Every Mac quietly builds a graph of who you know and how they're related
Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier
Since 2022, macOS has shipped two undocumented daemons, knowledgeconstructiond and intelligenceplatformd, that cross-reference Contacts, Photos, Calendar, Messages, Mail, location, and Screen Time to build a personal knowledge graph in ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform. The graph.db triple store uses 181 entity classes and 278 predicates, including kinship and employer links, and is meant to feed LLM retrieval. The authors open-source iKnow, a local dashboard for reading your own graph, and explore how this single point of privacy failure could be abused.
Every Mac since 2022 ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you: who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, with whom, what you do and when.
- thomascountz
At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.
A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern.
If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat relentless transcription.
With Recaps and this social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?
- elgertam
> What if I told you that every Mac since 2022 ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about you and the people around you: who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, with whom, what you do and when.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, given that Photos knows the names and faces of all the loved ones in my life. Not just people, in fact, but the "furry friends." And Calendar and Reminders knows where I go. And so forth.
The feature is genuinely useful. Only thing is it should be opt-in and have guarantees about where/how the data is stored, such as encrypted-at-rest. I trust Apple with that more than all other Big Tech combined, but still in a "trust, but verify" way.
- infwhispers
I am the author of the research. Please, feel free to ask me anything. Also, check out the followup research: https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-...
- aetherspawn
This is context for local LLMs like Siri so that when you say “Text James and tell him …” it knows which James you mean.
Likewise, you could say “Tell my boss I’m not coming in tomorrow” and it would have to know who your boss is.
We could get super angry about this, but seeing as it’s fully local and doesn’t leave the device, it really doesn’t seem like a big deal. Is it much different to your car remembering who you call and where you go at what times for navigation purposes?
- Ungh
Just spent 30 minutes poking around this. It's horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.
Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.
- jwilcoxson
Maybe the technical details weren’t available, but I thought that we already knew this was a thing? I was aware that my Mac and iPhone were indexing various sources like this on device for Siri.
- oldfuture
This is deeply troubling,
this data is unnecessary collected and impossible to opt out from apparently and may be read at any point in the future by an attacker or by apple itself without notice
this is a class action lawsuit in the making
- hoherd
Something that is additionally concerning is that you apparently cannot read your own data:
$ ls -la ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
total 0
ls: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
$ find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
/Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
$ sudo find ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
/Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform
find: /Users/USERNAME/Library/IntelligencePlatform: Operation not permitted
Edit: I was wrong. The snarky comment below is right.