We sincerely understand your frustration and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. We understand you have questions and concerns about your contacts and FaceTime. Because of the nature and complexity of this issue, Apple does not offer this type of assistance or support through written correspondence.
Can it really be that the explanation is too complex for “written correspondence”? What other communication method would be more adequate?
Or maybe one of you know the answer. How does Contacts.app determine which of the email addresses in my addressbook have been registered for Facetime?
Re: Smoke Signals, Morse Code or … ?
Most likely they put the email address through a one-way hash function and then ask the server if that hash is registered. So long as the request to the server doesn’t include your personally identifiable information there’s no leak of info here - you haven’t revealed your contacts email address or even that you have that ID as one of your contacts.
It’s quite a common practice these days.
That’s a dubious assumption, especially for the Contacts App on the iPhone. I’m more willing to believe that the requests from the Desktop MacOSX App are anonymized.
But, even if “your” personal information is suppressed, we have a situation here, where every Apple user is sending Apple a complete list of (the Facetime-registered subset of) his/her contacts. Dropping the user from that dataset is only a tiny omission.
If the Hash is registered, then they know who it’s registered to. And now they know that person is on your contact list.
At least, this way, they don’t learn the email addresses which are not registered for Facetime (those yield unknown Hashes).
Handing over (roughly) half of my contact list is better than handing over the whole list. But not by much.
Apparently the FaceTime app on the Mac and the FaceTime settings on iOS devices lets you specify what contact methods (phone numbers, e-mail addresses) others can use to find you. I don’t know whether Apple is opting you in by default, but you can control it.
Is FaceTime better (i.e. clearer, etc.) than Skype, Google, or other services?
Which tablet would you prefer? iPad or Android?
What do either of those have to do with whether my contact list is being sent (without my knowledge) to Apple?
This is a post about the behaviour of Contacts.app, not about Facetime.app.
Well, it’s off topic. I was just wondering what your opinion is. Is FaceTime better? Which tablet would you recommend? iPad? A particular Android tablet that has caught your eye?
I know Apple automatically “assumes” someone’s number is registered for facetime or iMessage if you add their number with the iPhone label instead of regular old mobile, or work. As for emails, my guess is you have iCloud backup enabled for your contacts? Everyone’s information is uploaded by default!
I know Apple automatically “assumes” someone’s number is registered for facetime or iMessage if you add their number with the iPhone label instead of regular old mobile, or work.
As for emails, my guess is you have iCloud backup enabled for your contacts?
That would be stupid. If I wanted to share my contact list with Apple, then I would have turned on iCloud Backups. Since I don’t, I didn’t do that.
Well I don’t even have a Mac so I can’t check this myself but have you considered using a network packet sniffer like wireshark to investigate what’s going on? You could run it in the background and then add some contacts and see what happens.
Seriously? Does anyone still care what Peter Woit has to say?
I stopped paying attention years ago.
Apparently, your colleague, David Ben-Zvi still cares.
David desperately needs to start a blog of his own.
An excellent bit of explication of Geometric Langlands (and not the first such explication he has left in the comments section of some blog or other), but totally wasted over there.
Have you looked at papers (such as this one, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.2283v1.pdf) that claim that conformal gravity doesn’t contain ghosts?
I’m surely no expert, but would love to know what (if any) flaws there are in this.
How does this evade “Georgi’s objection” you mentioned in a blog post from 10 years back?