Privacy Loss in Apple's Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12 · HackerPapers discussions

Privacy Loss in Apple's Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12 — mentioned by matthewdgreen

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 16:59:06 GMT

I went looking for exactly this information the other day. I was surprised to find that it's hard to come up with recent, detailed explanations of what Apple is doing for telemetry collection. When they announced their DP systems back in 2017, they were clearly doing something like Google's RAPPOR [1]. But it's been several years since then and their writeups haven't been updated very much at all [2]. This is pretty important, because these systems aren't so robust that you can just assume everything is working without review. (See, for example, this paper [3].) Apple should at least document…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Privacy Loss in Apple's Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12 — HN submission

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 17:32:31 GMT

Privacy Loss in Apple’s Implementation of Differential Privacy (2017)

59 points; 8 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Privacy Loss in Apple's Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12 — mentioned by Cynddl

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 15:36:06 GMT

Differential privacy appears regularly on Hacker News, with either theoretical articles or projects that aim to implement it. Yet often there is a huge gap between both. For example, Apple has touted about its use of differential privacy, but researchers [1] have shown that the privacy budget is reset every day and the parameters, buried inside the code, lack a proper derivation. Similarly, Uber seems to use DP for internal analytics. However, the proposed model does not seem really robust and does not provide accurate results at all [2]. One should always carefully review claims associated…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Privacy Loss in Apple's Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12 — mentioned by frankmcsherry

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 12:51:50 GMT

> Wired recently deployed a team of experts to deconstruct Apple’s code and found its differential privacy practices to be lacking, a characterization that the company strongly disputes. If by "deployed" they mean "interviewed about their work". I don't understand Time crediting Wired with the research[0], which does a disservice to their actual sources of funding. https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02753

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Privacy Loss in Apple's Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12 — mentioned by pgeorgi

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 06:26:29 GMT

Apple still needs data to build these locally running models. They advertise differential privacy as a solution for that but researchers aren't impressed (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.02753.pdf). Meanwhile on Android you can opt for a different photo gallery app, giving Google _nothing_ to work with, while on iOS you're stuck with whatever Apple allows you to use.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Privacy Loss in Apple's Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12 — HN submission

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 02:34:06 GMT

Privacy Loss in Apple's Implementation of Differential Privacy on MacOS 10.12

180 points; 39 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.