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Apple was in a very bad damn if you do damn if you don't situation. Their CSAM reporting looked awful. They needed a solution. They came up with something that
by camillomiller 5y ago
Apple was in a very bad damn if you do damn if you don't situation.
Their CSAM reporting looked awful. They needed a solution. They came up with something that's definitely more elegant and more privacy-oriented than scanning all iCloud Photos.
They went for the more complicated solution, which incidentally is one that less people will properly understand (or care about), therefore limiting the size of the inevitable dent on their privacy reputation.
I think they are also preventing the consequences of some upcoming legislation in the US, UK and other parts of the world to make CSAM scanning mandatory in the Cloud, which would carry the risk of weakening Apple's privacy infrastructure even more.
So, if you're given the choice to go for a haute cuisine gourmet sandwich with a side of shit salad, and a huge shit clam chowder, what would you rather go for?
In Cupertino they picked the sandwich.
- klelatti 5y agoWhy are they 'preventing' the upcoming legislation?
- camillomiller 5y agoSorry, bad phrasing. Clarified.
- cblconfederate 5y ago> more privacy-oriented than scanning all iCloud Photos But they ll be scanning all icloud photos
- camillomiller 5y agoThey don’t. It’s technically not a scan, but a hashing of all content. It’s a non trivial difference.
- cblconfederate 5y agois there any difference in effect?
- lolsal 5y agoScanning in this context implies understanding what is in the image. Hashing doesn't. A hash of a tree only tells apple "This is not a CSAM image", it doesn't say "there is a tree in this image."
- cblconfederate 5y agook i thought we were talking about "scanning for CSAM images". I dont understand why we derailed to different image identification techniques. The point is, whatever apple is doing on the phone could be done exactly in their icloud servers
- rjakobsson 5y agoI believe the difference is that on device they can do it prior to encrypting the image. On the cloud it is encrypted.