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An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

• mbilal 5y ago
  How to complain: don't buy an iphone next time you need a new phone
  • 14 5y ago
    I am going to give them a chance to reverse this but I literally just bought an upgrade to my iCloud. I thought it would make my life easier not having to worry about storage so much. Now I am just waiting for this reversal to happen or think I will have to cancel my iCloud subscription to start.
  • foxpurple 5y ago
    What cloud service are you putting your images on? I would be shocked if google photos hasn’t already been doing this.
    • sschueller 5y ago
      Cloud services doing this isn't the problem and they are already doing it. The problem is your device doing this. Imagine if your Tesla reported back to Tesla who was in your car and sent that to the authorities if they thought someone in your car was "illegal".
      • pmlnr 5y ago
        You honestly can't know if it does that already or not.
      • EtienneK 5y ago
        Coming in the not-so-far-future.
      • polishdude20 5y ago
        Actually Tesla's do client side machine learning. When tesla needs training data of a bike for example, they can remotely "query" all the cars on the road and have the cars do client side detection of the stored footage and driving data and send over only the data that contains bikes.
    • feanaro 5y ago
      Why do you need to put your images on a cloud service at all? Just use a spare disk.
      • cft 5y ago
        It's just a matter of time till they start scanning all image files on the SSD. Then documents (country-specific probably)
      • foxpurple 5y ago
        I’m saying it because apple is scanning iCloud photos here. Unless I am mistaken, local only photos are not scanned.
    • pmlnr 5y ago
      You don't need the cloud: syncthing can sync your phone and your computer together without any issues. No nasty cloud provider involved: https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
      • Haemm0r 5y ago
        You can even sync to $nasty_cloud_provider and don't provide the syncthing password. Problem solved!
        • pmlnr 5y ago
          What? Syncthing is not a backup program, it, as the name suggests, syncs folders and files. There is no password involved.
          • Haemm0r 5y ago
            Check out: https://docs.syncthing.net/branch/untrusted/html/users/untrusted.html https://docs.syncthing.net/branch/untrusted/html/users/untru...
          • ronyclau 5y ago
            Syncthing now supports untrusted device sync[0] (i.e. storing an encrypted copy on an untrusted device) in a recent version, though this is still on beta. [0]: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/untrusted.html https://docs.syncthing.net/users/untrusted.html
      • polack 5y ago
        Looks like Syncthing doesn’t have support/client for iOS though?
        • fouc 5y ago
          There may be 3rd party apps like https://www.mobiussync.com https://www.mobiussync.com
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • summm 5y ago
      Cloud is other people's computers. So, get your own server, or use someone's you trust. or use e2e encryption.
      • seanp2k2 5y ago
        That would be great if I could run an iCloud back-end on my home servers. Unfortunately, I can’t, and no software other than iCloud can do what iCloud does on iOS due to Apple’s usage of private iOS APIs to accomplish things like persistent background sync or syncing parts of the OS which would be required to do a full device restore that aren’t accessible to user space apps.
  • UweSchmidt 5y ago
    Boycotting products to change a company's mind won't work because: - not enough people even know about this issue, understand the consequences or remember to act on it the next time a new phone is due - not enough alternatives on the market, and we're probably already boycotting them for other reasons - even with lower sales a company might not see the cause-and-effect There is a general trend in the industry to take all kinds of liberties with user data. There is pressure on companies to do something about bad things happening in their clouds. Machine learning folks want to apply their tools to big data and the corpus of everyone's photos is probably nice to work with. So we would have to tackle these issues on a larger scale.
    • nicce 5y ago
      That it is. I'm bit fancied of the ignorance of the people, until it is Apple who is doing it. And Apple is minority compared to other platforms. I haven't heard much of complains about Windows sending all your file hashes and most of the files into their servers, what they have been doing a very long time with Windows Defender. It is literally the same what Apple is doing now, but without restrictions. Google and other cloud service providers have scanned your photos for very long time, by using PhotoDNA. On top of images, Google scans also your emails. People forget and move on.
      • babesh 5y ago
        I don’t use Windows Defender nor Google Photos nor other cloud service providers to scan my photos. I barely use gmail. I knew that Google was terrible so I have already minimized my use of Google services. Same with Facebook. But Apple!? I guess the dominos have finally gotten to me.
        • nicce 5y ago
          It is not so straightforward to not use Windows Defender if you are using Windows 10. You must edit group policies in quite deep to disable automatic scanning and startup. Google Drive includes backups of your phone, so it is not limited to Google Photos. Literally everything that is stored unencrypted on Google servers.
  • oakpond 5y ago
    There is hardly any mention of a boycott. Cynicism prevails; Apple is laughing all the way to the bank.
• vladharbuz 5y ago
  Yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085632
• rjzzleep 5y ago
  I was actually looking to buy the new iPhone should they add back TouchID, but this has been quite the turnoff. Are Pixel phones the only android phones that allow you to do secure boot with non stock images and basically long term cripple phone functionality once its unlocked?
  • thg 5y ago
    Fairphone allows re-locking the bootloader with the /e/ rom flashed.
    • sleavey 5y ago
      The annoying thing about unlocking or relocking the bootloader is that it wipes your phone. Unless you're paranoid that someone can give you a rootkit while you're not looking, as long as you use full device encryption then leaving the bootloader unlocked isn't too bad. Plus, it lets you upgrade your bootloader and OS later. I stupidly relocked the bootloader after installing LineageOS and now I can't upgrade the OS major version without wiping everything.
      • thg 5y ago
        I'm in the same boat with my Fairphone and /e/. ;) For me, re-flashing wouldn't even be that much of a hassle since I have contacts and all in my Nextcloud instance and would only have to make a backup of Signal (I barely use my phone - about 2-3 hours total per month), but I just can't get myself to do it. Should have sticked with my trusted ol' Nokia 3110c I used for a good 13 years, but alas I sent that in to Fairphone for recycling after I bought my Fairphone 3 last year (which I only bought in the first place because finding CNG gas stations is such a hassle here in Germany).
  • nicce 5y ago
    Google does the same with Google Drive. Apple is just late for the party.
    • nelox 5y ago
• punnerud 5y ago
  Because it’s based on machine learning, why can’t some of the network and weights used for the hash be shared? So we can be sure it is not possible to match anything else than children. The sub narrow network used for detecting only CP is of course secret, but then we know it can’t be used for revealing pictures of police, activists etc
  • Dylan16807 5y ago
    It doesn't seem to work that way. It's a bunch of arbitrary hashes that might not show up as any content in particular except "this hash matches". In particular, there was someone claiming that images of empty rooms where abuse happened are part of the database, along with other images that appear in the same sets as CSAM.
  • doubtfuluser 5y ago
    Like stated below, I’m seriously worried about Adversarial examples that fool the network into A) hiding bad pictures being not recognized B) triggering false positives on harmless pictures to discredit people. Opening up the network would mate it even easier to create the adversarials… Im not sure there is a winning position in the approach they used
    • punnerud 5y ago
      «even easier to create the adversarials», agree. But if they find one of this pictures they can retrain in a way that find all of them on all phones. So it will never be safe to have CP on the phone/iCloud. And easier to keep Apple accountable on not matching anything else than the purpose.
    • matwood 5y ago
      Do you use iCloud photos now? CSAM checking has already been used for years (on almost all photos services btw).
  • pjerem 5y ago
    Because the technology is not the point. I just don’t want Apple to search anything in my photos. Because those are my photos. Not theirs. My phone doesn’t need a program that search for abused child photography since there is not such material on it. I don’t care if their thing is open or closed source : My iPhone is mine and I don’t want them to do anything on it that can get me arrested because of a false positive. We must not accept those intrusions. This thing is as serious as if IKEA regularly sent robots in your house to check all the photo albums on your IKEA shelf to check them against some database. Why does it sounds dumb when it’s IKEA but more acceptable when it’s your phone constructor ?
• riffraff 5y ago
  I signed this, but I'm very doubtful this will ever achieve something. But this made me wonder: is there an history of people complaining about this sort of things and actually achieving something? I think this might have happened with MSFT's hailstorm/passport, where in the end industry opposition meant the project was abandoned, but I can't recall other instances.
  • Mike8435 5y ago
    Unlikely to fix Apple. They have sold their souls and are beyond all hope. However it will further motivate efforts to get Linux running properly on Apple hardware. When this trojan inevitably arrives in macOS hopefully someone can figure out how to isolate and remove/disable that piece of malware.
  • almostdigital 5y ago
    Last year Apple reacted after the outcry about MacOS tracking[1] so there is some hope. That was not a deliberate product and probably more of an unintended behavior though. I'm really hoping this was just a team at Apple that got blinded by all the cool cryptography they came up with to solve a problem and that the higher ups will react if we screech loudly enough. [1]: https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/ https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
    • okamiueru 5y ago
      > Last year Apple reacted How did they react? Isn't it still in effect? Still sending unencrypted messages when apps are opened? As far as I'm aware, they plan on having OCSP encrypted, and plan on giving users a choice. I honestly do not get the outrage over the apple's client side scanning. It's outrageous, sure, but... much of the same people seem to have been ok with unencrypted telemetry being transmitted for every executable run. Not to mention that every executable will also be logged at some point, so apple knows every program you've ever run.
      • almostdigital 5y ago
• cft 5y ago
  I was about to buy M1 Macbook. No thanks.
• sneak 5y ago
  From the letter: > Apple Inc. issue a statement reaffirming their commitment to end-to-end encryption and to user privacy. Apple has no commitment to end to end encryption or user privacy; the premise of this letter is incorrect. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv... The data in iCloud is for the most part effectively unencrypted. iCloud Backup serves as a backdoor to e2e messaging, and iCloud Photos aren't e2e at all. If you are using iCloud Photos or iCloud Backup today (on by default and enabled on most iPhones), you are already uploading all of your data to Apple presently in a way that both Apple and the USG can read without a warrant. This is by design.
• teclordphrack2 5y ago
  Whats the data usage going to look like for this? Why am I footing the bill for even more anal lubing?
• tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Is it ok nowadays to use github for pamphlets, "open letters" (that aren't letters), and other social media and polemic content to protest against privacy invasion of all things?
  • Torwald 5y ago
    Why should it not?
• alichapman 5y ago
  I'm not usually the most idealistic when it comes to FOSS, but it's stories like this and Apple's stance of "trust us, we promise we know what we're doing and that nothing is going to go wrong" that makes me think all software should be legally required to be open source.
  • dcow 5y ago
    It would be if y’all slapped the AGPLv3 on your code instead of Apache/MIT/BSD. If we were to perform a cyber analog of what the founding fathers did for the USA 250 years ago, it would be something along the lines of declaring all software free from the tyranny of corporate control and state oppression. Free in perpetuity so that our digital projections onto hardware shall reside comfortably each in their own pursuit of happiness.
    • cinquemb 5y ago
      > If we were to perform a cyber analog of what the founding fathers did for the USA 250 years ago, it would be something along the lines of declaring all software free from the tyranny of corporate control and state oppression. … and then proceed to conduct asymmetric warfare against state and corporate cyber systems alike.
      • dcow 5y ago
        If we use servers in China and Russia it’s essentially legal, right?
  • bnt 5y ago
    How would OSS help in this case? Someone can run a hash, find an “offensive” photo and jail you. Shit, if someone is out to get you, they will dig up any photo on your phone, put it in the “bad hashes” database and just wait for Apple to catch you. And then you’re effed, because no court will want to publicly display a photo that may contain child pornography, so you’ll be jailed without a fair trial. OSS won’t help here. This system must be shut down, and the gov should deal with pedos in a different way.
• thinkloop 5y ago
  Google Photos and Gmail openly and heavily scan server-side, and I'm sure a lot of us use them, how do we reconcile that?
  • f6v 5y ago
    The Big Tech is already here, it’s hungry for control and data. Not just for its own good, but to also serve the governments around the world. It’s going to happen eventually, and most people won’t care.
  • jpxw 5y ago
    I don’t use Android, so genuine question here: does an Android phone automatically upload everything to iCloud like an iPhone does? With the iOS ecosystem, in my experience having everything backed up to iCloud is the default position, and you have to turn it off manually.
  • amelius 5y ago
    Google is heavily incentivized not to share the data with anyone else.
  • alerighi 5y ago
    On the server side. That is the difference. I know that if I put something on Google Drive it is in clear in the Google servers. What I don't want is Google performing a scan of the internal memory of my Android device! Server side they can do whatever they want, and I choose what data they can access, but on my device not.
    • marcellus23 5y ago
      You know it’s still only photos being uploaded to iCloud that are scanned right? Or are you just totally unfamiliar with the actual issue? If you are familiar, can you explain the practical difference between these approaches that makes one worse?
      • matwood 5y ago
• genocidicbunny 5y ago
  At this point we need to be doing more than signing open letters to companies that are completely free to ignore them. If you work for Apple and don't stand up to this, you should find it extremely hard to find employment or acceptance anywhere. If you're a hiring manager, throw the resumes of anyone that worked at Apple in the trash. It should be a black mark on you if you continue to work and contribute to Apple after this; If you continue to work for them or support them, you should be ostracized.
  • rich_sasha 5y ago
    I think this is rather hyperbolic. Vast majority of people at Apple have nothing to do with this. And even people involved in this, I’m not sure how much I can blame them. Soldiers vs generals kind of argument. Also, they likely see the pedo-fighting side of things and think are in the right.
    • genocidicbunny 5y ago
      If you work for Apple, you have provided a non-zero amount of support to them and their actions. Even if you're just the janitor that cleans the offices in the evening, you are providing material support. That gives you a non-zero liability for their actions. There are no generals without the soldiers. Yes, maybe for some of their employees its a choice between starving or working for Apple. I bet for the vast majority of Apples direct employees, they would be able to find another job to support them. And even for the ones that would starve, I'm sorry, but I put the well-being of the entirety of society and our collective future over their lives. If they go destitute or broke, the world will move on. If Apple gets their way..it might just not.
      • arp242 5y ago
        > And even for the ones that would starve, I'm sorry, but I put the well-being of the entirety of society and our collective future over their lives. God, just listen to yourself. Personally I think their plans are fairly balanced and reasonable. Like it or not, there are legitimate interests here. It's a difficult trade-off and conversation. Ostracizing people and saying you would literally rather have people DIE is not adding to the conversation. The way you talk about it makes it sound like this is about the Nuremberg laws or something.
• bArray 5y ago
  Honestly I'm glad to see a non-insignificant amount of people in tech take this seriously, especially when the goal Apple announces appears to be for the greater good. It can be hard to stand on the side that doesn't immediately appear to be correct. We have already lost so many freedoms for 'national security' and other such blanket terminology. Just be warned, there will be those that unfairly try to cast this as helping the distribution of CP. Expect a headline tomorrow: "Edward Snowden et al Supports Child Porn" - or some other hot take. A few other things: 1. Vote with your feet - Put your money in the pockets of the people aligned to your values. 2. Actively support projects you align with - If you use some open source hardware/software, try to help out (financially or time). 3. Make others aware - Reach out to those around you and inform them, only then they can make an informed choice themselves.
  • peakaboo 5y ago
    I think people need to wise up extreamly quickly to what we are facing here. I cannot overstate the importance of being extreamly sceptical of the motives of tech giants at this point in time.
  • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    > especially when the goal Apple announces appears to be for the greater good. Not surprising at all. In Russia, _every_ measure to limit internet freedom was introduced under the pretence of fighting child pornography and extremism. Then, of course, it was used to block the websites of political opponents.
    • hulitu 5y ago
      Not only in Russia. It's sad to see a country (in central europe) which puts a guy 8 years in jail for raping children more than 8 years, justifying such invazive software as defence against CP.
    • Muromec 5y ago
      It was promotion of suicide before it was extremism and cp
    • 5y ago
• toastal 5y ago
  Don't support Apple! *You must sign up for a Microsoft GitHub account to sign our petition. While I like the sentiment of protest, I don't understand this logic of putting it on a closed platform of one of Apple's biggest competitors who also doesn't respect your privacy.
  • fouc 5y ago
    You made me ponder about "Microsoft Github account" vs "Github account", or large corporation vs smaller corporation. So many smaller corporations end up getting acquired by larger corporations anyways. It's all kind of a broken system huh?
    • toastal 5y ago
      I wish I would practically escape it. On personal projects, I’ve moved everything to Sourcehut and GitLab, but so many projects I want to contribute to are still on GitHub for legacy reasons and don’t feel it’s worth the effort to migrate (though everything heavy on the libre side have moved). Some projects, like Elm (programming language), use GitHub for both as the source of its package management and identity so it’s impossible to escape the lock-in. But this is why Microsoft bought it: to get closer to monopoly (GitHub, Copilot, NPM, VS Code, Azure, etc.) making people buy into a platform they feel they cannot escape. I think it is important to tag the parent company when talking about GitHub so users understand who they are really dealing with by hosting their projects on this Git forge and what restrictions this puts on their contributors.
• jasonlfunk 5y ago
  I’m not sure what to think of the backlash here. I’m sure that people aren’t trying to minimize the evil of child pornography and exploitation. But anything that has the potential to stop or slow it should be fairly considered. People complaining that Apple is scanning your photos, they are already doing that. Where was this backlash when they released the memories feature? Why is scanning your photos for good pictures of your dog different that scanning your pictures for exploitive pictures of children? Is the problem that they could then share that information with the authorities? But of course this feature could be abused. But Apple already has all the power it needs to be abusive. They can push whatever software they want to your devices. They can remotely lock and wipe all your data. They already have the power to do all of these things. This statement is simply an announcement that they will be using some of this power to try to stop one of the worst evils in our world. Until they prove that they will abuse this power, I suggest that we let them try.
  • xvector 5y ago
    The concern is less about outing people with CSAM and more about Apple building a powerful tool for government surveillance that will most certainly be abused by countries like China and Saudi Arabia when they request that politically dangerous images be added to the database if Apple wants to continue business in their country. It is incredibly myopic of Apple to implement this feature. You must consider, as an engineer, how your constructions will be abused and used for bad as well as good.
    • simondotau 5y ago
      This isn't a powerful tool, it's more akin to a rudimentary hash check. It's not going to match photos that aren't already known to authorities. And any time a user is flagged, the material in question is sighted by an Apple employee before a decision is made whether to forward it onto the relevant authorities.
      • dmitrygr 5y ago
        Ok, so what stops the CCP from submitting hashes of photos of the "tank man" to this hash set? And then jailing all those reported to possess it?
• ssss11 5y ago
  Related but slightly off-topic: am I the only one that thinks more technology is not the answer to catching crooks? Can’t the police do good old fashioned police work to catch people doing these things? Why does EVERYONE need to be surveilled for the 0.01% (or less?) who don’t behave properly. To further this point: why do we need cameras on every street, facial recognition systems and 3-letter orgs storing huge data silos and maintaining lists etc etc… One thought: is it because over 10, 20, 30+ years the police have been de-funded everywhere and become useless for difficult cases and/or militarised to deal with peaceful protesters instead? Genuine questions.. I just don’t think this surveillance nightmare is the answer, and police could still catch crooks before the internet so what’s the problem.
  • pydry 5y ago
    >One thought: is it because over 10, 20, 30+ years the police have been de-funded everywhere Police funding has shot up in America. It's everything else thats been cut. >what’s the problem. There's no problem. It's just a drawn out power grab with a weak pretext.
    • adventured 5y ago
      > Police funding has shot up in America. It's everything else thats been cut. What else in America has been cut? I'd be interested in that very long list (since you're saying that everything else is seeing cuts; the understood meaning being that a very large number of major items are seeing their budgets slashed). The spending data I see year in year out, or across decades, is showing the opposite. Healthcare spending has skyrocketed over the last 20-30 years, including healthcare spending by the government (eg Medicaid, Medicare). They're not slashing Medicaid or Medicare, those programs have far outrun inflation and are drowning the US budget. Social Security hasn't been slashed. Even the leading Republicans no longer dare talk seriously about cutting Social Security (30-40 years ago they commonly did). Trump could hardly run away faster from that conversation, it's the third rail of US politics, absolutely nobody dares. Education spending has not been slashed. US teachers are among the best paid in the world and Americans spend more per capita on education at all levels than just about any other nation (while getting mediocre results for their epic investment, as with healthcare spending). Defense spending of course continues to rise. The US welfare state has continued to perpetually expand. US social welfare spending is larger as a share of GDP than it is in Canada; and it's closing in on Britain (the US will catch Britain on social welfare spending as a % of GDP this decade). The US social safety net has gotten larger, not smaller, over the decades. Programs like housing first didn't even exist 30 years ago; food security programs like SNAP continue to get bigger over the decades, they're not vanishing. US Government spending has continued to soar year by year. Typically 5-8% annual spending increases are normal (just look at the radical spending increases during the Bush and Obama years, or any of the recent budgets). Total government spending (Federal + State + Local) has continued to climb, it has not been slashed or reduced. Total US government spending is taking more out of the US economy than it ever has outside of WW2 - you have to go back to WW2 level spending to find something comparable. Total US government spending has increased by roughly 225% over the past two decades (more than triple the rate of inflation over that time). The soaring spending shows no sign of letting up. The major US Government agencies - such as NASA, NSA, FBI, DHS, VA, DoJ, etc - have not had their budgets slashed over the last few decades, they keep climbing year after year. The only big one I can think of is infrastructure spending, which has not kept up with inflation because both sides have refused to raise gasoline taxes. What kind of results do we have to show for the massive increase in government spending? Are our streets now lined with gold? Things are better than they have ever been, is that right? Is our quality of life equivalent to Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden? Because we now have their per capita government spending levels. The government systems of the US are spending the equivalent of 45% of the economy each year.
• doubtfuluser 5y ago
  Most of the people see the adversary in Apple (or governments), I think there is something else: What about Adversarial Attacks. Let’s assume someone is going to spread regular memes modified as Adversarial examples to generate the same neural hash as the true bad images. Thinking back at the political campaigns, these could spread very easily among some voters for some party. Suddenly you have a pretty serious attack on people of some political spectrum (or whatever group you can target with this)… I seriously think this wasn’t fully thought through.
  • dcow 5y ago
    …Maybe we should? All it would take is someone publishing the hash database and then another group working to generate hamming-similar images. Shouldn’t be that hard if it’s as broken as people claim. What’s that saying, “can’t outlaw something that is commonly acceptable behavior”? Point being attacking the system would either prove or compel the false positive rate to be “acceptable”, or result in it being dismantled. Still ideologically opposed but this may be a practical “solution”.
  • ursugardaddy 5y ago
    It requires a 'collection' of images to trigger an alert to apple who then has someone manually reviewing the photos before taking further action there's still our justice system/due-process as well
• blazespin 5y ago
  Horrible. Apple has every right not to facilitate child exploitation, your rights be damned. Don’t like it? Don’t buy an iPhone. end of story.
  • b0afc375b5 5y ago
    Four of the top ten posts as of writing is about this issue. I'm glad people are finding something they are interested in to talk about, but at this point this issue is hardly intellectually interesting. It's like people are being forced to buy an iPhone or something.
    • beermonster 5y ago
      I guess a lot of owners of Apple devices are also making use of a lot of their services/features making it hard, or at least inconvenient, costly and time-consuming to switch out i.e. vendor lock-in with open alternatives. This is why it's good to try to avoid this situation occurring in the first place. But that's at odds with how you're 'supposed' to use their devices and ecosystem and you may as well have not chosen Apple in the first place. Most people have already gone 'all-in'. Too bad when they implement something (like this) that could be used to target innocent people at some point in the future. Apple obviously don't intend it to be used in this way. But a bit like the Pegasus debacle with it only targeting criminals, it's obviously a vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
  • Nginx487 5y ago
    So we should sit still and wait while CCTV in every room would be a normal preventive measure against child abuse? No thanks, we will tear down this initiative, and will keep doing that in future. However, you can keep sending your private footage to the police station, if you like doing so.
• Synaesthesia 5y ago
  I think the important question is, can we trust a large company like Google, Apple or Intel again in the future, and how do we know that they're not spying on us?
  • lovelyviking 5y ago
    I think at this stage big companies affecting societies in a big way may be forced to publish source code that people of those societies run on their personal devices. At least the client side.
• lovelyviking 5y ago
  At this stage it doesn't matter if it is carefully calculated effort to gradually strip off people from the very sense of any privacy with longing effects on a society (like I described here [1]) or it's some company trying to legalize Spyware Engine for it's own convenience covering it with some story to justify it. Usually they use children for such cover story because people have direct emotional response to that topic and thus stop thinking for just enough time to miss the important issue. The important issue here is an attempt of Spyware Engine installation/legalization on personal device. I think this is much more serious than many people might see it at the moment. I think it is attack on a very fabric of free democratic society where human rights have real meanings. It is done by people who do not share those values or not familiar with them or simply do not care about them or even worse - doing it on purpose. Many can think of their personal device as their home. Some can even think of it as extension of their mind. It is very personal space and attempts to invade it can/should be considered not less serious then invasion into your private home. Even critics can admit that your personal device indeed can be in your private home space and connectivity of such personal device should not automatically mean that someone or something like AI under control of someone should access it and spy on you without warrant. Companies are doing shitty things for some time now and they are getting away with them. This can be a reason why they move forward with unacceptable practices of surveillance. Perhaps those companies do not understand that surveillance is completely incompatible with free democratic societies respecting human rights and there is no way they can succeed in combining two incompatible things unless they wish to repeat China way of doing thing. And I believe the later would not be met gladly I even think not so much possible without using firearms to which people would resist with the same effort like they did many times in history to protect own freedom. At this stage I think it is much more serious than just writing a letter. There should be a law protection of your personal computer from any Spyware Engine/Agent for any reason other then warrant to avoid bigger and possibly deadly confrontations. Just like your home as your personal space should be protected from Search without warrant in Fourth Amendment [2]. Your personal device is much more personal then your home in a way and deserve to be guarded accordingly. I am not a lawyer and perhaps Fourth Amendment is already enough but then it should be used properly to prevent Spyware Engines in personal devices. * Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. * [2] The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that “each man’s home is his castle”, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrants, stop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law. [2] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28084578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28084578 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment
• tcldr 5y ago
  So, if I understand correctly, the NCMEC provides a bunch of hashes of CSAM for Apple to match. This way Apple doesn’t get exposed to the content of images themselves? Then Apple will provide a user’s details plus the IDs of matching content. This identifies the direction of travel for any CSAM content? So, now NCMEC and any local NCMEC can provide new hashes and identify – possibly even historically – the epicentre of the distribution of a group of images. Except, if Apple only gets the hashes, what’s to stop a bad actor in a NCMEC from providing non CSAM images to Apple for other purposes? Seems like this technology should be illegal without a warrant. It’s a wire tap.
  • 0xy 5y ago
    NCMEC's database already contains non-CSAM. What you suggest is not theoretical, it's reality today. I really think people are missing this point. NCMEC's database is not an infallible, audited and trustworthy source of despicable imagery. It's a mess contributed to by thousands of companies, individuals and police. It's also so intertwined with the FBI that I don't think it's truly correct to call NCMEC independent, given FBI employees work at NCMEC, including on the database. The FBI's involvement is particularly notable here, given their past usage of mass surveillance. This is a truly terrifying precedent.
    • tcldr 5y ago
      Wow. Also, many people trust Apple to do ‘the right thing’. But if Apple are trusting NCMEC and their local equivalents to provide valid CSAM hashes, Apple will never know if their technology is being abused, so they can conveniently point the finger elsewhere if it is. I can’t imagine this point has escaped their awareness.
      • nullc 5y ago
        > Also, many people trust Apple to do ‘the right thing’. Well that's silly of them, thats the motto Google switched to after they gave up on the whole not being evil thing. ( https://www.engadget.com/2015-10-02-alphabet-do-the-right-thing.html https://www.engadget.com/2015-10-02-alphabet-do-the-right-th... ) :P
• NotChina 5y ago
  It's really hard to not want to throw some Schadenfreude on those who pay mini-bar prices for technology. Sadly I doubt this will be a last straw for most, given their investment in time standing in lines.
• Klonoar 5y ago
  This letter doesn't really read correctly. If you're going to write an open letter, this might be better worded. >Apple's proposed technology works by continuously monitoring photos saved or shared on the user's iPhone, iPad, or Mac. It does a check if it's being uploaded to iCloud Photos. It is not (currently, at least) continuously monitoring photos saved or shared; shared is Messages specific for child accounts. >Because both checks are performed on the user's device, they have the potential to bypass any end-to-end encryption that would otherwise safeguard the user's privacy. There is currently no E2E encryption for iCloud, so short of HTTPS... what is this supposed to mean? There is literally no privacy at all if you upload to iCloud currently. If anything, it feels like Apple's client side system enables something closer to E2EE while maintaining the ability to detect child porn on their platform.
  • jpxw 5y ago
    Yes, there seems to be a lot of conflation between the two separate systems (in the media, and in comments on here). As you say, it’s important to be precise, otherwise people won’t take your arguments seriously. To summarise: One system involves hash checking. This is performed when photos are being uploaded to iCloud. The hashes are calculated on-device. Private set intersection is used to determine whether the photos being uploaded match anything in the CSAM hash list. Photos that match will be reviewed manually - if I recall correctly, this only occurs after a certain threshold has been reached. This system will only match known CSAM (or whatever else is in the hash list). The second, independent, system, is a machine learning model which runs on-device to detect sexually explicit photos being received on Messages.app. This system is designed to be run on children’s phones. The system will hide these explicit images by default, and can be configured to alert parents - that feature is designed for under-13s. This system doesn’t use the CSAM hash list.
    • matwood 5y ago
      Based on my reading, the first system is interesting in that the threshold is also cryptographically determined. Each possible hit forms part of a key, and until a complete key is made none of the images can be reviewed. Should also be noted the second system sends no images to Apple or is reviewed by Apple employees in any way. It's just using the same on device ML that finds dog pics for example. I think Apple PR screwed up here announcing all these features at once on one page, and not having the foresight they would be conflated. It also didn't help that a security researcher leaked it the night before without many of the details (iCloud only for example). Context should also be included. CSAM has been happening for years on most (all?) photo hosts, and is probably one of the blockers to full E2E encryption for iCloud photos (I so hope that's coming now!). Finally, nothing has really changed. Either iOS users trust Apple will use the system only as they have said or they won't. Apple controls the OS, and all the 'what if' scenarios existed before and after this new feature. As described, it is the most privacy preserving implementation of CSAM to date.
• saltmeister 5y ago
  kol ayre
• jpxw 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion: I think the outrage over this is quite overblown. This kind of hash checking is done by damn near all cloud providers - Google Photos, Dropbox, Gmail, Discord, Reddit, OneDrive, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Apple have actually been very reluctant to implement this. If you don’t like it, you don’t need to enable iCloud Photos. In the exact same way as if you don’t want your images scanned by Dropbox, you don’t upload the photos to Dropbox. It seems reasonable for Apple to implement something like to prevent iCloud becoming a repository for CSAM. Edit: I’m unable to respond to the comment below this about hashes being performed locally, as I’m rate limited, but here’s my response anyway: The hashes are calculated on the local device, but only for photos which are about to be uploaded to iCloud Photos. The hashes are sent with the photos to iCloud. If a certain number of hashes in someone’s iCloud match (calculated using private set intersection), a manual review will be performed.
  • thinkingemote 5y ago
    It's being done on the local device, not just the cloud.
    • marcellus23 5y ago
      Why does it matter where the scanning is done, if the scans are done to the same content under the same circumstances?
      • jbuhbjlnjbn 5y ago
        iphone user != icloud user When you use a cloud service, you must (should) be aware of the consequence of your files being stored on another computer on the internet. Until now, your local files on your device were not scanned in an inscrutable manner. This is a precedent.
        • marcellus23 5y ago
          But it’s still only cloud photos being scanned. The only photos on your device being scanned are ones that are being uploaded to the cloud. So again, what’s the practical difference?
• nbzso 5y ago
  Apple is forgetting the network effect of professionals that made them billionaires. I personally evangelized my clients in the past for years to switch to Apple ecosystem. In my view this is weaponization of personal devices on a mass scale with clear intent of normalization of surveillance state on a global level. The fact that this comes after NSO spyware investigation speaks volumes. They don't care about privacy. They care about control over user data. I hope this will give power to Linux and FOSS movement and be the beginning of serious Apple detox.
  • lovemenot 5y ago
    The empowerment that you feel you once lent to Apple may no longer be part of their growth plan. Whether or not it actually mattered at the time.
    • nbzso 5y ago
      The empowerment at the time was a honest and professional assessment of using MacOS X vs Windows. Apple embraced PC vs Mac marketing as I can remember. The empowerment today is the same professional stance. Explaining the technical facts to my customers. Nobody will like the idea that their phone or personal computer will actively police on the behalf of big brother. Serious business people don't have to "follow" tech closely. That's why they pay us.
      • lovemenot 5y ago
        Your professionalism is admirable. In this context, perhaps that's all it counts for.
        • nbzso 5y ago
          Thanks. Smart one. :)
  • parasubvert 5y ago
    As a fellow professional, I think this is kind of nonsense. Apple (and all these companies) also operate in a world with a populace that WANTS surveillance for these areas, does not agree that it is a slippery slope, and has voted in governments where that eventually will force Apple to install an even worse back door. The Linux and FOSS movement have never been up to the end user device challenge, and they too operate in a world with a populace that WANTS surveillance for this stuff. The solution to true privacy is never going to be “switch to FOSS” for most users, as that’s sort of like saying “get a degree in math”. It will work for some, but it will be an unstable experience. The solution has to be to a) ensuring democracy survives and b) convincing most people that the right to privacy is more important than finding child pornographers, and c) to vote for representatives that will uphold that right.
• jwildeboer 5y ago
  To introduce such invasive technology just a few weeks after the Pegasus scandal shows me that Apple has lost its ability to read the room.
• nullc 5y ago
  https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni... Apple uses sophisticated cryptography to make absolutely certain that you cannot hold them accountable for abuses of this system against you, NONE of which are prevented by its complex construction. The private set intersection is an alternative to sending you a list of bad-image hashes which uses significantly more bandwidth than simply sending you the list. This alternative is superior for Apple because if they distributed the hashes it would be possible for someone to prove that they had begun matching against innocent images (such as ones connected to targeted races or religions, or sought to out particular pseudonyms by targeted images connected to them). It is inferior for the user for precisely the same reasons. Some might be fooled into thinking the "threshold" behavior, somehow is in their interest: But no, Apple (or parties that have compromised them) can simply register the same images multiple times and bypass it and the privacy (for apple, but not for you) makes it impossible to detect that they've done that.
  • lovelyviking 5y ago
    The existence of Spyware Engine is a problem, not technical details of how current version suppose to work. Suppose to work because we have not idea what it will do. Did you see the source code? We are not that naive to believe for a second that this Spyware Engine will do what is claimed. This is simply viewed as calculated attempt to legalize Spyware Engine on a personal device covered by some bs story intended to get emotional response from the audience to fog the real issue. It is always done this way so no surprises here. All limitations of free speech on the web in Russia were done under umbrella of protecting children and immediately used against political opponents to this very day. This is discussion about values [1] not technical details! Simply because Spyware may be already installed. It should not become any legal though or morally accepted anyhow. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28084578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28084578
    • nullc 5y ago
      I agree with you, but if you'd take the time to read my post you would see that I am arguing that it's not good even by their own claims! They talk a lot about complex crypto to protect privacy but the primary thing it's doing is hiding what apple is matching against, which shields them against accountability. I fully agree that even if the behavior were currently threading the needle it would still be an extremely bad move. See also this prior post of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28083838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28083838
• dalbasal 5y ago
  The common, instinctive reaction in tech circles & HN seems to be some version of "consumer action," vote-with-your-dollar stuff. This isn't going to work. It almost never does. At most, it'll be affect a minor tweak or delay. This is a political issue, IMO. A thousand people protesting outside Apple HQ and/or stores is worth more than 100 thousand consumer striking. IMO, the main non-political avenue here is alternatives, especially FOSS alternatives. It's hard to see a way to widely adopted FOSS phones from here, but if we had a viable alternative things would look different. That's producer action, rather than consumer action. Make it an issue in elections. Stand outside Apple stores with a sign. Push for a Digital Freedom law. Etc. An Apple labour union, maybe. The conscious consumer game is a dead end. It usually is.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    > The common, instinctive reaction in tech circles & HN seems to be some version of "consumer action," vote-with-your-dollar stuff. This isn't going to work. It almost never does. At most, it'll be affect a minor tweak or delay. If "vote with your wallet" doesn't work and only causes, say, 1 million people (out of the billion+ customers) to switch off of iOS, doesn't that mean that the rest of the billion+ people really don't care enough? Maybe a few million more accept the tradeoff of getting iOS for 'scanning my photos for csam and having the ability to move off of iOS later if they expand usage or this system otherwise has issues'. Maybe, just maybe, even if a million people complain about this and apple loses an extreme amount of iPhone sales upwards of 20 million, they can still sell 220 million[0] iPhones to people who don't care. We are certainly the vocal minority here - whether or not that warrants government intervention or otherwise harms our society doesn't really matter when Apple still makes tens of billions in profit a quarter. 0: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/07/2021-iphone-sales-forecast-wedbush/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/07/2021-iphone-sales-forec...
    • dalbasal 5y ago
      >>If "vote with your wallet" doesn't work and only causes, say, 1 million people (out of the billion+ customers) to switch off of iOS, doesn't that mean that the rest of the billion+ people really don't care enough? IMO, no. This is silly logic. I don't particularly care that Apple scan my photos. First, most people don't care about or understand any particular issue well. You might care about the freedom issue here. Another person cares about oceanic biodiversity. Another person cares about factory working conditions. All of them make purchasing decisions that affect all of these. The civilians will always outnumber activists 100-1 on any particular issue. Second, in this particular case, choices are few and poor. Hence exasperated declarations of going back to dumb phones or DIYing something. Third people's individual purchasing decisions don't have any effect on the thing they're trying to affect. In any case, my point was empirical, not theoretical. There are very few significant examples of consumer action amounting to anything. Where it has (eg dolphin safe tuna), consumer action was one piece of a much bigger puzzle, and more about raising awareness than direct. IE people buying dolphin safe tuna also become insistent on regulatory action. By the same logic, you could conclude that people don't care enough about anything. In which case, we come to the same conclusion.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• space_rock 5y ago
  Using child abuse as the example crime for this crime prevention technology makes it feel like they want to silence any criticisms of their phone monitor technology
• intricatedetail 5y ago
  What is the current flagship phone that could run e.g. Ubuntu Touch? I am looking for a new phone that will not be worse than my current driver from 2018.
• axiosgunnar 5y ago
  Let‘s play a simple game. Go to https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni... and then replace - "National Center for Missing and Exploited Children“ with „the new Trump administration“ - „child pornography“ with „LGBT content“ Doesn't look fun anymore, does it? (use „the new Clinton administration“ and „images of guns“ if you are conservative)
  • AlexSW 5y ago
    I'm not sure of the point you're getting at. You can do this with effectively anything. Replace "gay marriage" with "child sexual exploitation" in "I support gay marriage". Does that mean we shouldn't support anything?
    • indymike 5y ago
      > Does that mean we shouldn't support anything? Op is pointing out what a universal evil Apple's scanning of personal property at scale is.
    • jbuhbjlnjbn 5y ago
      I understand you wanted to refute the former comment, but, ironically, that is indeed the case in point: when we cannot trust that the the thing we support won't be exchanged with something else in the future we don't support, without our knowledge, then we indeed should not support it.
• nullc 5y ago
  Somewhat offtopic, but the subject caused me to make a disappointing realization: The most sure way for someone to obtain child porn images that won't trigger a hit in these known child-abuse-image databases would be for someone to take new photos. Is there a reason we can be confident that these databases aren't creating a market for novel child abuse at a greater rate than they're taking abusers out of the community? Esp since presumably abusers are only a (small?) subset of people who view these images?
  • meowster 5y ago
    Or if it's just a simple hash, change a single, impercetible pixel in the photo.
    • judge2020 5y ago
      See this other HN thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28091750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28091750 - they make it a 'perceptual hash' instead of a bytestream hash since they know a lot can and will be done to try to evade PhotoDNA and NeuralHash.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    The target of NCMEC's database is stopping the distribution, and hopefully encouragement of CSAM. Besides how the distribution can negatively impact the mental state of victims, distribution and more eyes on it might cause more people already on barely-legal parts of the internet (ie. qanon message boards) to learn about ways to obtain CSAM and become part of the market of buyers for such material. If you stop that, then the population of people looking for CSAM shrinks and makes it less economical for criminal enterprises to target children specifically for the production of the illegal material.
    • nullc 5y ago
      > The target of NCMEC's database is stopping the distribution, and hopefully encouragement of CSAM. But potentially with the unintended consequence of encouraging the creation of more child abuse material, in order to evade the detection of recognized images.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• weikju 5y ago
  Anybody else feel the chilling effect, wanting to sign this but unsure of future implications of doing so?
• helen___keller 5y ago
  Just a reminder that proprietary software that auto-updates does not serve you and should never have been treated as such. Sometimes it's most convenient / best to use proprietary, and that's fine, but please be aware that all vendors with root level access (google + android, microsoft + windows, etc) are just 1 update away from this situation.
• WA 5y ago
  If it’s just a list or hashes, any possessor of CSAM could simply modify a few pixels to make it no-matching, no? How "flexible" is the matching? And if it is flexible, what about false positives? What if I have a pictured of my naked son on my device and I get flagged? Will the picture of my son get uploaded to the cloud "for further analysis" even though I don’t have iCloud enabled and never signed up for this? Edit: A sibling post has this link, which answers some of these questions: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
  • Grustaf 5y ago
    I think it makes sense to take a step back and ask yourself if Apple, or any sensible Western company, would set up a system that could falsely flag millions of people, or even a hundred. Even without going into implementation details, it seems clear that they would not have a system that would flag standard family photos.
    • WA 5y ago
      I wouldn't over-/underestimate the support capabilities of a big corp like Apple. I remember the Twitter account takeover hack a year ago, which was possible only because customer support had some 2FA-bypass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Twitter_account_hijacking To prevent false-positives, who knows if they have a "review" team that takes a tiny little peek at my naked son. Do you know for sure that no such system is in place or ever will be in place? What if they do get hundreds of thousands of false positives in the future? How would they improve their system if not by reviewing the existing system with real data?
      • Grustaf 5y ago
        They are not looking at your photos at all, they are comparing hashes of them to hashes of KNOWN predatory material. Your family photos will not be in that database.
• metta2uall 5y ago
  I'm not sure what the solution is.. Child abuse is an extremely severe problem. In the future encrypted-messaging may be used by terrorists developing some weapon of mass destruction like a virus. I'm concerned about privacy, but is it tenable to have true E2EE regardless of the harm? For better or worse it seems that human societies will prioritise physical safety over most things. Even if we have true E2EE, a bad authoritarian regime in the future can simply make it illegal. It's more imperative than ever to prevent such a regime arising in the first place..
  • travoc 5y ago
    The solution is for law enforcement to show evidence of a crime to get a subpoena. If you don’t think it works, check out your local list of Megan’s Law participants.
    • metta2uall 5y ago
      Unfortunately law enforcement don't have super-human powers and very often don't know who exactly is involved..
• michalu 5y ago
  Apple's new policy will have only one effect - pedophiles will stop using ios. For the rest of us, our privacy will remain compromised.
  • Jolter 5y ago
    Pedophiles in the know would presumably just have to disable iCloud sync, and the hash scan would never happen.
    • seanp2k2 5y ago
      This. It’s not like iCloud and GDrive are the only two cloud storage vendors, or like there’s no way to encrypt things before uploading them.
• valparaiso 5y ago
  Google for years does server side scanning of all detectable content (photos, videos, urls etc) and no one cares. Now everyone is focused on Apple which still doesn’t have access to not-detected photos on iCloud. Ridiculous.
• athrowaway3z 5y ago
  I kind of stopped after: >fundamental privacy protections for all users of Apple products. Users of Apple (should and largely do) accept they are not in control. Apple has always been clear this is a feature not a bug. This is the logical next step to justify that their lock-in/monopoly has unique features beside making them more money.
• Jenda_ 5y ago
  Notice, for example, that Thunderbird is sending file names and SHA-256 hashes when you open most (e.g. .pdf) attachments, in the clear, to Google. This seems worse to me (in the Apple case, the information is revealed only if enough files from one device match against a predefined hash list) and nobody really cares... I have just tested with a fresh profile with a freshly downloaded thunderbird-78.12.0.tar.bz2 (x64 Linux, en-US) using a Burp proxy. Here is the function that does it: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/components/reputationservice/ApplicationReputation.cpp#1564 https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone... Here is the about:config tweak to turn it off: browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.url Here is an example request: POST https://sb-ssl.google.com/safebrowsing/clientreport/download?key=no-google-safebrowsing-api-key https://sb-ssl.google.com/safebrowsing/clientreport/download... Content is Protobuf-encoded payload containing: - full path to the mailbox including the username and "secret" random profile name (e.g. /home/jenda/.thunderbird/ioi8uk0k.tbtest/Mail/hrach.eu/Inbox) - SHA-256 of the file - attachment file name (e.g. 10-test-blahblah.pdf)
  • chrisrhoden 5y ago
    I suspect that if they were strictly bitstream hashes and not perceptual hashes, people would be less concerned.
    • judge2020 5y ago
      No, i'm sure people would still make a fuss. Perceptual hashes are required to prevent criminals from slightly changing pixels within CSAM photos to avoid detection.
      • chrisrhoden 5y ago
        I think everyone knows why perceptual hashes are being used. I'm not sure how you're certain that people would make a fuss. Almost all of the discussion I have seen surrounding this has spent a tremendous amount of time dwelling on the risk of false positives.
  • the8472 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• hkai 5y ago
  Expect people to be swatted by placing CP on their laptop.
  • Jolter 5y ago
    Except this doesn’t scan the contents on your laptop. It scans what you upload to iCloud.
• FirstLvR 5y ago
  Let's not forget Microsoft is doing this same fukery for years https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Wasn't this covered, yesterday? It seems to be a GitHub Pages site that links to the same resource that was posted here yesterday. But I think it def deserves a lot of scrutiny, and I support the effort, so I'm not really complaining.
• JacobiX 5y ago
  I think that the used technology described in CSAM Detection Technical Summary (the so called NeuralHash) is a really bad idea, basically it uses the output of a neural network (likely a CNN) trained using the now classical triplet loss (see page 5). The problem with those methods that they are not always reliable, for instance the same type of networks and same training procedure is used in neural face recognition that proved to be vulnerable (A recent example is the 'Master Faces' That Can Bypass Over 40% Of Facial ID, etc).
• ryeguy_24 5y ago
  I wonder what image transformations would yield a different hash in the NeuralHash algorithm. Anyone know? From Apple: “The neural network that generates the descriptor is trained through a self-supervised training scheme. Images are perturbed with transformations that keep them perceptually identical to the original, creating an original/perturbed pair.”
  • randcraw 5y ago
    Not a pair. The number of possible perturbations of each example image in deep learning are enormous. This blithe quote implies that a hash code somehow can provide a flexible match against the billions of perturbations even a single image can undergo. It's a specious claim, and intended to cow anyone from disbelieving in the effectiveness of such a brute force match model.
• ryeguy_24 5y ago
  If you had the weights of the hashing neural network (NeuralHash) could it be reversible so that a hash could derive a similar photo to the original?
  • metahost 5y ago
    Neural networks are generally assumed to be non-invertible functions. That said, something like an auto-encoder can learn to decode the encoded data back to its original form, with loss.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Apple in the eyes of many had one redeeming feature over the competition: they appeared to value privacy. The problem is that the 'many' are still a small minority, and that the much larger contingent that Apple serves sees them more accurately for what they are: a consumer electronics manufacturer, where privacy is not an absolute concept but something malleable as long as it serves the bottom line. The tech world seems to have a problem reconciling these two views.
• JudasGoat 5y ago
  I am relatively sure that Apple has made concessions to the Chinese government to allow it's existence in the Chinese market. I would guess that other Governments might feel slighted if not offered the same access.
• intricatedetail 5y ago
  It seems like it is coming together. They'll be able to figure out what kind of person you are by looking at your phone's content. Then at your next vaccination, you'll get one that causes a blood clot or you'll get sterilized. It's not like government hasn't done some of those things. Now it is only going to be automated.
• c7DJTLrn 5y ago
  I'm disturbed by this ordeal and Apple don't seem to be backing down. I was thinking of getting one of the new MacBooks later this year but I think I've changed my mind - I won't buy products from a company that treats its customers as pedophiles. My phone is getting pretty old too, don't think the next one will be an iPhone.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• schappim 5y ago
  Boycotting Apple products will not make a difference. Apple doesn't care, what Apple does care about is bad PR. Generating and sharing bad PR is the only way to get Apple to change something. Think about the Bad PR around Butterfly Keyboards, MacPro, App Store Policies etc and Apple reversing course on decisions.