7 ms·

> Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse. Is it intangible

> Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse. Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced. I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. * Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right?

slg 5y ago
>Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced. You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? >I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough that cracking down on this content will result in less abusers on the streets. >* Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right? I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an incomplete number since it excludes younger children.
- zug_zug 5y ago
  >> You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? That's a weird goal-post. >> Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough that cracking down on this content will result in less abusers on the streets. Obviously of the people who look at cp, a higher percentage of those will be actual child abusers. The question for everybody is -- does giving those people a fantasy outlet increase or actually reduce the number of kids who get assaulted. At the end of the day that's what matters. >> I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an incomplete number since it excludes younger children. [EDIT: Mistake] Well you didn't cite anything at all, and were off by a shockingly large number. Please cite something or explain why you made up a number.
  - slg 5y ago
    >Well you didn't cite anything at all, and were off by a shockingly large number. Sorry, I am just baffled by your last point here. How can I be off by a shockingly large number when I didn't even cite a number?
    - zug_zug 5y ago
      My B, I see now that was in a section where you were quoting hackerfactor. I guess I should direct that question to him.
- Teever 5y ago
  > How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. The first time any man's freedom is trodden on we're all damaged...."
  - zepto 5y ago
    That seems like a ‘no’ then.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It’s also silly - there has obviously been a case where the first speech was censured. It happened before civilizations. Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that? Look, speech is important. So is protecting the public good. But if one believes in absolutes, rather than takeoffs, they are IMO getting too high on their own supply. Let’s talk about the trade offs that we have already made.
    - mikeyjk 5y ago
      Does the fact that the NSA can comb your personal files and look at people's nude photographs not concern you? That's a present day reality brought to light by Snowden. Showing a colleague a 'good find' was considered a perk of the job. We're lying to ourselves if we think this couldn't be abused and can implicitly be trusted. We should generally be sceptical of closed source at the best of times, let alone when it's inherently designed to report on us. To your point of 'as a layman end user what is the cost to me?': more code running on your computer doing potentially anything which you have no way to audit -> compromising the security of whatever is on your computer, and an uptick in cpu/disk/network utilisation (although it remains to be seen if it's anything other than negligible). My defeated mentality is partly - 'well they're already spying on us anyway'...
    - FeepingCreature 5y ago
      > This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It’s also silly - there has obviously been a case where the first speech was censured. It happened before civilizations. Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that? Frankly, yes.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  > Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? So far any defense of this whole fiasco can be boiled down to what you are trying to imply in part. When you say "The possibility of abusing this system is a slippery slope argument", as if identifying a (possible) slippery slope element in an argument would somehow automatically make it invalid? The other way around if all that can be said in defense is that the dangers are part of slippery slope thinking, then you are effectively saying that the only defense is "trust them, let's wait and see, they might not do something bad with it" or "it sure doesn't affect me" (sounds pretty similar to "I've got nothing to hide"). This might work for other areas, not so much when it comes to backdooring your device/backups for arbitrary database checks. And since "oh the children" or "but the terrorists" has become the vanilla excuse for many many things I'm unsure why we are supposed to believe in a truly noble intent down the road here. "No no this time it's REALLY about the kids, the people at work here mean it" just doesn't cut it anymore. So no, I'm not convinced the people at Apple working on this actually do it because they care. When "but the children" becomes a favourite excuse to push whatever, the problem are very much the people abusing this very excuse to this level, not the ones becoming wary of it. > some of the tech community has begun to think we should do absolutely nothing about this problem I don't believe that people think that, I believe that people rather think that the ones in power simply aren't actually mainly interested in this problem. The trust is (rightfully) heavily damaged.
  - loves_mangoes 5y ago
    > So no, I'm not convinced the people at Apple working on this actually do it because they care. I think this is the hardest part to steelman. If you believe that Apple employees are doing this not because they care, then you need to explain the true motive you think they have, otherwise that would be assuming bad faith. Apple has smart and reasonable people, they must have a reason that can be explained, beyond not caring.
mlac 5y ago
> I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. “Think of the Kids” damn well applies to the consumers of this content - by definition, there is a kid (or baby in some instances) involved in the CP. As a society, the United States draws the line at age 18 as the age of consent [the line has to be drawn somewhere and this is a fairly settled argument]. So by definition, in the United States, these are not consenting victims in the pictures. Demand drives creation. Getting rid of it on one of the largest potential viewing and sharing platforms is a move in the right direction in addressing the problem. What I haven’t seen from the tech community is the idea that this will be shut down if it goes too far or beyond this limited scope. Which I think it would be - people would get rid of iPhones if some of the other cases privacy advocates are talking about occur. And at that point they would have to scrap the program - so Apple is motivated to keep it limited in scope to something everyone can agree is abhorrent.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >Demand drives creation. Getting rid of it on one of the largest potential viewing and sharing platforms is a move in the right direction in addressing the problem. Yeah, that focus has worked really well in the "war on some drugs," hasn't it? I don't pretend to have all (or any good ones for that matter) the answers, but we know interdiction doesn't work. Those who are going to engage in non-consensual behavior (with anyone, not just children) are going to do so whether or not they can view and share records of their abuse. The current legal regime (in the US at least) creates a gaping hole where even if you don't know what you have (e.g., if someone sends you a child abuse photo without your knowledge or consent) you are guilty, as possession of child abuse images is a felony. That's wrong. I don't know what the right way is, but adding software to millions of devices searching locally for such stuff creates an environment where literally anyone can be thrown in jail for receiving an unsolicited email or text message. That's not the kind of world in which I want to live. Many years ago, I was visiting my brother and was taking photos of his two sons, at that time aged ~4.5 and ~2. I took an entire roll of my brother, his wife and their kids. In one photo, the two boys are sitting on a staircase, and the younger one (none of us noticed, as he wasn't potty trained and hated pants) wasn't wearing any pants. I took the film to a processor and got my prints in a couple of days. We all had a good laugh looking at the photos and realizing that my nephew wasn't wearing any pants. There wasn't, when the photos were taken, nor when they were viewed, any abuse or sexual motives involved. Were that to happen today, I would be sitting in a jail cell, looking at a lengthy prison sentence. And when done "repaying my debt to society" I'd be forced to register as a sex offender for the rest of my life. Which is ridiculous on its face. Unless and until we reform these insane and inane laws, I can't support such programs. N.B.: I strongly believe that consent is never optional and those under the age of consent cannot do so. As such, there should absolutely be accountability and consequences for those who abuse others, including children.
jodrellblank 5y ago
What tangible impact in the life of an everyday Chinese citizen are you expecting if Apple offered an E2EE messging and cloud backup service in China? And why do you think the Chinese government would not just ban it and criminalise anyone found using a device which connected to Apple's servers, rendering any benefits moot? (And why do you think it's morally right, or the responsibility of a foreign private company to try and force anything into China against their laws? Another commenter in a previous thread said the idea was for Apple to refuse to do business there - but that still leads to the question, how would that help anyone?)
zepto 5y ago
You can’t seriously be suffering that Apple not implementing these measures will somehow be good for privacy in China?
- cvwright 5y ago
  The implication -- and I think it's a valid one -- is that this client-side mechanism will be very quickly co-opted to also alert on non-CSAM material. For example, Winnie the Pooh memes in China.
  - zepto 5y ago
    I think it’s not valid to claim that it will be quickly used for that purpose. However I absolutely agree that it could be used to detect non-CSAM images if Apple colludes with that use case. My point is that this is immaterial to what is going on in China. China is already an authoritarian surveillance state. Even without this, the state has access to the iCloud photo servers in China, so who knows what they are doing, with or without Apple’s cooperation.
    - Maakuth 5y ago
      You can label it collusion, but when Apple does it, it's going to call it _complying with local regulation_.
      - zepto 5y ago
        It doesn’t matter what you label it. Hand wringing over making things worse in China is not a valid concern.
        dmitriid 5y ago
        I'm old enough to remember when the revelation that NSA is spying on everyone was a shock. Now people are seriously arguing that continuous searching through your entire life without any warrant or justification by opaque algorithms is fine. It only took what, 10 years?

slg 5y ago

>Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced. You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? >I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough that cracking down on this content will result in less abusers on the streets. >* Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right? I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an incomplete number since it excludes younger children.

zug_zug 5y ago
>> You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? That's a weird goal-post. >> Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough that cracking down on this content will result in less abusers on the streets. Obviously of the people who look at cp, a higher percentage of those will be actual child abusers. The question for everybody is -- does giving those people a fantasy outlet increase or actually reduce the number of kids who get assaulted. At the end of the day that's what matters. >> I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an incomplete number since it excludes younger children. [EDIT: Mistake] Well you didn't cite anything at all, and were off by a shockingly large number. Please cite something or explain why you made up a number.
- slg 5y ago
  >Well you didn't cite anything at all, and were off by a shockingly large number. Sorry, I am just baffled by your last point here. How can I be off by a shockingly large number when I didn't even cite a number?
  - zug_zug 5y ago
    My B, I see now that was in a section where you were quoting hackerfactor. I guess I should direct that question to him.
Teever 5y ago
> How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. The first time any man's freedom is trodden on we're all damaged...."
- zepto 5y ago
  That seems like a ‘no’ then.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It’s also silly - there has obviously been a case where the first speech was censured. It happened before civilizations. Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that? Look, speech is important. So is protecting the public good. But if one believes in absolutes, rather than takeoffs, they are IMO getting too high on their own supply. Let’s talk about the trade offs that we have already made.
  - mikeyjk 5y ago
    Does the fact that the NSA can comb your personal files and look at people's nude photographs not concern you? That's a present day reality brought to light by Snowden. Showing a colleague a 'good find' was considered a perk of the job. We're lying to ourselves if we think this couldn't be abused and can implicitly be trusted. We should generally be sceptical of closed source at the best of times, let alone when it's inherently designed to report on us. To your point of 'as a layman end user what is the cost to me?': more code running on your computer doing potentially anything which you have no way to audit -> compromising the security of whatever is on your computer, and an uptick in cpu/disk/network utilisation (although it remains to be seen if it's anything other than negligible). My defeated mentality is partly - 'well they're already spying on us anyway'...
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    > This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It’s also silly - there has obviously been a case where the first speech was censured. It happened before civilizations. Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that? Frankly, yes.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
> Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? So far any defense of this whole fiasco can be boiled down to what you are trying to imply in part. When you say "The possibility of abusing this system is a slippery slope argument", as if identifying a (possible) slippery slope element in an argument would somehow automatically make it invalid? The other way around if all that can be said in defense is that the dangers are part of slippery slope thinking, then you are effectively saying that the only defense is "trust them, let's wait and see, they might not do something bad with it" or "it sure doesn't affect me" (sounds pretty similar to "I've got nothing to hide"). This might work for other areas, not so much when it comes to backdooring your device/backups for arbitrary database checks. And since "oh the children" or "but the terrorists" has become the vanilla excuse for many many things I'm unsure why we are supposed to believe in a truly noble intent down the road here. "No no this time it's REALLY about the kids, the people at work here mean it" just doesn't cut it anymore. So no, I'm not convinced the people at Apple working on this actually do it because they care. When "but the children" becomes a favourite excuse to push whatever, the problem are very much the people abusing this very excuse to this level, not the ones becoming wary of it. > some of the tech community has begun to think we should do absolutely nothing about this problem I don't believe that people think that, I believe that people rather think that the ones in power simply aren't actually mainly interested in this problem. The trust is (rightfully) heavily damaged.
- loves_mangoes 5y ago
  > So no, I'm not convinced the people at Apple working on this actually do it because they care. I think this is the hardest part to steelman. If you believe that Apple employees are doing this not because they care, then you need to explain the true motive you think they have, otherwise that would be assuming bad faith. Apple has smart and reasonable people, they must have a reason that can be explained, beyond not caring.

mlac 5y ago

> I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. “Think of the Kids” damn well applies to the consumers of this content - by definition, there is a kid (or baby in some instances) involved in the CP. As a society, the United States draws the line at age 18 as the age of consent [the line has to be drawn somewhere and this is a fairly settled argument]. So by definition, in the United States, these are not consenting victims in the pictures. Demand drives creation. Getting rid of it on one of the largest potential viewing and sharing platforms is a move in the right direction in addressing the problem. What I haven’t seen from the tech community is the idea that this will be shut down if it goes too far or beyond this limited scope. Which I think it would be - people would get rid of iPhones if some of the other cases privacy advocates are talking about occur. And at that point they would have to scrap the program - so Apple is motivated to keep it limited in scope to something everyone can agree is abhorrent.

nobody9999 5y ago
>Demand drives creation. Getting rid of it on one of the largest potential viewing and sharing platforms is a move in the right direction in addressing the problem. Yeah, that focus has worked really well in the "war on some drugs," hasn't it? I don't pretend to have all (or any good ones for that matter) the answers, but we know interdiction doesn't work. Those who are going to engage in non-consensual behavior (with anyone, not just children) are going to do so whether or not they can view and share records of their abuse. The current legal regime (in the US at least) creates a gaping hole where even if you don't know what you have (e.g., if someone sends you a child abuse photo without your knowledge or consent) you are guilty, as possession of child abuse images is a felony. That's wrong. I don't know what the right way is, but adding software to millions of devices searching locally for such stuff creates an environment where literally anyone can be thrown in jail for receiving an unsolicited email or text message. That's not the kind of world in which I want to live. Many years ago, I was visiting my brother and was taking photos of his two sons, at that time aged ~4.5 and ~2. I took an entire roll of my brother, his wife and their kids. In one photo, the two boys are sitting on a staircase, and the younger one (none of us noticed, as he wasn't potty trained and hated pants) wasn't wearing any pants. I took the film to a processor and got my prints in a couple of days. We all had a good laugh looking at the photos and realizing that my nephew wasn't wearing any pants. There wasn't, when the photos were taken, nor when they were viewed, any abuse or sexual motives involved. Were that to happen today, I would be sitting in a jail cell, looking at a lengthy prison sentence. And when done "repaying my debt to society" I'd be forced to register as a sex offender for the rest of my life. Which is ridiculous on its face. Unless and until we reform these insane and inane laws, I can't support such programs. N.B.: I strongly believe that consent is never optional and those under the age of consent cannot do so. As such, there should absolutely be accountability and consequences for those who abuse others, including children.

jodrellblank 5y ago

What tangible impact in the life of an everyday Chinese citizen are you expecting if Apple offered an E2EE messging and cloud backup service in China? And why do you think the Chinese government would not just ban it and criminalise anyone found using a device which connected to Apple's servers, rendering any benefits moot? (And why do you think it's morally right, or the responsibility of a foreign private company to try and force anything into China against their laws? Another commenter in a previous thread said the idea was for Apple to refuse to do business there - but that still leads to the question, how would that help anyone?)

zepto 5y ago

You can’t seriously be suffering that Apple not implementing these measures will somehow be good for privacy in China?

cvwright 5y ago
The implication -- and I think it's a valid one -- is that this client-side mechanism will be very quickly co-opted to also alert on non-CSAM material. For example, Winnie the Pooh memes in China.
- zepto 5y ago
  I think it’s not valid to claim that it will be quickly used for that purpose. However I absolutely agree that it could be used to detect non-CSAM images if Apple colludes with that use case. My point is that this is immaterial to what is going on in China. China is already an authoritarian surveillance state. Even without this, the state has access to the iCloud photo servers in China, so who knows what they are doing, with or without Apple’s cooperation.
  - Maakuth 5y ago
    You can label it collusion, but when Apple does it, it's going to call it _complying with local regulation_.
    - zepto 5y ago
      It doesn’t matter what you label it. Hand wringing over making things worse in China is not a valid concern.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        I'm old enough to remember when the revelation that NSA is spying on everyone was a shock. Now people are seriously arguing that continuous searching through your entire life without any warrant or justification by opaque algorithms is fine. It only took what, 10 years?