9 ms·

The thing that scares me isn't so much the violation of privacy. It's the idea that some computer algorithm can accuse me of a crime automatically with no evide

• throw03172019 5y ago
  There is a human review (ugh.) as well. But still, your example is very concerning.
  • falcolas 5y ago
    From Apple's announcements, there is a human comparison of the visual hashes. They don't appear to be forcing humans to view the images themselves.
    • y7 5y ago
      The technical assessments speak about "visual derivatives". I'm guessing they mean a low resolution thumbnail.
  • foxyv 5y ago
    They say there is a human review, but fail to explain the parameters of the review. How many photos is a reviewer expected to review in an hour? What are their incentives and performance metrics? Do they have a 3 party voting system to confirm? For positive human review is there additional scrutiny? Is data anonymized properly? Does law enforcement receive a copy? Is this going to be limited to child exploitation? Without this info I just have to assume it's some guy in a box expected to review 1000 pictures an hour and gets scrutinized if he doesn't click at least 10% positive. So he's just counting 1 positive 9 negatives.
    • throw03172019 5y ago
      I would hope they aren’t incentivized to incriminate innocent people.
      • foxyv 5y ago
        I would hope so as well. However, my hopes for these policing algorithms have been dashed too many times. The potential for abuse is just too great without effective laws and appropriate procedures. We've seen the results at YouTube, Pasco County Florida, the UK, and Facebook. There is a reason that a key part of justice is being able to face your accusers. Secret algorithms are being used to abrogate this right. You can't cross examine an algorithm. Expert witnesses to contradict its expertise are too expensive for most defendants. Then the developers of the algorithm can claim with plausible deniability that the algorithm is 1 in a trillion accurate. It's essentially the new bite mark analysis and polygraph pseudoscience used to elicit false admissions of guilt or convince gullible juries. "We have the hash of your photo George, we KNOW you are a pedophile. Just admit it and you can go home. We'll go easy on you. We promise!" https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2021/04/26/lawsuit-florida-county-uses-predictive-policing-to-arrest-residents-for-petty-code-violations/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2021/04/26/lawsuit-...
    • gjsman-1000 5y ago
      Remember they said the odds of an account being falsely reported were "1 in a trillion." We have no math to back that, some have called it BS. However... that would mean that one person could easily review only a few photos a week even if it was way off.
• aNoob7000 5y ago
  I want to add that they are scanning your property without your permission. The crazy part is that the government can't do this with a warrant or probable cause, but Apple decided that it can and will. Amazing that Apple destroyed their image about "Privacy" in minutes.
  • Scaevolus 5y ago
    Not that anyone reads them, but every cloud storage EULA has a clause describing how they may remove content at will, especially if it is illegal. That's their justification for why this scanning is happening on photos that are being uploaded to iCloud, and not simply all photos on every device. https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/ https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/ > Apple reserves the right at all times to determine whether Content is appropriate and in compliance with this Agreement, and may screen, move, refuse, modify and/or remove Content at any time, without prior notice and in its sole discretion, if such Content is found to be in violation of this Agreement or is otherwise objectionable.
    • aNoob7000 5y ago
      I have no problem with Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.. Removing and reporting illegal content from their servers. My issue is with Apple doing it on your device or machine. When did Apple become law enforcement?
  • api 5y ago
    I really wonder about their motives for this. It really has destroyed their image to the point that I'm thinking about abandoning the platform if nothing changes. This will not just be about CP. In many countries this will instantly be used to detect any kind of dissent. In the US it will take longer, but eventually I can imagine "misinformation" as determined by some stupid algorithm flagging you for quiet social credit style lists. What constitutes misinformation will change with the political winds. Hey... maybe we can let people select which reality they wish to be enforced! Maybe Republicans can get flagged if they spread memes about universal health care while Democrats can be flagged for discussing LGBT rights! The only thing I can imagine is that Apple is facing enormous pressure from behind the scenes to become part of the panopticon. Private companies can't really resist governments.
• jrm4 5y ago
  Say it louder. Recently I opposed this and was met with "I bet you don't have children." I do, and I am black and so are they, and I'm quite familiar of the present state of facial recognition tech (and, of course, the justice system generally) when it comes to people who look like us. This is all unacceptable, and the fact that some of it has already come to pass is no reason to not fix it.
  • zepto 5y ago
    What does any of this have to do with facial recognition tech or race?
    • jrm4 5y ago
      I get that questions like these are perhaps meant to be "more precise" about the specific tech in question, but honestly, they do more to display the naivete of the questioner in terms of understanding how this sort of thing plays out in real life, when it's not just tech folks, but other policymakers and stakeholders are involved and have the power to make decisions. Even if the thing Apple is talking about right now can be distinguished from "facial recognition" on a technical level, it would be much MORE of a mistake to NOT lump them in together if we're trying to bring this debate to the general public, which we, of course, we should. (don't get me started on race..)
      • zepto 5y ago
        > it would be much MORE of a mistake to NOT lump them in together if we're trying to bring this debate to the general public, which we, of course, we should. Frankly this suggests that you think it’s a good idea to mislead the general public. I think that is one of the ways we harm our public discourse. I could be missing a connection between the two that is obvious to you but not to me, in which case I apologize. I am not naïve about facial recognition. I am not white, and I have known about ML technology since the 90s. Long before it became a known problem it was obvious to me that ML models would end up simply reflecting the biases of the corpus they were trained on, and this would lead to them embodying discrimination of one kind or another, some of which would not be obvious in advance. The perceived ‘neutrality’ of algorithms would be and in fact is invoked to minimize this problem, when of course the problem is not with the algorithms but with what people feed into them. Please let me know if that doesn’t capture the problem with facial recognition adequately. So, given that I’m not naïve about facial recognition, I ask again - what is the connection you see here between racially biased facial recognition and Apple’s CSAM countermeasures?
• zepto 5y ago
  > The thing that scares me isn't so much the violation of privacy. It's the idea that some computer algorithm can accuse me of a crime automatically with no evidence and generate an investigation. Nothing about apple’s proposal involves algorithms accusing people with a crime without evidence. All actual alerts are done by humans checking the photos.
  • foxyv 5y ago
    Predictive policing models require a human in the loop as well. However people tend to trust these algorithms far beyond their reliability without knowing how they work. As I understand it, human reviewers for this program do not see the photo itself, but instead see the hash and make a determination from that. A positive result may be enough to see all of your devices in evidence bags for the next 6 months and serve as probable cause for warrants. In addition, how hard is it to subpoena Apple for a report on how many times a whistleblower's device has been flagged then use it as probable cause. Or, cherry pick which reports Apple makes to target undesirables.
    • zepto 5y ago
      > As I understand it, human reviewers for this program do not see the photo itself, but instead see the hash and make a determination from that. No, this is not correct. Human reviewers see a visual derivative which is separate from the hash. It’s basically a blurred thumbnail - enough to visually confirm that the image is not a false positive, buy not enough that the reviewers are constantly exposed fo child porn. Also remember that multiple matches are required to even get to the human review. The rest of your comment really doesn’t seem to match the system being described. It’s not predictive policing or anything like it, and it is obviously very much against Apple’s interest for it to generate false positives.
      • smsm42 5y ago
        I'm not buying it. If you can recognize what it is, enough to be able to be sure, you're exposed to it. If not, you're just guessing - and your guess is heavily biased towards confirming what the machine said, because Apple spend $MASSIVE_AMOUNT on this technology, and who are you to question it based on a blurry picture? Also, you'd be saving children, and if you're wrong (which you're likely not - remember, industry-leading AI!) - well, the police surely will find that out very quickly and everything will be fine. It's not like it's the first time such systems are built. We have a cases of Big Social banning people for random stuff and then saying "it was a technical error" when the noise in the media is strong enough. We have chess channels banned for racist hatespeech. Only this time the question is not whether you will be denied the opportunity to post cat pictures on facewitter for a week. It's pretty much the most shameful accusation one can be subjected to in our society. Once the press gets hold of it - and it'd get hold of it the minute the police does - there's no coming back from it for the person affected (well, maybe if they are Hunter Biden, but not otherwise). And all that will be hinged on an anonymous drone looking at a blurry picture?
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  This is why algorithmic and predictive policing is so terrifying. Everyone in the justice system now has a great way to shirk liability for their actions and decisions: they can just defer to the infallible black box system that tells them who is a criminal or not. Want to side step accusations of bias or targeting? They were just going after whoever the black box said was guilty, and computers purportedly are not biased. The corollary to this shirking of responsibility is how it lets people, and not just law enforcement, justify abuse of whoever the system says is guilty of a crime, because after all, the company that made the black box says that there is a one in a trillion chance of encountering a false positive. Judges will throw the book at defendants because, statistically, the black box system is almost never wrong, and the system says the defendants are monsters. But the most Kafkaesque part is that people will never get an answer for how these systems determined they were guilty. It's a trade secret, it's part of on-going investigations, it's critical to national security, or in Apple's case, it's literally illegal to look and find out how their system came to conclusion because viewing the data itself is a crime. These systems often inscrutable ML models, as well, and we all know just how buggy and error prone computers and software can be.