Every Mac since macOS 13 (allegedly) ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about who you are, whom you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, what you do and when. In this post, we look into how this system works and give you a tool to peek into your own graph.
Anatomy of Apple's Personal Knowledge Graph
Security researchers Dario Pasquini and Michał Bazyli (Eighth Rank) dig into two little-documented macOS daemons, knowledgeconstructiond and intelligenceplatformd, that quietly build an on-device knowledge graph of you and the people around you: who you know, how they relate to you and each other, how you talk to them, where you go and when. It's cross-referenced from Contacts, Calendar, Photos, Messages, Mail, location, Screen Time and more, and kept as plaintext SQLite under ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform for Apple Intelligence to query. The post maps what the graph holds, releases iKnow, an open-source local dashboard for reading your own graph, and then runs a thought experiment on what an attacker with an abliterated LLM could do with such a "privacy single point of failure", a risk that applies to any personalised AI assistant.