I’m a macos user, and the only thing I’m really aware of is mediaanalysisd. It runs constantly and can’t be turned off, and occasionally it uses 50-100MB of ram but usually it passively uses 500MB-1GB of memory constantly, for seemingly no benefit. There’s no official documentation about what it does, but speculation that I’ve seen is that it’s for analysing your photos so that you can search by faces or by computer vision results, e.g. “car” or “mountain” etc, which would be reasonable. The problem with that theory is that I don’t take photos and I have almost none in my Photos app. So the other explanation is that apple announced a few years ago that they were going to scan people’s devices for known CSAM hashes and report any matches to authorities. So I really REALLY hate the idea that they’re using a 16th of my system memory to constantly scan my files in case they find any csam. That can fuck right off. But there’s no way at all to disable it. I occasionally Force Quit the process in Activity Monitor, but it just comes back within a few minutes.
But I completely acknowledge that that’s just speculation (although the csam detection thing was certainly announced by apple, they kinda shut up about it after the backlash and seem to have retracted it, certainly on iOS but maybe on macos too). So what is mediaanalysisd actually doing if not that? Nobody seems to really know. Certianly it isn’t using 1GB of ram to do anything that benefits me. e.g. right now it’s using 500MB for a mystery process: https://ibb.co/qfZD1TL
I’m not at all agreeing with the other user that “macos is spyware”, which is a bit ridiculous. But that particular daemon is a bugbear of mine, so I just took the opportunity to have my little rant lol 😂
I realize this is ostensibly to enable a security feature, but if your threat model includes American software companies & oligarchs tracking what you do on your computer, it’s still something to be aware of.
So the other explanation is that apple announced a few years ago that they were going to scan people’s devices for known CSAM hashes and report any matches to authorities.
This was only for icloud photos, and the reason they were considering that was to keep your photos encrypted in the cloud. this way the photos are analyzed locally on your device and kept private, unless they are found to be problematic obviously.
It surely just isn’t this one deamon. Despite “mediaanalysisd” sounds highly threatening to me. Especially if you aren’t allowed to disable it. How i would hate that on MY computer. Surely better than windows, where 5198231 services do that of which you can only disable 99%.
If you use ANY service in the apple cloud though, your data is, by definition, unsafe. If you don’t, you’re probably not the run-of-the-mill-apple-user that knows which service does what.
mediaanalysisd isn’t mysterious. It’s a ML process that evaluates your photos and videos and generates description metadata to make them text-searchable. It’s what allows you to search your photos for “flowers” and see all the photos with flowers in them.
Yeah, that’s what I said in my post. But my latest photo in the Photos app is from the 17th of January, so what has that process been doing taking 100’s of MBs of memory for the last three months? I have other random images/screenshots/etc on my disk but as far as I know those aren’t ML indexed.
But yes, it’s an inefficient and buggy process. I think it’s also what makes text selectable in images, which is why it is always running. Since we’re living through a RAM apocalypse you would think that Apple would find ways of making always-on processes more efficient.
I’m a macos user, and the only thing I’m really aware of is mediaanalysisd. It runs constantly and can’t be turned off, and occasionally it uses 50-100MB of ram but usually it passively uses 500MB-1GB of memory constantly, for seemingly no benefit. There’s no official documentation about what it does, but speculation that I’ve seen is that it’s for analysing your photos so that you can search by faces or by computer vision results, e.g. “car” or “mountain” etc, which would be reasonable. The problem with that theory is that I don’t take photos and I have almost none in my Photos app. So the other explanation is that apple announced a few years ago that they were going to scan people’s devices for known CSAM hashes and report any matches to authorities. So I really REALLY hate the idea that they’re using a 16th of my system memory to constantly scan my files in case they find any csam. That can fuck right off. But there’s no way at all to disable it. I occasionally Force Quit the process in Activity Monitor, but it just comes back within a few minutes.
But I completely acknowledge that that’s just speculation (although the csam detection thing was certainly announced by apple, they kinda shut up about it after the backlash and seem to have retracted it, certainly on iOS but maybe on macos too). So what is mediaanalysisd actually doing if not that? Nobody seems to really know. Certianly it isn’t using 1GB of ram to do anything that benefits me. e.g. right now it’s using 500MB for a mystery process: https://ibb.co/qfZD1TL
I’m not at all agreeing with the other user that “macos is spyware”, which is a bit ridiculous. But that particular daemon is a bugbear of mine, so I just took the opportunity to have my little rant lol 😂
Another example is that macOS periodically sends records of which apps you’re opening to Apple, due to OCSP cert revocation checks: https://www.howtogeek.com/701176/does-apple-track-every-mac-app-you-run-ocsp-explained/
I realize this is ostensibly to enable a security feature, but if your threat model includes American software companies & oligarchs tracking what you do on your computer, it’s still something to be aware of.
Mine surely does. Especially US-american.
This was only for icloud photos, and the reason they were considering that was to keep your photos encrypted in the cloud. this way the photos are analyzed locally on your device and kept private, unless they are found to be problematic obviously.
It surely just isn’t this one deamon. Despite “mediaanalysisd” sounds highly threatening to me. Especially if you aren’t allowed to disable it. How i would hate that on MY computer. Surely better than windows, where 5198231 services do that of which you can only disable 99%.
If you use ANY service in the apple cloud though, your data is, by definition, unsafe. If you don’t, you’re probably not the run-of-the-mill-apple-user that knows which service does what.
mediaanalysisd isn’t mysterious. It’s a ML process that evaluates your photos and videos and generates description metadata to make them text-searchable. It’s what allows you to search your photos for “flowers” and see all the photos with flowers in them.
Yeah, that’s what I said in my post. But my latest photo in the Photos app is from the 17th of January, so what has that process been doing taking 100’s of MBs of memory for the last three months? I have other random images/screenshots/etc on my disk but as far as I know those aren’t ML indexed.
Sorry! I entirely missed that!
But yes, it’s an inefficient and buggy process. I think it’s also what makes text selectable in images, which is why it is always running. Since we’re living through a RAM apocalypse you would think that Apple would find ways of making always-on processes more efficient.