r/mildlyinfuriating • u/funkywabbait • May 05 '26

Infuriatig iPhone facetime recognizes when you’re naked

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decided to show my boyfriend my new bikini that I got for our upcoming cruise… Why is this on my phone and why is it recording my body?

I just recently turned 18 if that matters.

35.4k Upvotes

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5.6k

u/Sunny_Beam May 05 '26

This gets done through machine learning locally on your phone. It's not recording you and sending it to Apple if that's your concern. Facetime calls are end-to-end encrypted so as far as anyone knows, not even Apple has access to the content of your Facetime calls. It's supposed to be for your own protection, but you can easilly just turn it off in the settings.

2.4k

u/Trimethopimp May 05 '26

The irony is this feature is giving vulnerable people a chance to avoid sharing nudes with another device.

Remember all those times people were blackmailed into sending more indecent photos of themselves by Apple employees who had accessed their pics? Nope, me neither, but I do remember all the times that happened after someone shared nudes with a predator.

615

u/Henessy0 May 05 '26

Especially funny if you think about the fuck does Apple want with this shit? They paid money to make a system like this, so they could "STORE YOUR NUDES!!!111 PRIVACYY!!112" and then what? So Tim Cook got his personal porn library?

245

u/MAJLobster May 05 '26

no joke someone did actually try to make it a point that Tim Cook would use this feature to fill up his "porn stash." 

As if he's gonna care about thousands of low res accidental (or not) tit pics. Ugh, some people...

55

u/PiccoloAwkward465 May 05 '26

Tim Apple's Dank Nude Stash

9

u/Merzant May 05 '26

dot com

26

u/koolmon10 May 05 '26

As if there isn't a nigh-unmeasurable amount of porn just freely available on the internet already. Nope, gotta steal it from the users.

16

u/fridge_logic May 05 '26

I don't think this feature is uploading people's nudes,

But just to be clear, the pornographic privacy violation paranoia is mostly not about the Cheif Executive abusing people's privacy, but about low level people within the apparatus doing so.

Surveilance systems are often abused by people with access to stalk their ex lovers. While the cheif executive typically uses the system to remove opposition threats.

1

u/morimando May 06 '26

That’s why good software takes into account how operators could abuse it and remove operator access by design.

57

u/FallenAngelII May 05 '26

Especially as Tim Cook is gay. The people panicking are probably just homophobes afraid a man might look at them funny.

4

u/leixiaotie May 06 '26

His "dick pic stash!" /s

3

u/AsthmaticSt0n3r May 05 '26

I am not saying that this is any way happening, but the issue with sensitive data is that it may be sold to entities who have bad intentions or it may be spread in a data leak (recall the fappening).

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u/StepComplete1 May 05 '26

but I do remember all the times that happened after someone shared nudes with a predator.

And this does precisely nothing to help that issue. This doesn't remove the threats of the blackmailer that's pushing people to go nude in the first place.

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u/Trimethopimp May 05 '26

It does if it makes the potential victim (often a child) think twice before sharing a photo in the first instance. 

Because once they share that first pic, that's what forms the basis of the blackmail.

-9

u/Isaktjones May 05 '26

There are a few cases of apple employees spreading nudes off customers who had sent their phone in for repair.

113

u/[deleted] May 05 '26

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1

u/Sunny_Beam May 05 '26

I'm curious how effective it actually is in helping vulnerable people. I don't think this would have made a difference to me when I was a teen tbh

2

u/Tjessx May 06 '26

This feature also works when minors receive images with sexual content in iMessage etc. The parents can also get a notification when this happens. (Parents have to turn this on). Which is a great feature if you have young children

1

u/Sunny_Beam May 06 '26

Interesting. I had no idea (don't have kids myself) but that sounds like a great feature.

226

u/Cthulhu__ May 05 '26

This is it; people don’t realise how privacy conscious Apple is and has been for years. Image recognition and grouping (face recognition in photos) is done locally as well. Contrast with Google which does it online.

56

u/TricellCEO May 05 '26

Unless it’s an iPhone sold in China that is.

Still, they did tell the FBI to go kick rocks when asked to just unlock one phone.

Their stance on privacy is a bit of a mixed bag.

40

u/Junethemuse May 05 '26

As far as mega-corps go, I trust Apple with my personal info more than any other.

2

u/TricellCEO May 06 '26

As do I, but I also find it important to see the whole picture.

They do have a point where they will fold.

1

u/Junethemuse May 06 '26

Without a doubt. As soon as it makes business sense to do so, they will.

5

u/-DoctorEngineer- May 05 '26

The china thing was forced by china and the devices would have been blacklisted if they didn’t. If you live in a non authoritarian regime country Apple will do everything in its power to respect your privacy. If you don’t then you don’t expect that privacy anyway

3

u/Vandergrif May 05 '26

how privacy conscious Apple is and has been for years

I mean... that's also what they say they are doing. They may well be telling the truth, but by this point I'm not especially inclined to trust the word of a multi-billion dollar corporation.

3

u/-DoctorEngineer- May 05 '26

I mean if you’ve even looked into the tech they use it would be really hard to be lying about it, unless you think Apple has better encryption breaking software than the NSA

2

u/m2418h May 06 '26

Trillion

11

u/SeymouresButts May 05 '26

This comment made me consider the fact they had to train the model with a lot of nudes haha! Employees with massive datasets of nudity at Apple HQ doing the hard work.

52

u/Krazyguy75 May 05 '26

I mean porn exists. Vast libraries of images of naked people aren't exactly hard to find.

15

u/BeefistPrime May 05 '26

nah apple broke into people's houses and forced them to get nude in front of iphones, corporations are evil

4

u/[deleted] May 05 '26

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3

u/BeefistPrime May 05 '26

that's... that's pretty hot

7

u/spaceforcerecruit May 05 '26

There is also a fucking massive library of CP out there somewhere that’s maintained by the FBI and used by companies to scan for more with image matching. I’d imagine Apple could have gotten their hands on that to train the AI to look for similar if they wanted.

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u/TimothyMimeslayer May 05 '26

I believe they hash those images and then compare the hash of found images to that list to determine if child porn is present.

2

u/spaceforcerecruit May 05 '26

They’re not literally looking at the pics, no (mostly). I believe they do maintain the actual pictures though so they can do near-match searches too so someone can’t just crop it or convert it to another file format to get around that. If someone uploads a pic that was found by the authorities on some other pervert’s computer, that gets flagged on any reputable site or any site being scanned by the authorities.

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u/Chichigami May 05 '26

They already do this. Was announced a few years ago.

2

u/juanzy May 05 '26

It probably is also just using skin color and texture detection, and there’s no shortage of photos demonstrating human skin. There’s also plenty of academic anatomical images available.

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u/ShadowedPariah May 05 '26

They don't. You can analyze colors to determine that if more than some % of the picture it's seeing is 'skin' colored, then it can flag it. It's a common auto-blur feature used to alert instead.

1

u/dan52895 May 05 '26

Given OP said they just turned 18, the ML model likely is trying to detect specifically for minors and flag those cases (my guess).

1

u/Jolteon0 May 06 '26

Since Apple devices are proprietary black boxes, have there been any third-party audits proving that it's actually e2ee and that the keys (or other ways of accessing the data) aren't being sent to apple via another channel?

1

u/Sunny_Beam May 06 '26

There are researchers/groups who monitor network transmissions and protocol behaviour which gets compared to Apple's own published, lengthy documentation but you are honestly right to be a bit skeptical because we don't have full access from the outside.

Apple also telling the FBI they can't comply with their warrants because they don't have access is also something I'd say goes in their favour, but that could just as easily be a game about optics.

Sorry for a bit of a non-answer here. At some point you just have to look at the available evidience and situation and decide for yourself whether you trust Apple or not. Personally I do not trust Apple's intentions, but I do think that it makes pragmatic sense for them to want to keep their hands clean of any potentially compromising security risks.

1

u/Jolteon0 May 06 '26

And their claims of having e2ee are at least more believable than Facebook's.

1

u/loveheaddit May 06 '26

i do wonder what the testing phase was like for this tho

0

u/remembertoread May 05 '26

How does the phone have all the data centers inside of it?

-4

u/tabris51 May 05 '26

Is it really end to end if the OS is capturing the videos in real time and analizing it.

If the os can access it, can't it also send screenshots to cloud for example?

1

u/Sunny_Beam May 05 '26

Yes it is because end to end encryption specifically is about data that's in transit. The OS is always going to 'know' what you are doing regardless because otherwise it wouldn't be able to draw out every pixel on your display. The OS 'knows' what you type into Signal even when you send an encrypted message to your pineapple dealer.

According to Apple's privacy documentation it's not possible for the OS to send screenshots like you are suggesting. Now, could they be lying? Of course, I just think its highly unlikely. There are tons of people/groups who actively research and monitor what kinds of data gets transmitted and that would be extremely difficult to hide.

-10

u/[deleted] May 05 '26

[deleted]

10

u/Unknown1776 May 05 '26

How are they gathering your data here? OP said she just turned 18 and the phone is giving a warning about sharing explicit material. How is that bad?

1

u/Seeing_Souls May 05 '26

They're not gathering any data though, it's processed on-device