Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier(8rank.ai)
846 points by infwhispers 4 days ago | 449 comments
tl;dr: Since 2022, macOS ships two undocumented daemons (knowledgeconstructiond and intelligenceplatformd) that build a local SQLite knowledge graph of the user's life, cross-referencing Contacts, Photos, Calendar, Messages, Mail, location, and Screen Time into 181 entity classes and 278 predicates. It goes beyond copying data: shipped XGBoost classifiers score who counts as "family" using 144 features—including things like "photosPersonPosteriorProbabilityGivenSaturdayNight"—and an on-device LLM infers names and relationships for faces. Deleted entries persist in an expired_stable_graph table, and the author released an open-source dashboard (iKnow) to inspect it.
HN Discussion:
  • ↑Exhausted and socially concerned about pervasive data collection eroding conversational ephemerality
  • ↑Horrified upon inspection, especially since Siri/intelligence features were disabled yet collection continues
  • ↑Outraged this is unethical and grounds for legal action against Apple
  • ↓This is necessary context for local LLM assistants and acceptable since it stays on-device
  • ~Not surprising given existing Photos/Calendar features; on-device processing is preferable to cloud alternatives