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There is no such thing as a trustworthy third party and even trusting yourself is questionable at the best of times. We are constantly balancing a bunch of diff
by least 5y ago
There is no such thing as a trustworthy third party and even trusting yourself is questionable at the best of times. We are constantly balancing a bunch of different considerations with regards to the way that we compute, purchase devices, and utilize services. Security and privacy are of course important, and Apple to date has had a fairly good (if shallow) track record in this regard, at least in the United States.
With that being said, what Apple is doing here is just a blatant violation of that 'trust' and certainly a compromise to their commitment to privacy. Under no circumstances is it justifiable to essentially enlist people's devices to police their owners, while using the electricity that you pay for, the internet service you pay for, and the device itself that you pay for to perform a function that is to absolutely no benefit to the user and in fact can only ever be harmful to them.
It doesn't matter that the net data exfiltrated by Apple ends up being the same as before (through scanning unencrypted files on their servers). The distinction is so obvious to me that I find it incredible that people are legitimately arguing that it's the same, or that it in some way this is actually helping preserve user privacy.
As mentioned in the article, this does absolutely nothing towards protecting children other than directing all but the biggest idiots towards platforms that can't be linked to them, which I'd imagine, they already are.
- fossuser 5y ago> "As mentioned in the article, this does absolutely nothing towards protecting children other than directing all but the biggest idiots towards platforms that can't be linked to them, which I'd imagine, they already are." I suspect you're more wrong than you think about this. People share large volumes of CSAM through lots of different services - I knew someone who worked on the problem at Linked In(!). HN likes to downplay the actual reality as if it's always some trojan horse, but the issue is real. It's worth talking to people that work on combatting it if you get the chance. I'm not really commenting on Apple's approach here (which I haven't thought enough about), but I know enough that an immediate dismissal based on it 'not helping' is not really appreciating the real tradeoffs you're making. You can be against this kind of thing from Apple, but as a result more CSAM will be undetected. Maybe that's the proper tradeoff, but we shouldn't pretend it's not a tradeoff at all. "Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold. There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television" [0] [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb... Edit: After digging in, HN commentary is missing the most relevant details about this particular implementation. iCloud image checking compares to known CSAM image hashes - this means effectively zero false positive rate. For iMessage child account ML scanning it’s on device and just generic sexual material restriction - more similar to standard parental controls than anything else (alerts only go to the parent, and only happen on child accounts) My initial impression is this is a good approach. The risk mostly comes from future applications (like the CCP adding hashes of other stuff that isn’t CSAM like tankman or something). The frankly ignorant knee-jerk responses from technical HN readers do a disservice and weaken the ability of technical people to push back when necessary.
- White_Wolf 5y agoI would say most (if not all) know how easily you can change the scope of a database like this(like you said yourself) to check for other inconvenient terms, links, memes, etc that do not "toe the party line"(whether is eastern or western - I don't care) and shut down inconvenient discourse. The point is: This is too easy to abuse.
- fossuser 5y agoBeing specific with the arguments and addressing the nuance matters imo. Most of the HN responses are dumb, get the details wrong, and don’t take the trade offs seriously. That kind of thing causes me to dismiss them entirely. There are legitimate arguments and risks which I’d concede, but they’re not what most people in the comments are talking about.
- ctvo 5y agoThe trade-off here is to get pedophiles off of Apple services and on to something else, we give Apple an entry point into examining our private data. I understand it's hashes now, that does nothing to prevent this from expanding. "People just don't understand!!" has never been a convincing argument.
- fossuser 5y agoThis is just a slippery slope argument. The implementation specifically for detecting CSAM can be okay while using that for other purposes can not be okay. The goal is to stop child sexual abuse, FB reports millions of cases a year with a similar hash matching model for messenger. > ""People just don't understand!!" has never been a convincing argument." That's not my argument - I just think most of the HN comments on this issue both miss the relevant details, and are wrong.
- ErikVandeWater 5y agoSlippery slope fallacy is often implied incorrectly when it comes to people. Human nature is subject to the "foot in the door" sales tactic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique
- zepto 5y ago> Under no circumstances is it justifiable to essentially enlist people's devices to police their owners, while using the electricity that you pay for, the internet service you pay for, and the device itself that you pay for to perform a function that is to absolutely no benefit to the user and in fact can only ever be harmful to them. This is an obvious misrepresentation. An opt-in system to detect when adults are trying to groom kids by sending them porn seems like the opposite of harm. I imagine a lot of parents want that. As for scanning what gets sent to iCloud. That’s also an opt-in service, and frankly it seems entirely reasonable for Apple not to want their servers to be used as a repository or hub for child porn.
- least 5y agoIt's not a misrepresentation whatsoever. If Apple wishes to scan what's on their servers, that is their prerogative. They can use their compute resources and energy to do so. You needn't install spyware on a person's device that is of no benefit to the user. I'll reiterate, this can only ever be harmful to the user. Its utility right now is at its absolute best and most altruistic and it is still a violation of people's privacy and stealing computing resources from the device owner. > That’s also an opt-in service, and frankly it seems entirely reasonable for Apple not to want their servers to be used as a repository or hub for child porn. This will not stop their servers being used as a repository for illicit materials, if that is what you're suggesting.