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Wouldn’t a better analogy be: I run a shipping company. You want to send a package. It is illegal for me to handle and ship certain things (e.g., nuclear bombs

Wouldn’t a better analogy be: I run a shipping company. You want to send a package. It is illegal for me to handle and ship certain things (e.g., nuclear bombs). Further, I don’t want to handle any of those things. Furthermore, if I find those things (e.g., when a package breaks open), I am legally required to alert the authorities. What assurance can you provide to the me (the shipping company) that there is nothing illegal in your box? Suppose I ask you to attest but then I find out later that a bunch of people have been lying on their attestation forms which means I have been unknowingly, undesirably made party to illegal activities? Every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package and looking. Suppose my shipping company’s clever engineers invent a detector I can give to you that doesn’t require me to look inside the package but can tell me with some certainty that there are no illegal things in the package. What statistical properties would the detector need to have to satisfy you that this was better than forcing every package open?

wrs 5y ago
This isn’t an analogy, it’s just reality, right up to the sentence “every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package”. Every shipping company doesn’t open every package today, and in the real world there are no magical package opening robots, though there are some specialized detectors. So we already know from experiment that imperfect detection is better than forcing every package open.
- dpierce9 5y ago
  It is an analogy to what Apple is doing. Analogically you are sending something to Apple to handle for you (either store or ship) and they have legal obligations and business requirements. Every other company manages those by ‘opening your package’ is analogous to server-side image scanning like PhotoDNA.
  - wrs 5y ago
    PhotoDNA is analogous to the detectors. The analog of “opening every package” would be human review of every picture. We already have real world evidence for “what statistical properties the detector would need to have” to be better than opening every package, because the real delivery companies are literally doing this today. There’s nothing hypothetical about the question.
    - dpierce9 5y ago
      Perhaps the analogy could have been clearer and the hypothetical more broad. I was trying to press on the difference between the shipper doing a very specific test vs some functionally similar but unknown test being done by the shipping company (the server-side test is unknown, it could be hashes, non-hash based image comparison, or manual review). I wasn’t asking about something like the sensitivity or specificity of those tests, rather, why we would be fine with one and not the other when the difference is not whether but when, where, and what test is applied.
- gugtude 5y ago
  Bomb sniffing dogs are your “magical package opening robots”
mrweasel 5y ago
That’s a pretty good analogy, but it’s what you do with the detectors answer that’s the problem. If you just say: “The detect says no, we won’t accept your package”. Then there’s no problem. Apple could do the same, simply letting the user know that this/these images cannot be uploaded to iCloud, and then do nothing else. The problem is that the results of these scans are pretty useless. They don’t prove anything. While Apple knows that law enforcement and politicians will believe it’s 100% correct, because they don’t even understand that DNA can be wrong, and demand customer names from Apple.
deleted 5y ago
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wrs 5y ago

This isn’t an analogy, it’s just reality, right up to the sentence “every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package”. Every shipping company doesn’t open every package today, and in the real world there are no magical package opening robots, though there are some specialized detectors. So we already know from experiment that imperfect detection is better than forcing every package open.

dpierce9 5y ago
It is an analogy to what Apple is doing. Analogically you are sending something to Apple to handle for you (either store or ship) and they have legal obligations and business requirements. Every other company manages those by ‘opening your package’ is analogous to server-side image scanning like PhotoDNA.
- wrs 5y ago
  PhotoDNA is analogous to the detectors. The analog of “opening every package” would be human review of every picture. We already have real world evidence for “what statistical properties the detector would need to have” to be better than opening every package, because the real delivery companies are literally doing this today. There’s nothing hypothetical about the question.
  - dpierce9 5y ago
    Perhaps the analogy could have been clearer and the hypothetical more broad. I was trying to press on the difference between the shipper doing a very specific test vs some functionally similar but unknown test being done by the shipping company (the server-side test is unknown, it could be hashes, non-hash based image comparison, or manual review). I wasn’t asking about something like the sensitivity or specificity of those tests, rather, why we would be fine with one and not the other when the difference is not whether but when, where, and what test is applied.
gugtude 5y ago
Bomb sniffing dogs are your “magical package opening robots”

mrweasel 5y ago

That’s a pretty good analogy, but it’s what you do with the detectors answer that’s the problem. If you just say: “The detect says no, we won’t accept your package”. Then there’s no problem. Apple could do the same, simply letting the user know that this/these images cannot be uploaded to iCloud, and then do nothing else. The problem is that the results of these scans are pretty useless. They don’t prove anything. While Apple knows that law enforcement and politicians will believe it’s 100% correct, because they don’t even understand that DNA can be wrong, and demand customer names from Apple.

deleted 5y ago

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