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The post office scans your mail through various machines in transit. We accept that when we put the mail in the mailbox. What if the post office announced they
by stetrain 5y ago
The post office scans your mail through various machines in transit. We accept that when we put the mail in the mailbox.
What if the post office announced they were installing a man with a scanning machine in your home who would scan your letters before they left your house?
It's the same outcome. The same process. Just inside your house instead of out in the mail system. They're exactly the same, except somehow it's not.
- Klonoar 5y agoThis example changes with regards to emotional weight if you remove "a man" and leave it at just "a scanning machine". There is no human scanning your photos on an iPhone, so let's compares apples to apples here. If that scanning machine didn't reveal the contents of my mail, and then ensured that it wasn't able to be given out in-transit? Yeah, I'd potentially be fine with it - but I'll leave this answer as a hypothetical since it's all theory anyway. The point here is that you're choosing to use the mail system and you're thus choosing to play by those rules. Given that these checks happen for iCloud you're effectively making the same agreement.
- dannyw 5y agoThere actually is a man involved: enough similarities and a human will review the photos. Every algorithm, especially perceptual hashing, will have false positives, and at Apple's scale, some people's private and intimate photos will be false positives and be exposed to a man looking at it.
- visarga 5y ago> some people's private and intimate photos will be false positives and be exposed to a man looking at it and deciding who gets reported to police based on their cultural views on nudity
- jeromegv 5y agoI think the point of the OP is that it was already the case before when you were using iCloud photos. The scan was server side.
- stetrain 5y agoBut the barrier between “only happens for iCloud” and “happens for all photos on device” has been reduced to a very small barrier. Before it was the photos actually being sent to a separate server by my choice, now it’s Apple saying their on-device tool only runs given criteria X. And on a second note I think people are allowed to be freshly concerned at the idea of Apple scanning photo libraries given a government-provided hash list, even if it was already happening before now.
- Klonoar 5y agoTo be clear, I have no qualms about people being concerned. You can find my comments elsewhere on this site that I think people should scrutinize this entire thing. I'm just very tired of people (not necessarily you) spouting off as if the functionality is new. It dilutes an otherwise important conversation. So many of the threads on this site are just people privacy LARPing.
- stetrain 5y agoAgreed. I still think there is a distinction, even if only in principle and mostly psychological, between what a company does with my files on their server, and what they do with my files on my device. Even if the outcome is theoretically the same, the means are different and it feels different.
- bigiain 5y ago> The post office scans your mail through various machines in transit. That is a totally bogus comparison. The post office 100% does NOT can the content of every piece mail they handle. Not even close to the same scenario as Apple/governments being able to continually and silently check your phone/photo library for images on their watch list.
- stetrain 5y agoI’m pretty sure lots of mail gets x-rayed, perhaps even more looking for malicious packages or substances. I agree that data content scanning is more invasive than physical scanning. It was an intentionally simplistic example not meant to defend Apple.