macOS Builds Hidden Family Relationship Graph on Every Mac

Since macOS 13, Apple's Mac software has run background daemons that construct a detailed graph of a user's relationships, contacts, communications, and movements. Security researchers The Bishop and The Knight found the data stored in plaintext SQLite databases under ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform, with a core triple store holding entity and predicate data along with confidence scores. Machine learning classifiers reportedly infer family roles, such as identifying a partner or child, by combining signals from contacts, photos, and Family Sharing. Their analysis also found that deleted contact information persists in a secondary table for roughly 48 hours. The researchers warn that concentrating this data creates a privacy single point of failure if it were accessed by malicious actors.