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It's reasonable but it misses some omissions. Specifically: 1. What if the NSA/FBI, through the Patriot Act, demand Apple provide bulk interception safety vouc

by dannyw 5y ago

It's reasonable but it misses some omissions. Specifically: 1. What if the NSA/FBI, through the Patriot Act, demand Apple provide bulk interception safety vouchers ('metadata') for "counter-terrorism" purposes? Much like we learned from Snowden that this happens for all cell phone records for decades? This is not a strawman argument: it is a question concerning applications of laws in force today, that have been applied for mass surveillance already in other contexts. 2. The whole on-device spyware is a single feature toggle away from working on local files too. We're software engineers. We know that "if (iCloudPhotosEnabled) {" is a simple boolean comparison. Combine the two, and you realise Apple has just built the most intrusive mass surveillance tool in history, disguised as child safety. Apple's choice of announcing all 3 features together isn't a mistake. This is one of the best PR department in the world. Logic requires us to dig deeper.

chipotle_coyote 5y ago
> Apple's choice of announcing all 3 features together isn't a mistake. This is one of the best PR department in the world. Logic requires us to dig deeper. While I think your other critiques are reasonable (with an asterisk I'll get back to), this is a little conspiratorial-sounding -- and I would submit that we have a lot of circumstantial evidence from the last ~36 hours of reporting that the PR generated around this has not exactly been positive. I don't see how announcing all of these features together benefits Apple. (And at risk of being a little conspiratorial-sounding myself, I suspect there are other more intrusive mass surveillance tools already built and in use by other corporations and governments.) As for that asterisk: assuming the service works the way Apple describes it, I don't think it's comparable to cell phone call metadata. You could obviously use the system to search for other known photos besides CSAM and also search photos that are local to the device, but other use cases still need to fit "this photo matches the hash of this other photo" (I'm not even sure if you can abstract "photo" to "other media file"). Photos, of course, have metadata that would be interesting to law enforcement agents, but if this does anything with that metadata then the service doesn't work the way Apple describes it -- and if we assume that Apple is starting out lying about the way the service works, then all bets are off anyway.

by dannyw 5y ago

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

> Apple's choice of announcing all 3 features together isn't a mistake. This is one of the best PR department in the world. Logic requires us to dig deeper. While I think your other critiques are reasonable (with an asterisk I'll get back to), this is a little conspiratorial-sounding -- and I would submit that we have a lot of circumstantial evidence from the last ~36 hours of reporting that the PR generated around this has not exactly been positive. I don't see how announcing all of these features together benefits Apple. (And at risk of being a little conspiratorial-sounding myself, I suspect there are other more intrusive mass surveillance tools already built and in use by other corporations and governments.) As for that asterisk: assuming the service works the way Apple describes it, I don't think it's comparable to cell phone call metadata. You could obviously use the system to search for other known photos besides CSAM and also search photos that are local to the device, but other use cases still need to fit "this photo matches the hash of this other photo" (I'm not even sure if you can abstract "photo" to "other media file"). Photos, of course, have metadata that would be interesting to law enforcement agents, but if this does anything with that metadata then the service doesn't work the way Apple describes it -- and if we assume that Apple is starting out lying about the way the service works, then all bets are off anyway.