4 ms·
Well, presumably at that point, someone in that position would just reveal their own files with the hash an prove to the public that they weren't illegal. Sure,
by fogof 5y ago
Well, presumably at that point, someone in that position would just reveal their own files with the hash an prove to the public that they weren't illegal. Sure, it would be shitty to be forced to reveal your private information that way, but you would expose a government agency as fabricating evidence and lying about the contents of the picture in question to falsely accuse someone. It seems like that would be a scandal of Snowden-level proportions.
- gpm 5y agoIt wouldn't prove anything, because hash functions are many-to-one. It's entirely possible that it was just a coincidence.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dannyw 5y agoThere are literally hundreds of cases of police fabricating evidence and getting caught in court, or on bodycam. This happens today. We must not build technology that makes it even more devastating.
- visarga 5y agoYou can reveal your files and people can accuse you you deleted the incriminating ones.
- kelnos 5y agoNot if you show the file that matches the perceptual hash that "caught" you.
- deanclatworthy 5y agoWould a court be compelled to provide that hash to your defence? Arguable as it could be used by criminals to clean their collection. And by that time your life is ruined anyway.
- cotillion 5y agoSo Apple-users can no longer delete any pictures since Apple might already have reported that photo you accidentally took of your thumb as CP.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoNa they will ruin your life even if you are found innocent and pay no price for it. That's the problem: the terrible asymetry. The same one you find with TOS, or politicians working for lobbists.
- sharken 5y agoWho would a company hire: the candidate with a trial for CP due to a false positive or the candidate without ? And this is just to address the original concept of this scanning. As many others have pointed out there is too much evidence pointing to other uses in the future.
- CRConrad 5y ago> Who would a company hire: the candidate with a trial for CP due to a false positive or the candidate without ? First time I've seen it abbreviated like that; took me a while to grasp. Well, more of a plausible "Enemy of society" than what I came up with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28060995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28060995
- nicce 5y ago”Sorry, but collisions happen with all hashing algorithms, and you can’t prove otherwise. It is just a matter of time. Nothing to see here.”
- Frost1x 5y agoWell, not all hashing algorithms but all interesting or considered useful hashing algorithms, probably. When dealing with say countable infinite sets you can certainly create a provable unique hash for each item in that set. The hash won't be interesting or useful. E.g. a hash that indexes all the integers n with a hashing function h(n+1)... so every integer you hash will be that value plus one. But this just being pedantic and wanting to walk down the thought.
- nullc 5y agoIn the past the FBI used some cryptographic hash. Collisions with a secure cryptographic hash are functionally unobservant in practice (or else the hash is broken). The use of the perceptual hash is because some people might evade the cryptographic hash by making small modifications to the image. The fact that they'd discarded the protection of cryptographic hashing just to accommodate these extra matches is unsurprising because their behavior is largely unconstrained and unbalanced by competing factors like the public's right to privacy or your security against being subject to a false accusation.