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I think there is more going on here. I think what we're seeing is Apple betting on using cryptography as part of the product design phase. Apple devices alread

I think there is more going on here. I think what we're seeing is Apple betting on using cryptography as part of the product design phase. Apple devices already do weird things like wake up to announce their physical location so that users can find their devices. The thought of a powered down or suspended laptop waking up to announce its location isn't something I particularly want, but Apple users seem to like it. Anyone who has spent any time on spaces that are strongly encrypted and focused on privacy know how quickly they become havens for the sort of material that Apple doesn't want associated with its brand. How many "Apple protects child predator" news stories do you think Apple can withstand while still remaining a luxury brand? Apples goal here is to have the reputation for end-to-end encryption and privacy while simultaneously not being seen as a phone for child predators. They don't have a lot of options if they want to thread that needle. I've thought about this space quite a bit, and all options suck. Client side scanning is really the only choice with reasonable tradeoffs. The other option is scanning encrypted photos on cloud using secure enclaves to do the scanning. My guess is that when the tech makes that possible Apple will move in that direction. I agree that this isn't the best for privacy nuts like me. But the iPhone isn't a blackphone, it's a luxury handbag. The phone isn't for privacy nerds, the privacy is there to make other mobile OS's look cheap and tacky.

zionic 5y ago
This is needless Apple apologetics. They deserve to be raked over the coals for this, there's no world where their current design is a "good" or "right" one. Child abuse is a serious problem, but building a surveillance panopticon is not an acceptable solution to it. Better investment in education, health care, and reporting hotlines are the way forward to stop this issue at its source.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Right? Should cars have facial recognition cameras so they don't enable child trafficking?
  - nicce 5y ago
    Not relevant example as Apple is only required to stop redistribution of existing material. They are not forced to look for new material.
    - cvwright 5y ago
      But the point is, once you accept something noble and difficult like "preventing CSAM" as your primary overriding goal, then there's nothing that's too far or too extreme if it will help you with your noble goal. Five years ago, the idea of Apple scanning photos on your phone would have been absurd. Five years from now, what will people think about hotels installing AI-powered cameras in every room? The vendor swears they only start recording when they detect an act of abuse. It sounds absurd now, but where do you draw the line?
      - nicce 5y ago
        Many (maybe 5) years ago Apple launched Neural Net to categorize your photos and this scans all of them, a lot whether they are in the cloud or not. Difference is, that we don’t know where this information is stored. Still nobody is worried about that. Feature, which allows more than this newly added CSAM functionality. If someone wants to misuse that in hidden, there is no difference of now or future. Because all we have is trust. Speculation suddenly raises, when common politic reasons are mentioned. It does not really matter if the scanning happens on device or iCloud in this situation, because you have to always trust their closed source system. Google has scanned your images since 2009 in the cloud unencrypted, but now when Apple makes situation better, it is suddenly bad. All tools have been out there already. There are no really other options to get more privacy than this, but people refuse to see that. Well, there is voting. Vote people who puts privacy over everything. That would make everything easy.
        giantrobot 5y ago
        > Google has scanned your images since 2009 in the cloud unencrypted, but now when Apple makes situation better, it is suddenly bad. At the moment Apple's scanning policy is about the same as it was before. They claim they're only scanning photos if iCloud photos are enabled. The change they're advertising is doing the actual scanning process locally. The problem is two fold. The first is Apple went from scanning only explicitly uploaded content to local content. Since they've decided to intrude on local content once "for the children" it's not out of the realm of possibility (if not likely) they will make further intrusions in the future for prima facie noble reasons. Are third party apps going to be restricted on saving data unless they allow access to Apple's CSAM scanner? Will it start scanning texts or e-mails tomorrow letting and rando flood a person's phone with CSAM and get them arrested? Adding a local scanning system like this is a slippery slope. The second problem is the opaqueness of the system. This has multiple sub-problems. While the NCMEC has a laudable goal, involving them in the CSAM scanning process involves an outsize level of trust I don't think they have earned. They have law enforcement's unfortunate disdain for personal privacy coupled with a fanatical devotion to their cause. They believe their actions are always correct and just so long as they supposedly serve their goal of "protecting children". Due to the opaque nature of their content library it's not crazy to think repressive regimes will get self-serving content added to the source libraries for CSAM scanning. There's plenty of places where homosexuality is punishable by death and even mildly anti-government content will land you in jail. Obviously you and I can't go look at NCMEC/ICMEC CSAM libraries to check for falsely added content. So how are we supposed to trust a system run by fanatics to not have simple errors? Which leads to the other opaqueness sub-problem. Apple's design is interesting, if not laudable, but is closed source and full of black boxes. PhotoDNA, NeuralHash, and the like are not published algorithms anyone can verify. We don't even have a way of knowing if some image we have tripped a false positive and have to trust Apple's unknown "threshold" isn't 1. So not only does the public, the subject of these new intrusions, have no way of auditing the database but they have no way of auditing the code or process. A stupid bug in the scanning system could get a user reported to Apple which we then have to trust not to forward (and not to have additional bugs in their reporting system) them to law enforcement and ruin their life. So I am concerned with scope creep and bugs/false positives. I can live with a bug that causes video playback to stutter or a black box system in Maps that gives me the wrong hours for a restaurant. It's much harder to live with bugs that can get me arrested or even killed thanks to trigger happy police. Apple's system might be technically adept but their promises of future behavior aren't trustworthy since they've already changed their behavior with this new system.
- camillomiller 5y ago
  I think it’s actually a good way to look at the problem from a different, broader, perspective that isn’t the average HN user and privacy minded individual standpoint. Also, it interprets Apple’s decisions in the wider framework of their B2C business. Apple’s privacy engineers don’t have the luxury of being radical like their critics when it comes to taking a decision like this. Given this state of things, have they picked the lesser of two evils to solve the thorny problem of CSAM detection? I think it’s fair to say yes, they did, while still criticizing them for it (which is what they were of course expecting anyway).
  - thesimon 5y ago
    > Given this state of things, have they picked the lesser of two evils to solve the thorny problem of CSAM detection? I think it’s fair to say yes, they did, Can you describe the two options they had?
    - nicce 5y ago
      First option is not to encrypt data at all (current state, server side does not count), second option is to use end-to-end encryption with hidden backdoor. They found a (third) way, to lock themselves out of most of the data, and for example FBI can’t ask them to show some arbitrary images. Sorry, this was three options.
  - notheretoo 5y ago
    It’s not a privacy minded standpoint. It’s the god damn 4th amendment.
  - nbzso 5y ago
    Nope. If scanning was implemented outside the device on the iCloud as everyone else, may be. But this is intrusion of privacy on a new "on device surveillance" level and Apple deserves hostile reaction. No form of apologetic or "technical" explanation can remove this from reality now. They are betting heavily on their "core" demographics to trust them automatically and without any form of critical thinking. If this implementation has no effect on Apples bottom line. Things are over. We will live in badly implemented version of the Minority Report.
- wegs 5y ago
  I think one of the problems here is a reality and perception don't align: - Apple has over a billion devices out there. - Child abuse is a rare problem, but with over a billion devices, there will be enough of it for a lot of newsworthy stories. - Child pornography takes just one abused child for an arbitrary number of viewers. Arguably, by the time you're limiting the number of viewers, most of the harm has been done. On the whole, I'm not quite sure how the Apple plan will protect actual children from rape (except to somewhat reduce the secondary harm of distribution). I can clearly see how it will protect Apple from bad press, though -- people won't use iPhones to record that. On the other hand, an investment in education, health care, reporting, and enforcement could significantly reduce the amount of child abuse, but with 7 billion people in the world, no expense would bring it to zero. So long as it's not zero, the potential for bad press is there. Indeed, usually if something happens a few times per year, it receives more bad press than if it happens a few times per day. Apple has every incentive to be (1) seen as doing something (2) do things which protect its brand value. Apple has no incentive to invest in education, health care, reporting, and enforcement. Those seem like good things to do, but if anything, if a scandal comes up, those sorts of things are used to say "See, Apple new, and was trying to buy an out." As a footnote, if we value all children equally, a lot of this is super-cheap. This is a good movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_into_Brothels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_into_Brothels And the problem it portrays could probably be solved with the same finances as the salaries of a few Apple engineers, and a focused, targeted effort to identify child prostitutes, help their families with the economics which force those kids to become child prostitutes, and get those kids into schools instead. I'm guessing the $100k raised from this film will do more to protect kids than this whole Apple initiative will do.
  - throwavocado 5y ago
    > On the whole, I'm not quite sure how the Apple plan will protect actual children from rape (except to somewhat reduce the secondary harm of distribution). You bring up the distinction between "possession offenses" (i.e., a person who has CSAM content) and "hands-on offenses" (i.e., a person who abuses children and possibly, but not necessarily, produces CSAM). Detecting possession offenses (as Apple's sytem does) has the second-order effect of finding hands-on offenders because hands-on offenders tend to also collect CSAM and form large libraries of it. So finding a CSAM collection is the best way to find a hands-on offender and stop their abuse. Ideally, victims would always disclose their abuse so that the traditional investigatory process could handle it -- but child sexual abuse is special in that offenders are skilled in manipulating children and families in order to avoid detection. I think that the case of USA v. Rosenchein [0] is a good example because it shows the ins and outs of how the company->NCMEC->law enforcement system tends to work and how it leads to hands-on offenders. It's higher profile than most, perhaps because the defendant (a surgeon), seems to have plenty of resources for fighting the conviction on constitutional grounds (as opposed to actually claiming innocence). But the mechanism leading to the prosecution is by no means exceptional. Caveat: Not a lawyer. [0] https://www.anylaw.com/case/usa-v-rosenchein/d-new-mexico/11-11-2020/U23IwXUBvjaUG3Ruy4-x https://www.anylaw.com/case/usa-v-rosenchein/d-new-mexico/11...
- SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  > This is needless Apple apologetics. Just to be clear, I am neither defending nor attacking Apple. I don't even own any Apple devices. I'm just giving my interpretation of the dynamics behind what is going on.
IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
Yes, thank you. This is the only theory that explains observed reality. I'd add that they probably consider the scheme to be better than the alternative (which is how others do it, including Google IIRC), namely checking photos once they have been uploaded. They have gone to some lengths to do more on the device instead of uploading user data, in Siri for example, but also Photos.app face recognition etc.
JasonFruit 5y ago
> I've thought about this space quite a bit, and all options suck... I agree that this isn't the best for privacy nuts like me. But the iPhone isn't a blackphone, it's a luxury handbag. Privacy isn't a toy for nerds, though. It's not even a luxury item. It's a need and a right of all people. There is a good option: keep people's stuff private. It's the only option.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  I'm relatively extremist on privacy and user autonomy in general. But I hesitate to say that privacy is so fundamental that people shouldn't be _allowed_ to decide they're okay with it. It's a while since the ruckus about privacy from techie types has penetrated the public discourse, and I think this is a very good thing. The non-tech-savvy people, if anything, overestimate the degree to which their privacy is compromised, convinced that every sound they make within earshot of their phone is scraped for ad targeting. But not one of the people in my anecdotal dataset change their behavior on this basis, nor even seem to be particularly bothered by it. I don't think you can even chalk this up to technical ignorance. Bush's warrantless wiretapping had something like 40% approval, and that wasn't even transparent or consensual! It really does appear there are a massive amount of people out there who look at the current cost/benefit tradeoff of compromising their privacy and decide that it's worth it. Awareness is still important, but I don't agree with your suggestion that everyone be effectively coerced into accepting the tradeoffs that you or I accept.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    > massive amount of people out there who look at the current cost/benefit tradeoff of compromising their privacy and decide that it's worth it I don't agree with this characterization - it's too willful. To me, it seems more like a helpless coping mechanism. Since they "overestimate the degree to which their privacy is compromised", they resign themselves to not being able to do anything to protect their own privacy. The phone is listening to them, the satellites are tracking them [0], websites are recording them - basically every electronic device they encounter is not under their control. Their privacy is already gone. Then, they watch TV and see actors using surveillance systems to capture Really Bad People. Since they've already resigned themselves to the collection, the only thing they have left is to hope that said surveillance results in things that are good and just. And when you try to bring up real-world problems, they revert to coping mechanisms of how it doesn't bother them - because if it did, they're still ultimately powerless to change anything. To cross this divide, I think we need to give people actionable packaged-up solutions they adopt to protect their privacy. Part of the difficulty is that most people use their phone as their primary communication medium, and the phone ecosystem is a privacy dumpster fire. I don't have a recommendation for increasing phone privacy besides LoS+microg and also stop using your phone so much - do most of your communicating from a real computer running Free software. Incidentally this is why this Apple news is so terrible - they had seemed to plot a course for more user privacy. Even with Apple retaining control, it could have let people see there can be boundaries. But now they've basically thrown away user empowerment in favor of putting a government agent on every phone. And so we're right back to the understanding of "everything I do is surveilled". [0] I'm obviously describing their perspective. I've tried to explain to people that GPS satellites do not themselves track you, but rather let your phone figure out where you are. And by them taking an interest in the software on their phone, they could prevent it tracking their location. But I generally hit a wall of cognitive dissonance where the "satellite tracking" was really just some talking point, rather than something they think they could prevent.
josteink 5y ago
> Client side scanning is really the only choice with reasonable tradeoffs. As the guy sitting on the client-side, how about “No”?
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> The other option is scanning encrypted photos on cloud using secure enclaves to do the scanning. This doesn't work because secure enclaves only move trust from the software developer to the hardware manufacturer, who has the code signing keys to update the firmware on the secure enclave. Which in this case would still be Apple, or someone equivalently [un]trustworty and subject to external coercion.
merpnderp 5y ago
But many security researchers and analysts seem convinced this system will catch up innocent people. Will it only take a single arrest of someone who happens to get a copy of their iCloud account to their lawyer, instantly proving their innocence before Apple is destroyed? Or will it take two?

zionic 5y ago

This is needless Apple apologetics. They deserve to be raked over the coals for this, there's no world where their current design is a "good" or "right" one. Child abuse is a serious problem, but building a surveillance panopticon is not an acceptable solution to it. Better investment in education, health care, and reporting hotlines are the way forward to stop this issue at its source.

JasonFruit 5y ago
Right? Should cars have facial recognition cameras so they don't enable child trafficking?
- nicce 5y ago
  Not relevant example as Apple is only required to stop redistribution of existing material. They are not forced to look for new material.
  - cvwright 5y ago
    But the point is, once you accept something noble and difficult like "preventing CSAM" as your primary overriding goal, then there's nothing that's too far or too extreme if it will help you with your noble goal. Five years ago, the idea of Apple scanning photos on your phone would have been absurd. Five years from now, what will people think about hotels installing AI-powered cameras in every room? The vendor swears they only start recording when they detect an act of abuse. It sounds absurd now, but where do you draw the line?
    - nicce 5y ago
      Many (maybe 5) years ago Apple launched Neural Net to categorize your photos and this scans all of them, a lot whether they are in the cloud or not. Difference is, that we don’t know where this information is stored. Still nobody is worried about that. Feature, which allows more than this newly added CSAM functionality. If someone wants to misuse that in hidden, there is no difference of now or future. Because all we have is trust. Speculation suddenly raises, when common politic reasons are mentioned. It does not really matter if the scanning happens on device or iCloud in this situation, because you have to always trust their closed source system. Google has scanned your images since 2009 in the cloud unencrypted, but now when Apple makes situation better, it is suddenly bad. All tools have been out there already. There are no really other options to get more privacy than this, but people refuse to see that. Well, there is voting. Vote people who puts privacy over everything. That would make everything easy.
      - giantrobot 5y ago
        > Google has scanned your images since 2009 in the cloud unencrypted, but now when Apple makes situation better, it is suddenly bad. At the moment Apple's scanning policy is about the same as it was before. They claim they're only scanning photos if iCloud photos are enabled. The change they're advertising is doing the actual scanning process locally. The problem is two fold. The first is Apple went from scanning only explicitly uploaded content to local content. Since they've decided to intrude on local content once "for the children" it's not out of the realm of possibility (if not likely) they will make further intrusions in the future for prima facie noble reasons. Are third party apps going to be restricted on saving data unless they allow access to Apple's CSAM scanner? Will it start scanning texts or e-mails tomorrow letting and rando flood a person's phone with CSAM and get them arrested? Adding a local scanning system like this is a slippery slope. The second problem is the opaqueness of the system. This has multiple sub-problems. While the NCMEC has a laudable goal, involving them in the CSAM scanning process involves an outsize level of trust I don't think they have earned. They have law enforcement's unfortunate disdain for personal privacy coupled with a fanatical devotion to their cause. They believe their actions are always correct and just so long as they supposedly serve their goal of "protecting children". Due to the opaque nature of their content library it's not crazy to think repressive regimes will get self-serving content added to the source libraries for CSAM scanning. There's plenty of places where homosexuality is punishable by death and even mildly anti-government content will land you in jail. Obviously you and I can't go look at NCMEC/ICMEC CSAM libraries to check for falsely added content. So how are we supposed to trust a system run by fanatics to not have simple errors? Which leads to the other opaqueness sub-problem. Apple's design is interesting, if not laudable, but is closed source and full of black boxes. PhotoDNA, NeuralHash, and the like are not published algorithms anyone can verify. We don't even have a way of knowing if some image we have tripped a false positive and have to trust Apple's unknown "threshold" isn't 1. So not only does the public, the subject of these new intrusions, have no way of auditing the database but they have no way of auditing the code or process. A stupid bug in the scanning system could get a user reported to Apple which we then have to trust not to forward (and not to have additional bugs in their reporting system) them to law enforcement and ruin their life. So I am concerned with scope creep and bugs/false positives. I can live with a bug that causes video playback to stutter or a black box system in Maps that gives me the wrong hours for a restaurant. It's much harder to live with bugs that can get me arrested or even killed thanks to trigger happy police. Apple's system might be technically adept but their promises of future behavior aren't trustworthy since they've already changed their behavior with this new system.
camillomiller 5y ago
I think it’s actually a good way to look at the problem from a different, broader, perspective that isn’t the average HN user and privacy minded individual standpoint. Also, it interprets Apple’s decisions in the wider framework of their B2C business. Apple’s privacy engineers don’t have the luxury of being radical like their critics when it comes to taking a decision like this. Given this state of things, have they picked the lesser of two evils to solve the thorny problem of CSAM detection? I think it’s fair to say yes, they did, while still criticizing them for it (which is what they were of course expecting anyway).
- thesimon 5y ago
  > Given this state of things, have they picked the lesser of two evils to solve the thorny problem of CSAM detection? I think it’s fair to say yes, they did, Can you describe the two options they had?
  - nicce 5y ago
    First option is not to encrypt data at all (current state, server side does not count), second option is to use end-to-end encryption with hidden backdoor. They found a (third) way, to lock themselves out of most of the data, and for example FBI can’t ask them to show some arbitrary images. Sorry, this was three options.
- notheretoo 5y ago
  It’s not a privacy minded standpoint. It’s the god damn 4th amendment.
- nbzso 5y ago
  Nope. If scanning was implemented outside the device on the iCloud as everyone else, may be. But this is intrusion of privacy on a new "on device surveillance" level and Apple deserves hostile reaction. No form of apologetic or "technical" explanation can remove this from reality now. They are betting heavily on their "core" demographics to trust them automatically and without any form of critical thinking. If this implementation has no effect on Apples bottom line. Things are over. We will live in badly implemented version of the Minority Report.
wegs 5y ago
I think one of the problems here is a reality and perception don't align: - Apple has over a billion devices out there. - Child abuse is a rare problem, but with over a billion devices, there will be enough of it for a lot of newsworthy stories. - Child pornography takes just one abused child for an arbitrary number of viewers. Arguably, by the time you're limiting the number of viewers, most of the harm has been done. On the whole, I'm not quite sure how the Apple plan will protect actual children from rape (except to somewhat reduce the secondary harm of distribution). I can clearly see how it will protect Apple from bad press, though -- people won't use iPhones to record that. On the other hand, an investment in education, health care, reporting, and enforcement could significantly reduce the amount of child abuse, but with 7 billion people in the world, no expense would bring it to zero. So long as it's not zero, the potential for bad press is there. Indeed, usually if something happens a few times per year, it receives more bad press than if it happens a few times per day. Apple has every incentive to be (1) seen as doing something (2) do things which protect its brand value. Apple has no incentive to invest in education, health care, reporting, and enforcement. Those seem like good things to do, but if anything, if a scandal comes up, those sorts of things are used to say "See, Apple new, and was trying to buy an out." As a footnote, if we value all children equally, a lot of this is super-cheap. This is a good movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_into_Brothels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_into_Brothels And the problem it portrays could probably be solved with the same finances as the salaries of a few Apple engineers, and a focused, targeted effort to identify child prostitutes, help their families with the economics which force those kids to become child prostitutes, and get those kids into schools instead. I'm guessing the $100k raised from this film will do more to protect kids than this whole Apple initiative will do.
- throwavocado 5y ago
  > On the whole, I'm not quite sure how the Apple plan will protect actual children from rape (except to somewhat reduce the secondary harm of distribution). You bring up the distinction between "possession offenses" (i.e., a person who has CSAM content) and "hands-on offenses" (i.e., a person who abuses children and possibly, but not necessarily, produces CSAM). Detecting possession offenses (as Apple's sytem does) has the second-order effect of finding hands-on offenders because hands-on offenders tend to also collect CSAM and form large libraries of it. So finding a CSAM collection is the best way to find a hands-on offender and stop their abuse. Ideally, victims would always disclose their abuse so that the traditional investigatory process could handle it -- but child sexual abuse is special in that offenders are skilled in manipulating children and families in order to avoid detection. I think that the case of USA v. Rosenchein [0] is a good example because it shows the ins and outs of how the company->NCMEC->law enforcement system tends to work and how it leads to hands-on offenders. It's higher profile than most, perhaps because the defendant (a surgeon), seems to have plenty of resources for fighting the conviction on constitutional grounds (as opposed to actually claiming innocence). But the mechanism leading to the prosecution is by no means exceptional. Caveat: Not a lawyer. [0] https://www.anylaw.com/case/usa-v-rosenchein/d-new-mexico/11-11-2020/U23IwXUBvjaUG3Ruy4-x https://www.anylaw.com/case/usa-v-rosenchein/d-new-mexico/11...
SquishyPanda23 5y ago
> This is needless Apple apologetics. Just to be clear, I am neither defending nor attacking Apple. I don't even own any Apple devices. I'm just giving my interpretation of the dynamics behind what is going on.

IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago

Yes, thank you. This is the only theory that explains observed reality. I'd add that they probably consider the scheme to be better than the alternative (which is how others do it, including Google IIRC), namely checking photos once they have been uploaded. They have gone to some lengths to do more on the device instead of uploading user data, in Siri for example, but also Photos.app face recognition etc.

JasonFruit 5y ago

> I've thought about this space quite a bit, and all options suck... I agree that this isn't the best for privacy nuts like me. But the iPhone isn't a blackphone, it's a luxury handbag. Privacy isn't a toy for nerds, though. It's not even a luxury item. It's a need and a right of all people. There is a good option: keep people's stuff private. It's the only option.

wutbrodo 5y ago
I'm relatively extremist on privacy and user autonomy in general. But I hesitate to say that privacy is so fundamental that people shouldn't be _allowed_ to decide they're okay with it. It's a while since the ruckus about privacy from techie types has penetrated the public discourse, and I think this is a very good thing. The non-tech-savvy people, if anything, overestimate the degree to which their privacy is compromised, convinced that every sound they make within earshot of their phone is scraped for ad targeting. But not one of the people in my anecdotal dataset change their behavior on this basis, nor even seem to be particularly bothered by it. I don't think you can even chalk this up to technical ignorance. Bush's warrantless wiretapping had something like 40% approval, and that wasn't even transparent or consensual! It really does appear there are a massive amount of people out there who look at the current cost/benefit tradeoff of compromising their privacy and decide that it's worth it. Awareness is still important, but I don't agree with your suggestion that everyone be effectively coerced into accepting the tradeoffs that you or I accept.
- mindslight 5y ago
  > massive amount of people out there who look at the current cost/benefit tradeoff of compromising their privacy and decide that it's worth it I don't agree with this characterization - it's too willful. To me, it seems more like a helpless coping mechanism. Since they "overestimate the degree to which their privacy is compromised", they resign themselves to not being able to do anything to protect their own privacy. The phone is listening to them, the satellites are tracking them [0], websites are recording them - basically every electronic device they encounter is not under their control. Their privacy is already gone. Then, they watch TV and see actors using surveillance systems to capture Really Bad People. Since they've already resigned themselves to the collection, the only thing they have left is to hope that said surveillance results in things that are good and just. And when you try to bring up real-world problems, they revert to coping mechanisms of how it doesn't bother them - because if it did, they're still ultimately powerless to change anything. To cross this divide, I think we need to give people actionable packaged-up solutions they adopt to protect their privacy. Part of the difficulty is that most people use their phone as their primary communication medium, and the phone ecosystem is a privacy dumpster fire. I don't have a recommendation for increasing phone privacy besides LoS+microg and also stop using your phone so much - do most of your communicating from a real computer running Free software. Incidentally this is why this Apple news is so terrible - they had seemed to plot a course for more user privacy. Even with Apple retaining control, it could have let people see there can be boundaries. But now they've basically thrown away user empowerment in favor of putting a government agent on every phone. And so we're right back to the understanding of "everything I do is surveilled". [0] I'm obviously describing their perspective. I've tried to explain to people that GPS satellites do not themselves track you, but rather let your phone figure out where you are. And by them taking an interest in the software on their phone, they could prevent it tracking their location. But I generally hit a wall of cognitive dissonance where the "satellite tracking" was really just some talking point, rather than something they think they could prevent.

josteink 5y ago

> Client side scanning is really the only choice with reasonable tradeoffs. As the guy sitting on the client-side, how about “No”?

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> The other option is scanning encrypted photos on cloud using secure enclaves to do the scanning. This doesn't work because secure enclaves only move trust from the software developer to the hardware manufacturer, who has the code signing keys to update the firmware on the secure enclave. Which in this case would still be Apple, or someone equivalently [un]trustworty and subject to external coercion.

merpnderp 5y ago

But many security researchers and analysts seem convinced this system will catch up innocent people. Will it only take a single arrest of someone who happens to get a copy of their iCloud account to their lawyer, instantly proving their innocence before Apple is destroyed? Or will it take two?