. Bluetooth combined with wifi enables pin point location accuracy. Marketers use bluetooth to figure out where you’ve been inside of their stores – for example Target and Walmart use this. This often requires the use of their app and for it to be open, which is why you’ll notice many stores make you scan QR codes in the app to get a deal.

Bluetooth is also used for contact tracing, when Apple rolled out contact tracing, it seemed like a Fed thing to do, but it was for Covid, so might as well let the government know who I’ve been around to help the cause. Once I disabled it, I learned that Apple wasn’t done with contact tracing and they were rolling out a new Journaling app, you know, for “mindfulness”.. “mental health”, and it’s encrypted too! When my phone updated, I disabled every toggle presented to me for giving this app access to my calendar, contacts, messages, email, and location. Yet a few months later, I found out that by default my iphone was broadcasting a bluetooth ID to any iphone in the area to help the user of the other phone remember to journal about me.

This seemed different from normal bluetooth usage as I found out our phones already constantly emit a bluetooth ID and scan for other IDs for a variety of reasons.

No bother, I decided, I’ll just turn off bluetooth since it’s easy enough to do on my control panel. Except then I learned turning off bluetooth and wifi this way doesn’t actually turn them off, what it does is simply disconnects my phone from connected bluetooth devices, but it’s still leaving a digital trail of cookie crumbs behind literally everywhere I go. The only way to disable bluetooth completely is to open the settings app and turn it off there with a series of taps. Google’s android works the same way. The device gives you a way to do something and let’s you think you’ve done it, when it hasn’t done anything you thought it did.

3. One of the biggest shareholders of Apple is Laurene P. Jobs who was famously photographed with a certain woman who is currently in prison for her association to a certain financier who definitely didn’t kill himself over a little island in the Bahamas. LPJ’s past is a mystery, there is virtually nothing about her before she met Steve. Who are her parents? Where did she grow up? What’s her background? Does she have siblings? It’s a mystery. I can’t find a single biography of her and for a famous and wealthy person, that’s unusual. What’s known is she met Steve in college and after a whirlwind romance they wed. Except she clearly has ties to the IC through her association with a certain woman and the financier, and her association to one of the biggest tech companies in history. Once Laurene and Tim C. took over Apple, Apple’s position on privacy pivoted to being much more cooperative with the IC (intelligence community). As stated earlier, they immediately enrolled in the Prism program and there are several other changes that have occurred. Obviously as a normal dude and average user of these devices, I can’t prove it but it is raises my suspicions and to me, LPJ looks like a honey trap to me.

4. CSAM Scanning is an example of how Apple’s attitudes towards privacy shifted. If you recall, Apple had planned to roll out several new features with iOS 15, that involved using machine learning to get a deeper understanding of your iphone’s photo library and the context of your photos. They also wanted to scan your library for illicit and illegal sexual content and when a user uploaded this content to icloud, flag it and report it to the authorities so that a user could be arrested. Apple assured users that this was necessary and to “think of the children” and assured us all that our photos would be scanned on our device, a hash would be generated and matched to a hash in a database and that nobody at apple would be looking at our icloud photos. After a huge uproar, Apple claimed to have abandoned the program.

While at the outset this looked like a good way to protect children, in reality, Feds and their operatives usually use “the children” argument to get people to accept violations of our constitutional rights, like the 4th amendment, which states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

People might be willing to allow the government to scan their library to save the children, but as things go, within a few months, an update to the terms and conditions is made that nobody reads and now the phone can be hypothetically scanning for memes, misinformation, and all kinds of new stuff.

Despite claiming to abandon on device image csam scanning, Apple already scanned icloud photos, and this is because icloud is apple’s computer, not yours. All of the major cloud platforms analyze uploads for illegal content. Yet, iOS 15 and later versions still have deep contextual awareness of your photos, and this scan does happen on your phone, and what apple does with what they find, I’m not sure. I used to believe what they claimed, but after learning about their connection to Prism and some other abnormalities with iOS, I simply no longer trust apple.

To test out what kinds of things Apple has notes on about your photos, go into your photos and search “Dog” or another keyword and it will retrieve photos of every dog you ever snapped a photo of. It also scans the text that is in your photos, even if it is extremely small. The only way this fast and instant retrieval can happen is if it scans and indexes your library as soon as you add a new photo to it and it stores the contextual words you might search for in a database somewhere to help you find that photo when you want to see it again.

While Apple shifted their program for iOS 15, the features exist, still do the same thing, and if you upload CSAM to iCloud, it will still be reported, nothing really changed about the program except that Apple claims they aren’t scanning for CSAM on your device, however we already know that Siri understands the who, what, when, and where of your photos. If you search for controversial keywords in iOS, the photo library doesn’t return results, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t indexed them. There is a setting in iOS that will blur nudity in imessages and to enable it you just flip a toggle in settings. Just because you haven’t flipped the toggle doesn’t mean it isn’t detecting nudity, it just means it isn’t blurring it, and when we think of these things we may not be too worried except that adults do have nude or near nude pictures of themselves in their phones for a variety of reasons including legitimate medical and weight-loss reasons. People often photograph their newborns who are often light on clothing, and in that case Apple may have flagged a parent as a potential predator.

But there are other concerns beyond just skin. Maybe you’re a christian, or a gun collector, journalist, a person living under a an oppressive regime, or just enjoy memes the current regime may dislike. etc… your phone is probably gaining contextual awareness of not just the content of your photos, but of your messages, of your location and of your co-location (people you share location with). This would be especially bad for people who belong to oppressed religious minorities or who are under ban in a country, since the phone can reveal the people you’ve spent any time with at all, say at organized meetings or events.

While Apple focused it’s release of new features on the crime prevention aspect, and then backed off after the uproar, the software has more uses than just scanning for CSAM and it’s clearly scanning everything on your phone and indexing it, what we don’t know is where that information goes or who has access to it. Since Apple was part of Prism, it is well within the realm of possibility there is a backdoor. I think even under the best case scenario, Apple may truthfully not be sharing our data like our actual photos, videos, etc with the feds, but I think at a minimum, the metadata is probably accessible. This is the data about the data on our phones, such as location data, keywords, etc. Of course, this cannot be disabled anywhere in settings. If you do not want iOS to scan your photos, you have to simply stop using the iPhone camera and photo library.

5. Siri was a DARPA project and many people brush it off just because … Facebook was too. They will say that Oracle, the company who created the database software that virtually every piece of data about you is stored in, started as a CIA project as well and that this is just the way the Government helps further innovation. Others see it as the Government intentionally creating surveillance tools that the masses will use by using a front company run by a bunch of cool college kids to build it out.

6. Siri is always listening for the wake word “Hey Siri”, Apple claims that even though Siri is capable of transcribing human speech, it only does so only when you give permission. Does disabling “Hey Siri” disable the phone’s ability to hear the wake word, or does it merely stop launching Siri when it’s said? Can it listen for other words? Without transcribing the conversation, is it possible to create a log of certain keywords that it’s overheard? Apple does have the ability to listen for other words, in the accessibility settings you can “train” it to listen for whatever you want, and the Apple Watch listens for the sound of water and uses that to determine if you’re washing your hands and for how long. For these features to be enabled and to work the microphone on your device must always be on and must always be sampling your environment. Apple is adamant that it does not “record” your conversations, but they do not specify to what degree conversations or background noise is analyzed or what metadata is generated from the mic being on 24/7. On an Android device, the mic can be disabled with a software switch, which we already know from the Bluetooth example may or may not do what we think it does. However, on iOS, there is no way to disable the system access to the mic. You can disable the mic access for each app that requests it, but not for iOS itself.

There are massive privacy concerns with iOS, and a bunch of odd design choices that have never been explained. While many people focus on the end to end encryption apple provides there is a lot of invasive stuff going on behind the scenes that we can’t disable and that Apple doesn’t share how the magic behind the scenes works.

Most people say “oh well that’s OK because I don’t have anything to hide”, and neither do I… but the things governments and marketers do with our information isn’t limited to surveillance and security, it’s used to manipulate our thinking. For marketers, the information about us is used to convince us to buy things. For the government this information is used to help buy support for new legislation or for public efforts like getting people to vote or take a vaccine, or to support a war effort etc and for political operatives, this data collection system has been used to swing elections, and spur civil unrest.

In order to protect our minds, we have to limit our exposure to sponsored ads, algorithms, pervasive and artificial internet culture and propaganda. Social media usage, internet news browsing, and smart phone usage gives algorithms a lot of information to leverage against us to intimidate us, change our minds, or get our support and buy in. This is why privacy matters, and I’m going to write more about how to limit collection and how to generate noise in a future post.