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As far as I can see: 1. This is a serious attempt to build a privacy preserving solution to child pornography. 2. The complaints are all slippery slope argume

by zepto 5y ago

As far as I can see: 1. This is a serious attempt to build a privacy preserving solution to child pornography. 2. The complaints are all slippery slope arguments that governments will force Apple to abuse the mechanism. These are clearly real concerns and even Tim Cook admits that if you build a back door, bad people will use it. However: Child pornography and the related abuse is widely thought of as a massive problem, that is facilitated by encrypted communication and digital photography. People do care about this issue. ‘Think of the children’ is a great pretext for increasing surveillance, because it isn’t an irrational fear. So: where are the proposals for a better solution? I see here people who themselves are afraid of the real consequences of government/corporate surveillance, and whose fear prevents them from empathizing with the people who are afraid of the equally real consequences of organized child sexual exploitation. ‘My fear is more important than your fear’, is the root of ordinary political polarization. What would be a hacker alternative would be to come up with a technical solution that solves for both fears at the same time. This is what Apple has attempted, but the wisdom here is that they have failed. Can anyone propose anything better, or are we stuck with just politics as usual? Edit: added ‘widely thought of as’ to make it clear that I am referring to a widely held position, not that I am arguing for it.

MikeUt 5y ago
> So: where are the proposals for a better solution? Better policing and child protective services to catch child abuse at the root, instead of panicking about the digital files it produces? If you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that real-world surveillance has massively increased, which should enable the police to catch predators more easily. Why count only privacy-betraying technology as a "solution", while ignoring the rise of police and surveillance capabilities? Edit as reply because two downvotes means I am "posting too fast, please slow down" (thank you for respecting me enough to tell me when I can resume posting /s): > How do you police people reaching out to children via messaging with sexual content? First, this is one small element of child abuse - you want to prevent child rape, merely being exposed to sexual content is nowhere near severe enough to merit such serious privacy invasion. To prevent the actual abuse, one could use the near-omnipresent facial recognition cameras, license plate readers, messaging metadata, to find when a stranger is messaging or stalking a child, DNA evidence after the fact that is a deterrent to other offenders, phone location data, etc. etc. At first I thought I didn't have to spell this out. Second, to answer your question: very easily. With parental controls, a decades old technology that is compatible with privacy and open-source. The parent can be the admin of the child's devices, and have access to their otherwise encrypted messages. There is no need to delegate surveillance (of everyone, not just children) to governments and corporations, when we have such a simple, obvious, already existing solution. It frankly boggles the mind how one could overlook it, especially compared to how technically complex Apple's approach is. Does the mention of child abuse simply cause one's thinking to shut down, and accept as gospel anything Apple or the government says, without applying the smallest bit of scrutiny?
- zepto 5y ago
  How do you police people reaching out to children via messaging with sexual content? > Why count only privacy-betraying technology as a "solution", while ignoring the rise of police and surveillance capabilities? I don’t. But if your solution is ‘just police more’, you need to explain how the police should detect people who are grooming children by sending images to them.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  You have overlooked that the system for protecting minors from sexual messaging /is/ the parental controls you wish it was, and is /not/ the serious privacy invasion you think it is. It is on-device only, it only alerts the parents, in the condition that the parents enable it and the child continues past a warning informing them that their parent will find out if they continue. > "The parent can be the admin of the child's devices, and have access to their otherwise encrypted messages." Apple have done even better - the parent doesn't get access to all their messages (at least not as part of this system). This is not the same system as the photo-scanning and authority-alerting one.
  - MikeUt 5y ago
    > You have overlooked No, the comment I replied to overlooked it. > This is not the same system as the photo-scanning and authority-alerting one. Which makes fighting child-grooming an even worse argument in favor of the authority-alerting system.
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
Yes. “We must do something, “It’s for the children”, “Even if it saves just one person”. No one has ever used this triple fallacy before. How big do you really think the market is on kiddie porn that there are people storing it plainly on their iPhones and are “safe” because they aren’t uploading it to iCloud? This is bullshit through and through. The best case is this is the step Apple needs to get E2E iCloud storage, to prove they’re doing enough while maintaining privacy. The worst case is that if their is potential for a list and reporting to be abused, it will. There seems to be no scenario for the best case to exist without the worst case.
- zepto 5y ago
  Your position is to simply deny that child porn or predation is a serious problem. I outlined that this was one of the sides in the debate - I.e. you take position 2, and have no empathy for position 1. The problem is that this is a political trap. You can’t win position 2 by painting technologists as uncaring or dismissive. ‘Think of the children’ works for a reason.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    I don’t believe people sharing child porn on iPhones is a serious problem, no. Laptops, desktops, sure. My position is that this system has far more likely harm than potential good. It’s not worth it. It has nothing to do with not recognizing another side.
    - zepto 5y ago
      Do you believe that sexual predators sharing images with children on iPhones is a problem? > It has nothing to do with not recognizing another side. It seems like you are simply stating that the other side’s priorities are wrong. That seems like a reasonable belief that won’t help anyone with the problem of creeping surveillance.
      - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
4f832fd4-8f08 5y ago
>2. The complaints are all slippery slope arguments that governments will force Apple to abuse the mechanism. These are clearly real concerns and even Tim Cook admits that if you build a back door, bad people will use it. I don't know how old you are but for anyone over 30 the slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy, it's a law of nature. I've seen it happen again and again. The only way to win is to be so unreasonable that you defend literal child porn so you don't need to defend your right to own curtains.
bisRepetita 5y ago
>Child pornography and the related abuse is a massive problem >proposals for better solution How do you define "massive"? What makes you think that current approach is not working well enough? Of course, it's really bad as soon as the very first case. But we need to go beyond the sensationalist articles which talk about millions of pictures outthere. Even though this is, yes, a problem. In the US, it looks like the number of child pornography cases is going down each year, from 1,593 in 2016 to 1,023 cases in 2020: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/quick-facts/Child_Pornography_FY20.pdf https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... So yes, there is a problem, but I would love some to see some justification that the problem is actually as massive as people imply, or getting worse. Or if they have a political goal in mind. And it feels to me like we talk about it a lot more, there is less taboo or social protections for perpetrators about it, which must help to fight this more efficiently than in the past.
- zepto 5y ago
  > child pornography cases is going down each year, from 1,593 in 2016 to 1,023 cases in 2020 Sam Harris (and the FBI) would likely say this is because detection is getting harder thanks to encryption. The only authority on this is actually the FBI, but I presume you wouldn’t trust them. That distrust is reasonable, but irrelevant. What matters is that many people will trust them and see the fear as legitimate. Arguing over numbers with me is irrelevant. I’m saying both positions are reasonable fears. You cannot win by denying that. One winning move would be to take the problem seriously and work out a better technical solution. There may be others.
  - bisRepetita 5y ago
    >One winning move would be to take the problem seriously What makes you think that the problem is not taken seriously? I am no specialist, but it looks like cases are investigated and people are going to jail. You say that it is not the case, so I am curious what leads you to this statement. Yes, policies can be based on fears and opinion, but some numbers and rationality usually help make better decisions. I'd love to hear something more precise than fears and personal opinion, including the FBI of course.
sathackr 5y ago
I appreciate this well thought out and logical approach. The issue I have is with the way this is presented. I actually really like the local-only features related to making underage users second-guess sending/viewing potentially harmful content. IMO this is a huge problem especially since most do not have the context to understand how things live forever on the internet, and is likely a source of a large percentage of this "Known CSAM material" in circulation. I think it's a great step in the right direction. But the scan-and-report content on your device approach is where it becomes problematic. It's sold as protecting privacy because of a magic box "the cryptographic technology" somehow prevents abuse or use outside the scope it is intended for. But just like this entire function can be added with an update, it can also be modified with an update. Apple pretends the true reality of this feature is somehow solved by technology, glosses over the technical details with catchphrases that 99.9% of people that read it won't understand. "It's 100% safe and effective and CANNOT IN ANY WAY BE ABUSED because, cryptographic technology." They're forcing their users to swallow a sugar-coated pill with very deep ramifications that only a very small percentage will fully comprehend. I'm 100% for doing anything reasonably possible in the advancement of this cause. But you're correct in that this is "one fear is more important than another fear." And I don't think anyone can say how slippery this slope is or where it can go. I also don't really feel like you can even quantify in a way that they can be compared the harm caused by CSAM or mass surveillance. So a judgement call on "which is worse" really isn't possible because the possibilities for new and continued atrocities in both cases are infinite. But at least in the US, a line is crossed when something inside your private life is subject to review and search by anyone else even when you have not committed a crime. If you want to search my house, you must, at least on paper, establish probable cause before a judge will grant you a search warrant. "It's okay, these specially trained agents are only here to look for just drugs. They've promised they won't look at anything else and aren't allowed to arrest you unless they find a large quantity of drugs" -- Would you be okay with these agents searching every house in the nation in the name of preventing drug abuse(which also is extremely harmful to many people including children even when they are not direct users)? The argument "well just don't use apple" doesn't stand either. A landlord can't just deputize someone to rummage through my house looking for known illegal things to report. Even though it's technically not "my house" and you could argue that if I don't like it, well I should just move somewhere else. But I don't think that can be argued as reasonable. Our phones are quickly becoming like our houses in that many people have large portions of their private lives inside them. I can't quite put my finger on the exact argument so I apologize for not being able to articulate this more clearly, but there is something with removing the rights of large groups of people to protect a much smaller subset of those people, from an act perpetrated by bad actors. You are somehow allowing bad actors to inflict further damage, in excess of the direct results of their actions, on huge populations of people here. I know there is a more eloquent way to descibe this concept, but doing so just doesn't seem like the right course of action. And I'm sorry but I am not smarter than all of the people that worked on this, so I don't have a better solution that would accomplish the same goal, but I know that this solution has a huge potential to enable massive amounts of abuse by nations who do not respect what much of the world considers basic human rights.
danShumway 5y ago
> Can anyone propose anything better Widespread education about how child abuse usually works in the real world outside of movies, public examination of what tools we have available and whether they're being used effectively, very public stats about how prevalent the problem is and what direction it's moving in. Better media that more accurately reflects how these problems play out for real people and that doesn't use them as a cheap gimmick to pray on people's fears to raise narrative stakes. Better education about the benefits of encryption and the risks of abuse, better education about how back doors play out in the real world and how they are abused both by governments and by individual abusers. Better education about the fail-rate of these systems. > Child pornography and the related abuse is widely thought of as a massive problem, that is facilitated by encrypted communication and digital photography. Most people don't have a basis for this instinct, they believe it because they were taught it, because it's what the movies tell them, because it fits their cultural perception of technology, because it's what the CIA and FBI tell them. Unless they're basing their fear on something other than emotion and instinct, there is no technical or political solution that will reduce their fear. It's all useless. Only education and cultural shifts will make them less afraid. If you survey the US, over 50% of adults will tell you that crime today is at the same level or worse than it was in 1950s, an absurd position that has no basis in reality. So what, should we form a police state? At some point, caring about the real problems we have in the real world means learning to tell people that being scared of technology is not a good enough justification on its own to ban it. Nothing else will work. People's irrational fears by and large will not be alleviated by any technical solutions. They won't even be alleviated by what Apple is doing, parents who have an irrational fear of privacy are not going to have that fear lessened because Apple introduced this scanning feature. They will still be afraid.
babesh 5y ago
There is no end to the loss of privacy in the name of safety if your bogeyman is increasingly sophisticated actors. The more sophisticated child molesters out there will find out about what Apple is doing and quickly avoid it. Isn’t that what the FBI is complaining about, that they have grown increasingly sophisticated? The more sophisticated privacy adherents will also avoid Apple and resort to end to encryption and offline tools. What is the actual outcome? You won’t get more arrests of child molesters. Instead, you get a security apparatus that can be weaponized against the masses. Furthermore, you will have the FBI complaining that child molesters are increasingly out of their reach and demanding greater powers. They will then try to mandate child porn detectors built into every phone. This creep has been occurring for years. Go read the Snowden disclosures. First your cell phone companies worked with the government for mass harvesting of data. No need for any suspicion because they promise not to look unless there is one. That wasn’t enough because the data was encrypted. Second they had the companies holding the data snoop in on data that was shared. That wasn’t enough. Third they had the companies holding the data snoop in on data EVEN when it wasn’t shared, just when it was uploaded to them. Not enough for them! Now they will have it done on device prior to uploading. Does this mean that if it fails to upload, it gets scanned anyway. Why yes! Next they will have it done on device even if it never is held by the company and never shared and never even intended to be uploaded. The obvious goal is that the government has access to ALL data in the name of safety. No need for warrants. Don’t worry about it. They won’t look unless there was any suspicion. Opps never mind that, we will just have tools look. There is no end to the loss of privacy in the name of safety if your bogeyman is increasingly sophisticated actors. Why isn’t this obvious to everyone? Anyone old enough to remember the Clipper chips?
- zepto 5y ago
  > The more sophisticated child molesters out there will find out about what Apple is doing and quickly avoid it. I think this is exactly what Apple wants to he the result of their their iMessage scanning. They are not in this to make arrests. They just want parents to feel safe letting children use their products. Driving predators to use different tools is fine with them. As far as the FBI goes, this is presumably not their preference, but it’s still good for them if it makes predation a little harder.
webmobdev 5y ago
The intention to prevent child sexual abuse material is indeed laudable. But the "solution" is not. Especially when we all know that this "solution" gives a legal backing to corporates to do even more data mining on its users, and can easily be extended (to scan even more "illegal" content) and abused into a pervasive surveillance network desired by a lot of government around the world. For those wondering what's wrong with this, two hard-earned rights in a democracy go for a toss here: 1. The law presumes we are all innocent until proven guilty. 2. We have the right against self-incrimination. Pervasive surveillance like this starts with the presumption that we are all guilty of something ("if you are innocent, why are you scared of such surveillance?" or "what do you have to hide if you are innocent?"). The right against self-incrimination is linked to the first doctrine because compelling an accused to testify transfers the burden of proving innocence to the accused, instead of requiring the government to prove his guilt.
- zepto 5y ago
  > But the "solution" is not. Agreed, that’s my point, and I would say that your comment outlines some good principles a better solution might respect, although it’s worth noting that those principles have only ever constrained the legal system. Your employer, teacher, customers, vendors, parents etc, have never been constrained in these ways.

by zepto 5y ago

MikeUt 5y ago

> So: where are the proposals for a better solution? Better policing and child protective services to catch child abuse at the root, instead of panicking about the digital files it produces? If you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that real-world surveillance has massively increased, which should enable the police to catch predators more easily. Why count only privacy-betraying technology as a "solution", while ignoring the rise of police and surveillance capabilities? Edit as reply because two downvotes means I am "posting too fast, please slow down" (thank you for respecting me enough to tell me when I can resume posting /s): > How do you police people reaching out to children via messaging with sexual content? First, this is one small element of child abuse - you want to prevent child rape, merely being exposed to sexual content is nowhere near severe enough to merit such serious privacy invasion. To prevent the actual abuse, one could use the near-omnipresent facial recognition cameras, license plate readers, messaging metadata, to find when a stranger is messaging or stalking a child, DNA evidence after the fact that is a deterrent to other offenders, phone location data, etc. etc. At first I thought I didn't have to spell this out. Second, to answer your question: very easily. With parental controls, a decades old technology that is compatible with privacy and open-source. The parent can be the admin of the child's devices, and have access to their otherwise encrypted messages. There is no need to delegate surveillance (of everyone, not just children) to governments and corporations, when we have such a simple, obvious, already existing solution. It frankly boggles the mind how one could overlook it, especially compared to how technically complex Apple's approach is. Does the mention of child abuse simply cause one's thinking to shut down, and accept as gospel anything Apple or the government says, without applying the smallest bit of scrutiny?

zepto 5y ago
How do you police people reaching out to children via messaging with sexual content? > Why count only privacy-betraying technology as a "solution", while ignoring the rise of police and surveillance capabilities? I don’t. But if your solution is ‘just police more’, you need to explain how the police should detect people who are grooming children by sending images to them.
jodrellblank 5y ago
You have overlooked that the system for protecting minors from sexual messaging /is/ the parental controls you wish it was, and is /not/ the serious privacy invasion you think it is. It is on-device only, it only alerts the parents, in the condition that the parents enable it and the child continues past a warning informing them that their parent will find out if they continue. > "The parent can be the admin of the child's devices, and have access to their otherwise encrypted messages." Apple have done even better - the parent doesn't get access to all their messages (at least not as part of this system). This is not the same system as the photo-scanning and authority-alerting one.
- MikeUt 5y ago
  > You have overlooked No, the comment I replied to overlooked it. > This is not the same system as the photo-scanning and authority-alerting one. Which makes fighting child-grooming an even worse argument in favor of the authority-alerting system.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

Yes. “We must do something, “It’s for the children”, “Even if it saves just one person”. No one has ever used this triple fallacy before. How big do you really think the market is on kiddie porn that there are people storing it plainly on their iPhones and are “safe” because they aren’t uploading it to iCloud? This is bullshit through and through. The best case is this is the step Apple needs to get E2E iCloud storage, to prove they’re doing enough while maintaining privacy. The worst case is that if their is potential for a list and reporting to be abused, it will. There seems to be no scenario for the best case to exist without the worst case.

zepto 5y ago
Your position is to simply deny that child porn or predation is a serious problem. I outlined that this was one of the sides in the debate - I.e. you take position 2, and have no empathy for position 1. The problem is that this is a political trap. You can’t win position 2 by painting technologists as uncaring or dismissive. ‘Think of the children’ works for a reason.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  I don’t believe people sharing child porn on iPhones is a serious problem, no. Laptops, desktops, sure. My position is that this system has far more likely harm than potential good. It’s not worth it. It has nothing to do with not recognizing another side.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Do you believe that sexual predators sharing images with children on iPhones is a problem? > It has nothing to do with not recognizing another side. It seems like you are simply stating that the other side’s priorities are wrong. That seems like a reasonable belief that won’t help anyone with the problem of creeping surveillance.
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

4f832fd4-8f08 5y ago

>2. The complaints are all slippery slope arguments that governments will force Apple to abuse the mechanism. These are clearly real concerns and even Tim Cook admits that if you build a back door, bad people will use it. I don't know how old you are but for anyone over 30 the slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy, it's a law of nature. I've seen it happen again and again. The only way to win is to be so unreasonable that you defend literal child porn so you don't need to defend your right to own curtains.

bisRepetita 5y ago

>Child pornography and the related abuse is a massive problem >proposals for better solution How do you define "massive"? What makes you think that current approach is not working well enough? Of course, it's really bad as soon as the very first case. But we need to go beyond the sensationalist articles which talk about millions of pictures outthere. Even though this is, yes, a problem. In the US, it looks like the number of child pornography cases is going down each year, from 1,593 in 2016 to 1,023 cases in 2020: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/quick-facts/Child_Pornography_FY20.pdf https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... So yes, there is a problem, but I would love some to see some justification that the problem is actually as massive as people imply, or getting worse. Or if they have a political goal in mind. And it feels to me like we talk about it a lot more, there is less taboo or social protections for perpetrators about it, which must help to fight this more efficiently than in the past.

zepto 5y ago
> child pornography cases is going down each year, from 1,593 in 2016 to 1,023 cases in 2020 Sam Harris (and the FBI) would likely say this is because detection is getting harder thanks to encryption. The only authority on this is actually the FBI, but I presume you wouldn’t trust them. That distrust is reasonable, but irrelevant. What matters is that many people will trust them and see the fear as legitimate. Arguing over numbers with me is irrelevant. I’m saying both positions are reasonable fears. You cannot win by denying that. One winning move would be to take the problem seriously and work out a better technical solution. There may be others.
- bisRepetita 5y ago
  >One winning move would be to take the problem seriously What makes you think that the problem is not taken seriously? I am no specialist, but it looks like cases are investigated and people are going to jail. You say that it is not the case, so I am curious what leads you to this statement. Yes, policies can be based on fears and opinion, but some numbers and rationality usually help make better decisions. I'd love to hear something more precise than fears and personal opinion, including the FBI of course.

sathackr 5y ago

I appreciate this well thought out and logical approach. The issue I have is with the way this is presented. I actually really like the local-only features related to making underage users second-guess sending/viewing potentially harmful content. IMO this is a huge problem especially since most do not have the context to understand how things live forever on the internet, and is likely a source of a large percentage of this "Known CSAM material" in circulation. I think it's a great step in the right direction. But the scan-and-report content on your device approach is where it becomes problematic. It's sold as protecting privacy because of a magic box "the cryptographic technology" somehow prevents abuse or use outside the scope it is intended for. But just like this entire function can be added with an update, it can also be modified with an update. Apple pretends the true reality of this feature is somehow solved by technology, glosses over the technical details with catchphrases that 99.9% of people that read it won't understand. "It's 100% safe and effective and CANNOT IN ANY WAY BE ABUSED because, cryptographic technology." They're forcing their users to swallow a sugar-coated pill with very deep ramifications that only a very small percentage will fully comprehend. I'm 100% for doing anything reasonably possible in the advancement of this cause. But you're correct in that this is "one fear is more important than another fear." And I don't think anyone can say how slippery this slope is or where it can go. I also don't really feel like you can even quantify in a way that they can be compared the harm caused by CSAM or mass surveillance. So a judgement call on "which is worse" really isn't possible because the possibilities for new and continued atrocities in both cases are infinite. But at least in the US, a line is crossed when something inside your private life is subject to review and search by anyone else even when you have not committed a crime. If you want to search my house, you must, at least on paper, establish probable cause before a judge will grant you a search warrant. "It's okay, these specially trained agents are only here to look for just drugs. They've promised they won't look at anything else and aren't allowed to arrest you unless they find a large quantity of drugs" -- Would you be okay with these agents searching every house in the nation in the name of preventing drug abuse(which also is extremely harmful to many people including children even when they are not direct users)? The argument "well just don't use apple" doesn't stand either. A landlord can't just deputize someone to rummage through my house looking for known illegal things to report. Even though it's technically not "my house" and you could argue that if I don't like it, well I should just move somewhere else. But I don't think that can be argued as reasonable. Our phones are quickly becoming like our houses in that many people have large portions of their private lives inside them. I can't quite put my finger on the exact argument so I apologize for not being able to articulate this more clearly, but there is something with removing the rights of large groups of people to protect a much smaller subset of those people, from an act perpetrated by bad actors. You are somehow allowing bad actors to inflict further damage, in excess of the direct results of their actions, on huge populations of people here. I know there is a more eloquent way to descibe this concept, but doing so just doesn't seem like the right course of action. And I'm sorry but I am not smarter than all of the people that worked on this, so I don't have a better solution that would accomplish the same goal, but I know that this solution has a huge potential to enable massive amounts of abuse by nations who do not respect what much of the world considers basic human rights.

danShumway 5y ago

> Can anyone propose anything better Widespread education about how child abuse usually works in the real world outside of movies, public examination of what tools we have available and whether they're being used effectively, very public stats about how prevalent the problem is and what direction it's moving in. Better media that more accurately reflects how these problems play out for real people and that doesn't use them as a cheap gimmick to pray on people's fears to raise narrative stakes. Better education about the benefits of encryption and the risks of abuse, better education about how back doors play out in the real world and how they are abused both by governments and by individual abusers. Better education about the fail-rate of these systems. > Child pornography and the related abuse is widely thought of as a massive problem, that is facilitated by encrypted communication and digital photography. Most people don't have a basis for this instinct, they believe it because they were taught it, because it's what the movies tell them, because it fits their cultural perception of technology, because it's what the CIA and FBI tell them. Unless they're basing their fear on something other than emotion and instinct, there is no technical or political solution that will reduce their fear. It's all useless. Only education and cultural shifts will make them less afraid. If you survey the US, over 50% of adults will tell you that crime today is at the same level or worse than it was in 1950s, an absurd position that has no basis in reality. So what, should we form a police state? At some point, caring about the real problems we have in the real world means learning to tell people that being scared of technology is not a good enough justification on its own to ban it. Nothing else will work. People's irrational fears by and large will not be alleviated by any technical solutions. They won't even be alleviated by what Apple is doing, parents who have an irrational fear of privacy are not going to have that fear lessened because Apple introduced this scanning feature. They will still be afraid.

babesh 5y ago

There is no end to the loss of privacy in the name of safety if your bogeyman is increasingly sophisticated actors. The more sophisticated child molesters out there will find out about what Apple is doing and quickly avoid it. Isn’t that what the FBI is complaining about, that they have grown increasingly sophisticated? The more sophisticated privacy adherents will also avoid Apple and resort to end to encryption and offline tools. What is the actual outcome? You won’t get more arrests of child molesters. Instead, you get a security apparatus that can be weaponized against the masses. Furthermore, you will have the FBI complaining that child molesters are increasingly out of their reach and demanding greater powers. They will then try to mandate child porn detectors built into every phone. This creep has been occurring for years. Go read the Snowden disclosures. First your cell phone companies worked with the government for mass harvesting of data. No need for any suspicion because they promise not to look unless there is one. That wasn’t enough because the data was encrypted. Second they had the companies holding the data snoop in on data that was shared. That wasn’t enough. Third they had the companies holding the data snoop in on data EVEN when it wasn’t shared, just when it was uploaded to them. Not enough for them! Now they will have it done on device prior to uploading. Does this mean that if it fails to upload, it gets scanned anyway. Why yes! Next they will have it done on device even if it never is held by the company and never shared and never even intended to be uploaded. The obvious goal is that the government has access to ALL data in the name of safety. No need for warrants. Don’t worry about it. They won’t look unless there was any suspicion. Opps never mind that, we will just have tools look. There is no end to the loss of privacy in the name of safety if your bogeyman is increasingly sophisticated actors. Why isn’t this obvious to everyone? Anyone old enough to remember the Clipper chips?

zepto 5y ago
> The more sophisticated child molesters out there will find out about what Apple is doing and quickly avoid it. I think this is exactly what Apple wants to he the result of their their iMessage scanning. They are not in this to make arrests. They just want parents to feel safe letting children use their products. Driving predators to use different tools is fine with them. As far as the FBI goes, this is presumably not their preference, but it’s still good for them if it makes predation a little harder.

webmobdev 5y ago

The intention to prevent child sexual abuse material is indeed laudable. But the "solution" is not. Especially when we all know that this "solution" gives a legal backing to corporates to do even more data mining on its users, and can easily be extended (to scan even more "illegal" content) and abused into a pervasive surveillance network desired by a lot of government around the world. For those wondering what's wrong with this, two hard-earned rights in a democracy go for a toss here: 1. The law presumes we are all innocent until proven guilty. 2. We have the right against self-incrimination. Pervasive surveillance like this starts with the presumption that we are all guilty of something ("if you are innocent, why are you scared of such surveillance?" or "what do you have to hide if you are innocent?"). The right against self-incrimination is linked to the first doctrine because compelling an accused to testify transfers the burden of proving innocence to the accused, instead of requiring the government to prove his guilt.

zepto 5y ago
> But the "solution" is not. Agreed, that’s my point, and I would say that your comment outlines some good principles a better solution might respect, although it’s worth noting that those principles have only ever constrained the legal system. Your employer, teacher, customers, vendors, parents etc, have never been constrained in these ways.