SEVERE Privacy Violation!

If you have iCloud disabled, Infuse will not use iCloud to sync data, and any fetched metadata will be cached locally on your device only. Infuse will work fine without iCloud, but you will not be able to enjoy the many benefits that iCloud Sync provides.

Many people find iCloud Sync useful for backing up their data and keeping multiple devices in sync. For this reason, it is enabled by default when installing a fresh copy of Infuse. If you installed Infuse and added data before disabling iCloud Sync, then some data may have been sent to iCloud. Or, if there was data previously synced to iCloud Infuse would attempt to pull that down to make setup easier. Both of these are normal and expected behaviors.

If you prefer not to use iCloud for anything, here are some tips to avoid using iCloud Sync in the future.

  1. Disable iCloud Sync in Infuse
  2. (optional) Disable Infuse under iOS Settings > iCloud > Apps Using iCloud > Show All
  3. Delete previous synced data via iOS Settings > iCloud > Manage Account Storage

Lastly, data synced to iCloud is not accessible by us or any other 3rd parties. Apple also recently added Advanced Privacy Controls which adds an extra layer of protection for those who prefer to enable it.

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James,
I think you are sincere in your belief that what you state is correct. However I have had empirical evidence that this is not true. The problems I have had with MetaData loss and corruption have ONLY occurred when my iCloud was overloaded, or when Infuse on my mobile devices accessed iCloud. Almost within an hour of that happenning I had a total metadata loss on my AppleTV Infuse App when I returned to use it. The AppleTV Infuse app ABSOLUTELY had iCloud synching/caching disabled. Unless you are looking at the actual Infuse source code and and thoroughly understanding it, and can prove to all that it is not possible, I will maintain my position as I have now seen and painfully experienced this with my own eyes several times, and have now spent dozens of wasted hours in total repairing my foreign language and other entries. I am also approaching this from the perspective of being a programmer and coder in an earlier period of my life and know full well how possible this scenario is. I wonder how many others that have had frustrating MetaData issues and posting for help on the forums might have been dealing with similar problems unknowingly?? Also, I, and others, have suggested and asked in several prior posts to have an option to backup our MetaData locally on our own laptops, hard drives or USB sticks. There is ABSOLUTELY NO reason for such an option not to be made available from a coding or programming perspective. Yet Firecore insists on this nonsense of the ‘benefits’ of the ‘convenience’ of the Cloud storage to restore backups easily. WHY IS THAT? Again, the location(s) of backup MetaData files should make absolutely NO DIFFERENCE in the functionality of Infuse. A backup should be able to load from where ever Infuse is pointed to look at. I am taking this issue VERY seriously and awaiting an informed reply.

You can disable iCloud by following the options I’ve listed above.

In fact, if you use option 2 this will disable iCloud for Infuse on the system level, so it will be disabled regardless of what you have the ‘iCloud Sync’ option within Infuse set to.

If you would like to see an option for Infuse to use something like a NAS as a backup point, you can follow this thread.

Yes I saw that in the earlier reply. Based on my previous posts and concerns about privacy several months ago, why was this not put forwarded then? It is misleading to have a disable icloud synch option in the app menu, and not inform us of the system setting in IOS. Thank you for this suggestion. It still does not address the issue of why MetaData crashed even with synch turned off when my mobile devices uploaded to my icloud account with synch turned off. AlsoI have followed that thread, and still nothing has been done to allow for a local backup that is easy to point to. A lot of complicated suggestions but no simple solution.

Yeah, this will happen when metadata gets flushed and Infuse isn’t able to recover a users’ customized settings from somewhere convenient like their iCloud account.

I agree with you here. I see James himself added the link to the request thread, so he’s well aware we’ve long wanted this option … but it certainly doesn’t feel high on his priority list.

Personally my security concern was giving Apple (a media producer) access to my Infuse library, which hypothetically might include content produced by the same (and those of their industry peers), which they are keenly aware has never been released absent DRM encryption specifically intended to prevent someone like me loading copies of said content on my personal server … and my being a current subscriber to their AppleTV+ service (and others) not being, in their eyes, any sort of excuse for such hypothetically reprehensible behavior.

I’m told that such Infuse library data is encrypted before being sent to and stored on Apple’s servers and never actually visible to any potentially curious eyes in Cupertino … but whether this is true or not, I can’t say. Regardless, since using Infuse on multiple devices without iCloud Sync enabled is a total drag, I’ve resigned myself to simply crossing my fingers and trusting them. :man_shrugging:t2:

The IOS settings you are referring to are for mobile devices, such a setting does not exist on AppleTV OS

It should NOT be hard to implement a pointer on all your devices to access a local metadata backup.

I wouldn’t think so, but there are lots of different devices and places Infuse allows users to pull their data from (both local to users and on various cloud services) and Infuse would need to secure write-permissions to each…

… and my software coding proficiency is sadly limited to my having written some killer text adventure games in 1980s Atari Basic … so I really couldn’t say.

Nothing insurmountable. Sharing /Read /Write permissions are simple to set…

Lest there be any confusion, I too very much want Infuse to permit me to instruct it to save the metadata required to keep my multiple instances of Infuse (on various Apple devices) in sync on my local NAS. I desire this not only due to my privacy concerns and wish not to need to pay for an iCloud subscription, but to allow continued use in absence of an external internet connection … but I understand why defaulting everyone to iCloud services instead of constantly troubleshooting access issues to a thousand different remote storage services and server operating system varieties makes sense for Firecore.

So in other words, the ‘benefits and convenience’ is mostly for Firecore.

I’m guessing Firecore might argue that utilizing a single synchronization system which every user has access to and which Firecore can mostly keep working as intended benefits their users, too; as compared to an alternative where Firecore is unable to keep working a synchronization system dependent on Firecore’s ability to keep control of individual users’ off-device databases, potentially located on a multitude of users’ various wired local and/or remote servers and/or plethora of cloud storage service options?

Probably so, semantics is a wonderful thing. But the main issue remains: WHY does ATV Infuse still somehow access iCloud even when that option is expressly disabled? It should NOT be happening at all. I have a feeling it is an error in coding where Infuse still searches for the backup cache even if it hasn’t uploaded one. But of course, why would it see the backup caches of the IOS mobile devices and interpret it as its own? I can see scenarios where the mobile devices might have different directories/folders shared. Multiple issues, all erroneous are at play here. I am positive that at least some of the metadata loss problems that others have been frustrated about are caused by these errors.

Perhaps the issue was related to iCloud pushing updates to the Apple TV system since you were doing stuff on iOS and it somehow messed up the Apple TV cache, like it was in the process of clearing it or something. I know it sounds like it wasn’t a coincidence, but maybe it didn’t have to do with Apple TV version of infuse at all.

If this was a one - of situation I would consider it. But I had multiple meta data loss issues that I have positively connected to icloud metadata accessing even with icloud synch disabled

Do you have network captures available to show this behaviour? You could post the pcap files here

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i was not running any network capture or sniffer tools. I had not been experiencing any problems and then my ATV4K Infuse Pro MetaData crashed unexpectedly when I installed / accessed the apps on my ipad and iphone for the first time in almost a year. And NO I am NOT going to try and induce a crash just to be get a traffic capture. I have already wasted dozens of hours repairing and reentering my metadata many other times and DO NOT WANT TO DO IT AGAIN. But the conditions are simple, I have SMB share setup, accessing folders on several shared folders on several hard drives, scraping from TMDB, Infuse iCloud synch turned OFF, files shared on a Windows OS. It should be fairly simple to recreate this behaviour by other motivated individuals willing to setup their AppleTVs and Mobile Devices the way I did. I have experienced with my own eyes the absolute cause and effect correlation/ situation I have described. I also posted similar concerns regarding problematic/unwanted iCloud caching issues causing MetaData crash issues back in May or June 2022, detailing exactly what happened when my iCloud storage exceeded limits accidentally.

I remember this report. The logs you sent in indicated iCloud Sync never started, as the device was not signed into iCloud.

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Advanced Data Protection (end-to-end encryption) for iCloud

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