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Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

• m3kw9 5y ago
  On the contrary, it would be weird if everyone inside unanimously agreed.
• karakot 5y ago
  The damage is already done.
• endisneigh 5y ago
  Don't use cloud services or closed-source services if you want your stuff to be safe and you want your privacy to be maintained.
  • geofft 5y ago
    Er, do you have a recommendation for non-cloud services that provide me with automatic backups of everything I do if something happens to my apartment, or open-source services that are free of all security flaws allowing hackers to compromise your privacy? Like I wholeheartedly get where you're coming from, but I'm not sure what realistic alternatives look like.
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      Use a photo client on an android phone, encrypt the photos and use NextCloud (self-hosted). Make sure your certificates are up-to-date. Reverse this process on another client to see the photos.
      • geofft 5y ago
        What sort of Android? Normal Google-provided Android, which contains closed-source components? Or do you have an open-source alternative in mind? Where do I self-host NextCloud?
        • endisneigh 5y ago
          you can self-host NextCloud on your laptop or desktop. you can use whichever flavor of Android you'd like - a lot of people like GrapheneOS
          • jjulius 5y ago
            So, lemme preface this by saying I also use my own NAS at home and wholly support your push for self-hosting. That said, I'm gonna play devil's advocate here, because this is an area I admittedly haven't put much thought into. GP said: >... non-cloud services that provide me with automatic backups of everything I do if something happens to my apartment... And my first concern is that a laptop or desktop (or my NAS) won't fare well if an apartment is broken into and the devices are stolen, or they get severely damaged in a natural disaster. What might a good mitigation be for that that doesn't involve spinning up a VPS via DO, etc.?
            • endisneigh 5y ago
              > And my first concern is that a laptop or desktop (or my NAS) won't fare well if an apartment is broken into and the devices are stolen, or they get severely damaged in a natural disaster. What might a good mitigation be for that that doesn't involve spinning up a VPS via DO, etc.? occasional offsite backups of all of your data
            • octopoc 5y ago
              How about whole disk encryption with Duplicati backing up to Sia[1]? This will let you do automatic backups to a decentralized version of S3 where you pay cryptocurrency (Siacoin) for the storage. That way here's what you need to protect: - Your whole-disk encryption keys / passwords - Your Sia key - Your password for Duplicati backups [1] https://duplicati.readthedocs.io/en/latest/05-storage-providers/#sia-decentralized-cloud https://duplicati.readthedocs.io/en/latest/05-storage-provid...
      • busymom0 5y ago
        Unfortunately since iOS doesn't allow changing default Camera app, using a third party photo client is not that easy.
    • nonbirithm 5y ago
      What I wouldn't recommend is using a cloud service like Flickr if you value the integrity of your data. Recently they charged me with a "Community Guideline Warning" because I accidentally included a folder filled with non-photo images, and threatened to delete my account within three days. There is no way to appeal or know which content is specifically in violation. All they left was a curt, automated email. You can request all your data from Flickr to save everything, but they state that the process can take up to several weeks before you're given a download link, longer than the three days it takes for them to arbitrarily terminate your account. Even with services like MEGA that tout keywords like "encryption" and "privacy" without end, look at their Terms of Service and there will be a clause stating that they will still give all your data to any law enforcement agency that puts in a request, including encrypted files. And they have no choice but to do so, because of the very same issue that's forcing the personal privacy debate with Apple into the spotlight - hosting any kind of illegal data, which is for all intents and purposes synonymous with CSAM, makes your service criminally liable in dozens of different jurisdictions. A public cloud provider that allows arbitrary file uploads and has absolute privacy cannot exist because of the necessity to allow law enforcement to investigate reports of the illegal hosting of CSAM in dozens of different countries. Any expectation of privacy is a facade when dealing with the cloud. Even beyond the issue of privacy, you're still at the whims of the cloud provider in the end. Fail to play by their rules, and you're done for.
    • gpm 5y ago
      Since we're on HN. Use something like restic and a cron job backing up to something like blackblaze. Yes, it's the cloud, but they don't control the backup software (it's open source, not developed by them, using public APIs) or the encryption keys (protected by a passphrase client side, use a good one). There may be less programmery equivalents of that, which have scheduling built into the backup tool and so on. Just recommending what I've used. (This advice applies to general purpose computers, not sure if there's an equivalent for android or iOS)
    • fgygjifdscg 5y ago
      Synology has a phone app that automatically backs up your photos. Then a pointy clicky setup to backup your backups to Glacier
• jonplackett 5y ago
  In their attempt to make this extra private by scanning 'on device', I think they've managed to make it feel worse. If they scan my iCloud photos in iCloud, well lots of companies scan stuff when you upload it. It's on their servers, they're responsible for it. They don't want to be hosting CSAM. It feels much worse them turning your own, trusty iPhone against you. I know that isn't how you should look at it, but that's still how it feels.
  • nottorp 5y ago
    That is how you should look at it. They have no business scanning the phones for anything, period. I'll refer you to the poem beginning with "First they came for the Jews...".
    • petermcneeley 5y ago
      The poem begins with "First they came for the socialists.." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
      • tpush 5y ago
        'Communists' instead of 'socialists' actually; the US version is inaccurate due to anti-communist propaganda.
        • stjohnswarts 5y ago
          Do you have a source for that?
          • FabHK 5y ago
            The original: Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist. Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. Als sie die Juden holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude. Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niemöller#Habe_ich_geschwiegen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niemöller#Habe_ich_gesc...
• travoc 5y ago
  Can someone explain how Apple being coaxed or coerced into searching all of our personal devices for illegal files by federal law enforcement is not an unconstitutional warrantless search?
  • michaelbjames 5y ago
    As I understand, they're acting as an agent of the government, it's a private company. So, the 4th amendment protecting against unreasonable searches _by the government_ does not apply.
    • himaraya 5y ago
      No, the Fourth Amendment applies to private actors acting on behalf of the government.
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        > No, the Fourth Amendment applies to private actors acting on behalf of the government. It applies to private actors acting as agents of the government, it doesn't apply to private actors who for private reasons not directed by the government conduct searches and report suspicious results to the government (other property and privacy laws might, though.)
        • simondotau 5y ago
          So the 4th Amendment doesn't cover Apple voluntarily inducing their devices to check for CSAM prior to cloud upload. But the 4th Amendment would cover Apple being forced to modify their system to scan for anything else the Government has told them to.
          • 0x426577617265 5y ago
            That's correct. If the government asked them to do it, then it would require a warrant to conduct the search.
• justinzollars 5y ago
  I have advice for Apple employees. Think Different. You've become Microsoft. I might as well buy a facebook phone.
  • echelon 5y ago
    Part of the reason this might succeed is the Apple fans. They're defending Apple yet again despite the treasons against our privacy being committed.
• akersten 5y ago
  As it should be sparked! Apple is asking its engineers to create spyware and deploy it on millions of devices. "Concern" is majorly understating my feelings right now.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• ahnick 5y ago
  How is Apple's CSAM implementation not a violation of the fourth amendment?
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    Apple isn’t the government.
    • ahnick 5y ago
      They are acting on behalf of the government.
      • justinzollars 5y ago
        We don't have any direct evidence of this, or any way of proving this, but it is suspicious
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        AFAICT, they are not. But if you have evidence that this is government directed (reporting results tonthe government isn’t sufficient for the private party’s action to be “on behalf of” government for Constitutional purposes), please, present it.
        • busymom0 5y ago
          The problem is that this is very hard to prove since government is a black box. Take this example where Pelosi, one of the richest members of Congress has personal calls with Tim Cook where she also holds her most worth stock of 17%: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-making-millions https://greenwald.substack.com/p/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-makin...
      • nullc 5y ago
        If they are acting on behalf of the government there is a massive secret conspiracy to illegally violate the constitutional rights of hundreds of millions of Americans. It wouldn't be the first time... but it shouldn't be our first assumption. Instead, in litigation caused by this scanning the companies of testified that they conduct the scanning out of their own free will with no coercion or incentive of the government, simply because they don't want their brand being connected to the distribution of child porn. Implicitly, they'd rather be associated with unaccountable mass surveillance-- with products that violate human rights, and with a push of a button could be used to enable genocide. They aren't stupid, so you have to assume that they think that the latter is less of a hit on their bottom line than the former. Lets prove them wrong.
• righttoolforjob 5y ago
  This is the ultimate lock-in strategy. If you switch from iPhone now, everyone will suspect you of being a pedo and you'll have to endure the social consequences.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    People switch back and forth between iphone and android all the time.
    • righttoolforjob 5y ago
      Apologies for my joke.
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  I want to own the devices I buy, hardware and software. Apple has no business doing what is the role of a state. I, quite simply, don't trust them.
  • Hackbraten 5y ago
    Me neither. I used to trust them to do the right thing for their customers but not anymore.
    • stephc_int13 5y ago
      I don't understand what they are thinking. This project is probably going to cost millions, they won't catch any pedophiles, they will only scare them so they don't use Apple devices. Nobody asked them to do it. This is none of their business. It can only creates new vulnerabilities, privacy issues and general annoyance.
      • himaraya 5y ago
        Just think of it as a form of lobbying.
        • stephc_int13 5y ago
          What's the end-game here? I don't follow.
          • himaraya 5y ago
            Idk, avoiding regulation in general? Getting into the government's good graces never hurt anyone
          • natch 5y ago
            End game (being charitable to them here) is they can now start encrypting iCloud photos, and iCloud backups for that matter, with a key that they do not have any way to access, while getting the FBI off their backs on this one hot button issue. That by itself makes it look ok. Until you consider… there are a couple counterarguments. One, Apple has not actually enabled such private encryption with the keys out of reach to Apple for iCloud backups. Two, that child protection in other countries will sometimes be defined in such repugnant terms that it will compromise Apple fully to scan for the hashes provided by “child protection” organizations in those countries. “Child protection” is in quotes not because I think countries will get away with shoehorning, say, terrorist content hashes in as purported child pornography hashes. It’s in quotes because the concept of child protection can be so wildly bizarrely corrupted in some countries for religious or ideological reasons. Who decides what is off limits for children, from having gay parents, to having friends of the opposite sex, to having an unislamic head covering? Well, each random government, of course, with Apple as the enabler, and individual and human rights be damned. So while the most charitably viewed end game may be good, they seem to be papering over the real impacts this could have.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  Regarding smartphones, I wonder if we’ve just lost a grip on what it means to have privacy. Even our expectations for privacy have degraded and eroded over time. We just carry this device with our life encoded in a flash chip with keys to cloud access. Life. Everything from emails to our walking gait, photos, text, history, health records, etc is stored on this one device. Dictators of the past would have a field day with this infrastructure. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the people of future would willingly carry a surveillance device that they depend on everyday to communicate to others and carry with them everywhere?” We need to move towards OSS and OSH phones with extreme urgency. We also need to get more people involved in Ham Radio.
  • hughrr 5y ago
    Why ham radio? That doesn’t make sense. There’s no privacy there by law. It is by nature a completely non anonymous medium. Not only that if a country shuts down its comms the hams are all on a nice list for their shit to be confiscated. Im not a ham because of some romanticised dystopia avoidance. It’s just fun to make things that you can talk to people on :)
    • systemvoltage 5y ago
      Ham Radio does not depend on internet backbone. In the extreme, you can communicate across the world with a few basic electronic components which can be built at home. Sure, government can listen to it but it's trivial to encrypt (illegal on Ham bands) if you're oppressed by the government. > nice list for their shit to be confiscated. I am not sure if this would go well in the USA.
      • hughrr 5y ago
        It’d go really well for the government. You’d just end up with a lot of dead hams. Disorganised morons with AR15’s vs professional army. I know who wins that one.
  • brokenmachine 5y ago
    Governments have wilfully not kept up with the technology, so they can spy on it all. Imagine if the government suddenly decided that they would open and scan everyone's physical mail into a permanent database. Why should email be any different?
• DarkmSparks 5y ago
  There are two things that make me think this will be walked back. Firstly, and most importantly, this kind of backdoor is the kind of thing that makes big corps prohibit the use/purchases of devices. Secondly, it seems rife for abuse: dont like someone who uses an ios device, msg them some cp and destroy their entire life.
  • faeriechangling 5y ago
    It seems easy as hell for them to just change the system to do server-side scanning instead of client-side scanning and it would probably be enough to calm the horde. I think people can understand, Apple can't have certain content on their servers. People have a much harder time understanding that Apple needs to make sure you don't have certain content on your phone.
    • nrabulinski 5y ago
      If iCloud content was encrypted (as it should be given what Apple says about themselves and privacy) they wouldn’t and couldn’t care any less what the data on their servers contains since, ideally, they’d have no way of decrypting that data. No need for any privacy invasion! > Apple needs to make sure you don’t have certain content on your phone. Excuse me, what? What does Apple care what I have on my device?
      • vineyardmike 5y ago
        > they wouldn’t and couldn’t care any less what the data on their servers Except they're legally forced to care. Thats why this is happening at all. They have a legal obligation to care, encryption be damned. They chose to preserve encryption instead of preserve trust.
        • stjohnswarts 5y ago
          they really don't though. no one can force them to scan a user for anything, however if they do scan and spot CP then obviously they have a duty to report it. Just like you have a duty to report child abuse if you're a teacher. No scans, no CP, no issues. This has been forced on them by the government by some means I think, either the US government or the CCP.
• notquitehuman 5y ago
  This was such a weird way for them to announce that they’re no longer pursuing privacy as a differentiation strategy.
  • colordrops 5y ago
    And that's all it ever was, perceived differentiation. They were never truly concerned with privacy ever.
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      Not really you were essentially immune to a lot of the ad spying and individual databases that google built up on you to sell to 3rd parties that advertised to you. Also apps were given much less freedom to spy on you or access your on device file. Apple just threw all the good sentiment they built up over google down the shitter and try to convince us otherwise with "think of the children".
      • colordrops 5y ago
        They've had a backdoor for the FBI even before they started positioning themselves as the privacy company.
    • notquitehuman 5y ago
      It was easier to dismiss in the past because the evidence to the contrary has been largely circumstantial, of sufficiently dubious origin, or not direct enough for people to accept as proof. They publicly announced a backdoor this time. They can’t un-invent the capability. You can now prove that Apple is lying about its concern for privacy by citing their own website.
  • busymom0 5y ago
    What makes it even weirder is that just couple months ago, everyone was praising Apple for their whole "Privacy" ads when they announced iOS 15 with the do not track defaults. I even think that Apple would have faced less backpack over this CSAM stuff if they hadn't used the "privacy" shtick just couple months ago.
• jpxw 5y ago
  Question for Android users: do you have Google Photos backup enabled? I’d say most people have iCloud Photos enabled, so I’m trying to gauge whether that’s true of Google Photos too. Google Photos also does CSAM scanning, I believe
  • coolspot 5y ago
    On both platforms those are enabled by default. 96% users keep defaults[1]. [1] - My estimate
  • vineyardmike 5y ago
    It's not about CSAM scanning its about where the scanning is done! > I’d say most people have iCloud Photos enabled, so I’m trying to gauge whether that’s true of Google Photos too. I'd say most people don't have CSAM eitherway.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• _carbyau_ 5y ago
  So it boils down to companies make most of the OSs for devices. Governments can compel companies to do stuff. The only option for the truly privacy conscious is to not use a company provided OS. The future is in buying a phone and flashing the ROM you want. Until even owning a non-standard phone becomes illegal.
  • userbinator 5y ago
    Until even owning a non-standard phone becomes illegal. A similar scenario was found in Stallman's disturbingly-prescient story 24 years ago: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
• whoisjuan 5y ago
  This CSAM Prevention initiative by Apple is a 180 degress change of their general message around privacy. Imagine investing hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-privacy programs, privacy features, privacy marketing, etc... just to pull this reverse card. Of course this is going to spark concern within their own ranks. It's like working for a food company that claims to use organic, non-processed, fair-trade ingredients and in just a day deciding that you're going to switch to industrial farming sourcing and ultra-processed ingredients. It's a complete change of narrative and there's no easy way to explain it and still defend Apple's Privacy narrative, wihout doing extreme mental gymnastics.
  • baggy_trough 5y ago
    Hey it's still private... unless you have content that matches an opaque, government controlled list of forbidden content... what could go wrong?
    • Covzire 5y ago
      Antifa or BLM or Burger King will never demand that they add certain content to the burn list. Don't worry. Be happy.
      • dang 5y ago
        Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. We're trying for something a bit different from internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • dang 5y ago
      Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. We're trying for something a bit different from internet default here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I actually think something else happened, and to be honest I think many at Apple behind this decision are likely pretty surprised by the blowback. That is, it seems like Apple really wanted to preserve "end-to-end" encryption, but they needed to do something to address the CSAM issue lest governments come down on them hard. Thus, my guess is, at least at the beginning, they saw this as a strong win for privacy. As the project progressed, however, it's like they missed "the forest for the trees" and didn't quite realize that their plan to protect end-to-end encryption doesn't mean that much if one "end" is now forced to run tech that can be abused by governments. This kind of thing isn't that uncommon with large companies. To me it seems very similar to the Netflix Qwikster debacle of a decade ago. Netflix could very clearly see the writing on the wall, that the DVD-by-mail business needed to morph into a streaming business. But they fumbled the implementation, and what largely came across to the public was "you're raising prices by 40%." I give Netflix huge props for actually reversing the decision pretty quickly - I find that exceptionally rare among large corporations. Remains to be seen if Apple will do the same.
• trhway 5y ago
  a bit of stretched speculation - may be Apple is just ahead of the curve getting ready (and thus naturally bringing it closer - dialectics though) for a future where "common carrier" protections would get eroded even more. We already have FOSTA laws against websites and it isn't a big stretch to imagine that the Apple style scanning would become a "reasonable care/etc." under FOSTA style laws.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  I’m more mad that they made a tool that will clearly be abused by totalitarian governments that need to squash protests in HK for example.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Certainly this can be used just as easily to analyze documents on the phone for antigovernment sentiment and I think Apple will use it for that eventually because "the Chinese government demanded it"
• akiselev 5y ago
  > It's a complete change of narrative and there's no easy way to explain it and still defend Apple's Privacy narrative, wihout doing extreme mental gymnastics. Everyone who took Apple at their word was already doing extreme mental gymnastics because Apple's privacy stance was a farce on borrowed time to begin with. Now it's just blatantly obvious to everyone.
  • busymom0 5y ago
    While I knew that the "privacy" stance from Apple in prior years was always a marketing facade to sell more devices, I still continued to believe that they would keep sticking up for privacy as much as possible. It's kind of funny how I am very suspicious of governments and politicians but when it comes to a trillion dollar corporation, I was giving them more of benefit of doubt. I was wrong.
    • akiselev 5y ago
      I don't necessarily think you were wrong to believe in Apple, perhaps just a bit naive about how little "as much as possible" is good for in this context. Apple is a public corporation at the mercy of several superpowers. Economic incentives and the people with the guns make the rules. Full stop. Apple's privacy stance was always one desperate/amibitious business unit or bureaucrat away from complete collapse.
    • heavyset_go 5y ago
      > I still continued to believe that they would keep sticking up for privacy as much as possible. Considering how often Apple gives up customer data without a fight when requested to by the government, I don't really believe that. According to Apple, they respond to government data requests with customers' data ~85% of the time, and 92% in cases of "emergencies"[1]. Apple gave customer data from over 31,000 users/accounts based on FISA requests and National Security Letter requests in the first half of 2020 alone[1]. During that same 6 month period, Apple provided customers' data to the government's data requests (not FISC related) about 9,000 times[1]. [1] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html
• JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Apple was surprised its stance then was not more popular, and the global tide since then has been toward more monitoring of private communication Huh. That’s a big problem. If the American public doesn’t support privacy, we won’t have it.
  • colinmhayes 5y ago
    The American public broadly does not care about privacy. Facebook is more than enough proof of that.
    • nhumrich 5y ago
      Facebook does significantly more business outside the US then inside of it.
      • colinmhayes 5y ago
        No one else cares about privacy either.
• jmull 5y ago
  I just do not want Apple scanning my phone for the purpose of finding something they can send to the police. I’m not even talking about any “slippery slope” scenarios and I’ll never have any of the material they are looking for. And right or wrong, I don’t really fear a false identification, so this isn’t about a worry that they will actually turn me in. I just don’t want them scanning my phone for the purpose of turning me in. I definitely do not want to take an OS update or new phone that does this. (False positives are the huge flaw in this system, though. There are human judgements by anonymous people using opaque processes without appeal throughout this. A lot of damage can be done before anything goes to court, not to mention courts themselves are susceptible to the illusion of infallible technology. Others have well laid out the scenarios that will result in serious consequences for innocent people.)
  • zepto 5y ago
    This is the most honest take on this that I’ve seen. The slippery slope arguments don’t make sense, nor does the risk of false positives. But the idea of being suspected even in this abstract way, because of something other people do, is at the very least distasteful, bordering on offensive.
    • drvdevd 5y ago
      > distasteful This is the word that most captures my feeling not just around the feature but how it was rolled out as well. Reading the PR announcement and then the leaked memo just felt - quite distasteful. There are a number of things Apple has done and continues to do that fit into that category for me personally - the fact that iOS is so locked down for example. But this really takes the cake. It's like someone at Apple dialed up the distasteful to 11 and let loose. The whole industry does distasteful things but this is a harbinger of our inability to trust them at a deeper level. Not just Apple.
    • thevagrant 5y ago
      I would not say the slippery slope take doesn't make sense. It is perfectly possible that had no one cried out about this change then the next change would have been: Large government to Apple: "Please now also create a hash on each photo metadata field including date/time and location. Let us query these. AND BTW, this change must be kept secret. Thanks."
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Our only option is minority screech.
  • istingray 5y ago
    Pikachu chooses "minority screech": https://i.imgflip.com/5jfpjo.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/5jfpjo.jpg
• gibsonf1 5y ago
  Its a terrible move for their business, I am already looking for an alternative.
  • istingray 5y ago
    Nice, what have you found so far? I just started a Nextcloud today, 2GB free from most providers listed here: http://nextcloud.com http://nextcloud.com
    • gibsonf1 5y ago
      Ahh, for a cloud, https://trinpod.us https://trinpod.us :)
• ZFH 5y ago
  "Apple says it will scan only in the United States and other countries to be added one by one, only when images are set to be uploaded to iCloud, and only for images that have been identified by the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children and a small number of other groups." First reference I read about adding other countries as a done deal, and especially about an incredibly opaque "small number of other groups" being involved as well. Man, after all they've said about being obsessed with privacy they're really not doing themselves any favors here. What a tragedy.
  • BikiniPrince 5y ago
    The children trope is a really big red herring. Anything to get the foot in the door.
    • calvinmorrison 5y ago
      The 4 horsemen of the Privacy Apocalypse: csam, terrorists, piracy and drugs!
      • flixic 5y ago
        I'd say swap piracy and drugs, and you have the escalation order.
• hackinthebochs 5y ago
  Personally I don't see on device scanning as significantly different than cloud scanning. I think the widespread acceptance of scanning personal data stored on the cloud is a serious mistake. Cloud storage services are acting as agents of the user and so should not be doing any scanning or interpreting of data not explicitly for providing the service to the end user. Scanning/interpreting should only happen when data is shared or disseminated, as that is a non-personal action. But that cat is out of the bag already. Sure, scanning a personal device vs. data stored in the cloud feels different because you supposedly own the device. But you don't own the software that runs on it, so the distinction seems artificial to me.
  • intricatedetail 5y ago
    Would you like to have a landlord coming to your flat as they please to look for drugs? It's the same thing. They make you a suspect by default.
    • pixl97 5y ago
      Heck, this is worse. More like do you want the bank coming into your house to look for drugs because you have your loan with them.
  • istingray 5y ago
    Can you expand upon what you mean by "feels different because you supposedly own the device"? Just want to get a clearer idea of what you're saying. How does it feel?
    • hackinthebochs 5y ago
      I just mean that there's an intuitive sense of ownership over a physical device that you don't have over data stored in the cloud. My point is that this distinction is artificial. You don't really own the (software on the) device, but you should own the data the company is processing on your behalf. Whether this processing happens on the physical device or in the cloud seems like an irrelevant distinction.
• mmaunder 5y ago
  Perhaps the fundamental flaw in thinking behind this tactical error is that Apple thinks of your iPhone as their iPhone.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    They see ownership more as "guidelines" than actual rules :)
  • musesum 5y ago
    Same goes for MacOS, try deleting the News App on Big Sur.
• deleted 5y ago
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• deleted 5y ago
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• rootusrootus 5y ago
  I think Apple actually thought they were doing the right thing. Maybe they are, and we're overreacting. Things have to calm down a bit first before that will be clear. But either way, it was [yet another] PR miscalculation. A very Apple thing to do...
• rz2k 5y ago
  I stopped my Apple Music subscription and downgraded iCloud to free, then donated a year of those fees to the EFF. $13/month is nothing to Apple, and I really regret it since photos in iCloud is really convenient, however it feels unethical to contribute to the Apple services system when it will inevitably be used to hurt people like dissidents and whistle blowers. It is arrogant to blow off security and human rights experts outside of Apple as simply confused or mistaken, when there are sufficiently informed and imaginative people within Apple to understand the practical implications of preemptively investigating users. Such contempt for users is also a sign of worrisome complacency. On the plus side, Apple has seemed to crowd out interest in third party OS user interfaces. Knowing that Apple believes you're a pedophile until they've run image analysis software on your stuff is one way to motivate people. Maybe 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. Anyway I hope that more users sacrifice the convenience of Apple services now that its hostility is apparent, and I hope that more people tell their political representatives that it is time for meaningful updates to anti-trust legislation. I know that I was complacent when I thought that having a choice, where at least one of the companies didn't place ads in the start menu, was a tenable state of the market.
  • hypothesis 5y ago
    I totally agree that those actions individually are not much. However, with enough people doing those small actions, it will add up in the long run. Plus we’re going to be better off with open alternatives. They just lost a few thousands from me alone not upgrading all my iDevices for next model year. Savings go to privacy advocacy organizations.
  • swiley 5y ago
    I fomated my iPhone and drained the battery.
• post_break 5y ago
  Cancelled my Apple TV+, iCloud. In the process of selling my iPhone and Apple watch. I know it seems crazy but I feel betrayed and this is the only way I can protest this. Will I have less privacy on android? Yes.
  • istingray 5y ago
    Taking action ftw. Any alternatives you're purchasing or thinking about? I'm quite interested in http://puri.sm http://puri.sm. Just setup a NextCloud today, they have free 2GB of hosting plans: http://nextcloud.com http://nextcloud.com
    • post_break 5y ago
      I have a synology, so I think they have an app to push photos directly to my home nas.
    • 6AA4FD 5y ago
      Synching will also do the trick, with more configuration involved perhaps.
  • leucineleprec0n 5y ago
    It's arguable Android, even stock, is better for privacy
  • 6yyyyyy 5y ago
    I've had a pretty good experience with LineageOS for microG: https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/
• pdx6 5y ago
  Has someone built a guide to self host on iOS/MacOS so the CSAM issue is moot? Or what are the other platform options, like on Android? I’m concerned that Apple’s stance on security has been compromised and it is time to dump the platform or find an acceptable modification. I’m surprised there’s no gist being linked on HN about to get people bootstrapped for secure device backups as an alternative to iCloud (and without a jailbreak).
• jijji 5y ago
  How long before journalists/activists in different countries get jailed/killed for taking pictures of some event that the government did not like and requested CSAM hashes from Apple, unrelated to "child-safety"?
• dqpb 5y ago
  Look at it from the point of view of the majority non-abusive parents: This can only increase the risk that their children will be taken away from them. This includes Apple employees.
• cletus 5y ago
  Apple's track record on user protection compared to Google or Samsung has been very good. For example, resisting wide net Federal "because terrorism" warrants as much as they legally can. There's a reason why Apple 0 day exploits sell for way more on the black market than Android exploits. Trust is hard to earn, easy to lose and even harder to regain. User trust is such a huge part of Apple's business and success, it's shocking to me they'd damage it so much and so fast. A system that exists but has "protections" can and will be abused. A system that doesn't exist can't be. It's really that simple. Here's the big question though: did Apple executives not realize there would be a backlash against this? Or did they just not care? Either is hard to fathom. Apple's board and shareholders should be asking some pretty tough questions of Tim Cook at this point.
  • FabHK 5y ago
    That strikes me as a much more nuanced and sensible take than all the facile "Apple's privacy stance has always just been a marketing ploy to maximise profits, you sheeple".
  • nicce 5y ago
    I believe, that this chaos is mostly caused by the leaked information, which was presented in a bit missleading way. The fire was spreading, and Apple went along to announce it publicly. It was too late to argue for reading their materials properly. In-device scanning was on everyone’s head. Some have argued, that leak was even intentional to lower pressures on new regulations. Or it was just whistleblowing. But there is a lot of evidence, that Apple is going closer to full E2EE with this PSI system, and original goal might have been announce everything in incoming iPhone event. That might have ended even into the positive light.
    • srswtf123 5y ago
      Where can I find some of this evidence? I haven't been following this closely
  • whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
    And yet, the way Apple openly operates iCloud in China is infinitely worse than Google's Dragonfly ever could have been. Apple's reputation for privacy is entirely undeserved.
• istingray 5y ago
  How would Apple roll this back? Seems unlikely, but stepping into "what if", what are people's thoughts on what it would like for Apple? Does it mean Cook resigning, firing a team. How do we get from here to there? Is CSAM on iPhone the next AirPower where it just gets cancelled?
• Tsiklon 5y ago
  "The ark of the covenant is open and now all your faces are going to melt" - to paraphrase "The Thick of It". Prior to this when a government tapped Apple on the shoulder asking to scan for what they (the government) deem illicit material, Apple could have feasibly say "we cannot do this, the technology does not exist". Now the box is open, the technology does exist, publicly and on the record - Now we are but a national security letter, or a court order with an attached super-injunction, away from our computers and phones ratting us out for thought crime, government critique and embarrassing the establishment. At first it's the photos, but what about messages and browsing history or the legion other things that people use their devices for, when do they follow? CSAM is beyond abhorrent, morally reprehensible and absolutely should be stopped. This is not in question. And I have no reason to doubt that there is sincerity in their goal to reduce and eliminate it from Apple's perspective. But they have root; this system and it's implementation is a fundamental betrayal of the implicit trust that their users have placed in them (however foolish it was, in hindsight). It just is not possible to regain that trust now that it is gone, when the level of control is so one sided and the systems involved are so opaque.
  • FabHK 5y ago
    > the technology does exist, publicly and on the record And not only that, but with a little footnote saying "* Features available in the U.S." - in other words, publicly and on the record: this can be switched on and off on per jurisdiction. If another jurisdiction comes and says "here's my list of hashes of illegal images", how can Apple say "sorry, can't do..."?
  • jjcon 5y ago
    Well stated. I am one of those that trusted Apple, and though it seems totally obvious now (the problems present with not having full control of ones device) for whatever reason it took all this for me to realize how privacy truly requires that control. You are also right that it would take a lot for me to trust Apple again and they are unlikely to do the things required for that since transparency, openness are not typically how they operate.
  • darwingr 5y ago
    So even if they go back on this the announcement served as strong signalling of capability.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  The problem is that, as much as this capability is disturbing, Apple chose it's first target well: It's difficult to be too vocal about this without the risk of getting labelled weak on underage sex trafficking and kiddie porn. So, no matter the criticism, Apple won't seriously be pressured to reverse course, and after that the door is open on incremental increases in content monitoring. (Not to mention the problems that could arise from false positives.)
• literallyaduck 5y ago
  States need to put a law on the books with fines to prevent faux encryption and scans without warrants which are unauthorized by the device owner, further consent may not be covered nor may electronic suppliers attempt to lease or license equipment to circumvent these protections.
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  I assume this is some sort of machine learning algorithm. How did they get the data set to train it on? That seems really strange. How did they test it? Seems like any engineers involved on this would come out with PTSD. Whatever they used to test it and train it with is illegal to possess and could only be used with some sort of massive government cooperation.
  • arn 5y ago
    It's not. It's a specific database of image hashes they are comparing against. Not AI, Not ML.
    • alfalfasprout 5y ago
      That's not... entirely clear actually. Well rather, what exactly the hash is based on. They call it "neural hash" which implies there's maybe some kind of embedding being used? It's one thing to compute a simple hash. It's another entirely if they're using some type of locality sensitive hash since that very much has the possibility of false positives and would be a major invasion of privacy (which it already is).
  • jl2718 5y ago
    Closer to a grayscale thumbnail. I was expecting something a lot more sophisticated.
• jl2718 5y ago
  NCMEC is a private charity. Why isn’t this being handled by law enforcement? Is this the beginning of the age of vigilante justice?
  • dagmx 5y ago
    I think you should look into the relationship between the NCMEC and the government. It's not just some arbitrary charity running it. They work with the government, with government regulations, while providing a layer of separation, that theoretically, should prevent government abuse.
  • zionic 5y ago
    NCMEC is literally just the feds, with a few civilian employees.
• thatsabadidea 5y ago
  First this and then it'll be gradually expanded to offensive memes against official political narratives.
• thevagrant 5y ago
  I think this has been developed by Apple attempting to balance a complex issue: E.g. Government request asking them to report with certainty that their cloud storage is not used for illegal activity (CP in this particular case but each country/govt may end up with different requirements). Apple thought they found a clever way to satisfy a government request of "Can you guarantee your storage is not used to house XYZ". Apple then continues to be able to advertise 'privacy' while retaining E2E encryption (or at least have E2E across all services eventually). What they didn't forsee is the potential slippery slope backlash that the IT community has become concerned about. The scanning feature could be used in more nefarious ways (if modified in future). For example. The hash checking could be altered to check and hash against each photo metadata field instead of the photo itself. Now we can find who took photos in a particular location at a particular point in history while still retaining E2E! Would it go that far? Or can we trust Apple to stop moving the line in the sand?
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  There is no way this doesn't get out of hand. This program is now the number one hacking target for every nation on earth. Currently it scans for CSAM, but can 'Free Hong Kong' images get added? What about Q or anti Putin literature? What if the US government believes incredibly sensitive documents were photographed and lives depend on finding out who did it? Is apple going to start reporting teens for selfies? This is a stone throw from escalating to minority report. I know this seems a little far fetched but it is very rare for governments or companies to willingly become less intrusive, it always escalates.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• FabHK 5y ago
  0. I've initially been ambivalent or even supportive of Apple on this, because much of the initial criticism was uninformed and easily refuted, or hysterical. But I'm getting around to this being a momentous blunder. 1. I understand Apple doesn't like to discuss its plans publicly, but rather present the final product when it is ready to ship. But if anything was a good candidate for one of the rare exceptions, then this, no? 2. Why announce unambiguously that this feature is "available" in the US only at first, in other words, can be enabled/disabled/configured per region? What is the plan when country X comes and says "fine feature you've built there, here's our list of perceptual hashes of illegal imagery, and the contact data of our competent authority to notify in case of matches."? Replying "ah, sorry, we can't" is not going to fly anymore, ever (!). Even if they walk this back, what defence will they have left in the future if any government requires them to implement this odious feature and scan all images on-device and notify some authority if anything untoward (in that jurisdiction) is found?
• spenvo 5y ago
  Many people take the following maximalist stance: "Apple can't save users' privacy in China, nor can it push back against laws, so therefore it's unreasonable to ask them to hold the privacy line." But for every China there is a Brazil, Hungary, or India. For every "completely authoritarian" regime, you have handfuls of (historically democratic) governments on their way toward authoritarianism. In these countries, it's often not the laws calling the shots but the politicians that happen to be in charge at that moment. Even in democracies with laws as guardrails, presidents will push for data on political opposition - at times threatening techies along the way (see: Brazil jailing WhatsApp execs for access to data [0], Twitter/India raids, or, in the USA: Trump DOJ asking Apple to turn over info on House Dems [1]) Simply "doing what you're told" around the world (no-questions-asked, aka "being in the arena" as Tim Cook says) will turn you into an enabler of authoritarianism, and not just in totally FUBAR countries like China but in many nations with a lot of freedom at stake. 0 - https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/senior-facebook-executive-arrested-in-brazil-after-police-denied-access-to-data/2016/03/01/f66d114c-dfe5-11e5-9c36-e1902f6b6571_story.html https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/senior-fa... 1 - https://www.techmeme.com/210610/p51#a210610p51 https://www.techmeme.com/210610/p51#a210610p51 From: https://twitter.com/SpencerDailey/status/1426008754143776771 https://twitter.com/SpencerDailey/status/1426008754143776771
  • brandon272 5y ago
    Also bear in mind that Apple makes the spectacular statement they they consider privacy a "fundamental human right" and that it's one of their core values. [0] It's mind boggling to imagine that a company comes up with that stance and advertises it so proudly without ever having considered that it is at odds with what governments around the world will want. "I know we said privacy is a fundamental human right but that was before the U.S. government asked us to give them your data" 0. https://apple.com/privacy https://apple.com/privacy
• technick 5y ago
  The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm going to start rallying for my employer to dump apple as a vendor if they stay the course.
• jack_pp 5y ago
  CSAM is such a blatant excuse to me it blows my mind how such a huge mindshare on here believes this is actually about child protection or is a valid argument. Since this is public information do you think pedophiles will just get caught by this? Will this curb their appetite? If somehow I found myself in an authoritarian state where porn was illegal just on apple devices do you think I wouldn't just switch to a different OS? This is a bullshit excuse and we've seen it countless times. It is manipulation 101, get the victim to agree to a small request first then ask more and more. I'm glad I never used apple devices and I'm not caught in their ecosystem.
• arvindamirtaa 5y ago
  This is what Apple's policy USED to sound like. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZmeZyDGkQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZmeZyDGkQ0 "...You can't have a backdoor that's only for the good guys. That any back door is something that bad guys can exploit." "No one should have to choose between privacy and security. We should be smart enough to do both." "You're assuming they're all good guys. You're saying they're good, and it's okay for them to look. But that's not the reality of today." "If someone can get into data, it's subject to great abuse". "If there was a way to expose only bad people.. that would be a great thing. But this is not the world. .... It's in everyone's best interest that everybody is blacked out." "You're making the assumption that the only way to security is to have a back door.....to be able to view this data. And I wouldn't be so quick to make that judgement." No matter the mental gymnastics now, it's still a pretty drastic departure from what it used to be.
• Throwaway12349 5y ago
  One thing I don’t understand about this debate is that one of the bigger concerns folks who are against the measure have is that Apple might one day add non-CSAM photos to the set of photos they scan for. As far as I understand it, the CSAM hash database is part of the OS, which Apple can update in any way they like, including to read your messages or surreptitiously compromise the encryption of your photos (and they can force your device to install this code via a security update). We trust them not to do these things (they already have a track record of resisting the creation of backdoors), so I’m not sure why they we don’t trust them to also use this capability only for CSAM. Sure, it would be technically easier for them to add the hash of the tank man photo (an example of something an oppressive government might be interested in) to their database after something like this is implemented, but it’s also not very hard for them to add scanning-for-the-tank-man-photo to their OS as it currently exists. Indeed, if the database of hashes lives on your device it makes it easier for researchers to verify that politically sensitive content is not present in that database.
• andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Stay tuned! On the next episode: "Apple bravely scans your text messages. Users greeted by 'Messages noticed this website contains misleading content, are you sure you want to share it?' in iOS 16." -MacRumors (2022)
• amaajemyfren 5y ago
  I'm not an expert here but it may be time for white box no name mobile phones that come with nothing that we have to set up ourselves. My second computer was the first time I downloaded from both kernel and kerneli and rolled my first Linux Kernel based gnu system....
• unityByFreedom 5y ago
  Good. I would be furious if I worked there. After the San Bernardino case, I viewed them as the paragon of privacy and security, to the extent I ignored most criticisms, including their lack of support for right-to-repair and concerns over App Store rejections. All of that is back on the table for me after this decision. It is out-of-step with everything they've been doing up to this point, and it makes me wonder who has something over the head of Apple that we aren't hearing about. The stated benefits of this tech are far outweighed by the potential for harm, in my view. If Apple pushes forward on this, I want to hear a lot more from them, and I want it to be a continuing conversation that they bear until we all understand what's going on.
  • polishdude20 5y ago
    What's fishy to me is the fact that they are letting this be known. Like, if you're trying to capture people who share CSAM or have it on their phone, why would you go around saying that you can now scan for it? I think this announcement would have been well known to cause a major outrage so why say anything? I'm wondering if this is a cover up for something else. Get people talking about this in the news and getting outraged about it while something else goes unnoticed.
    • unityByFreedom 5y ago
      Announcing it isn't fishy. If they didn't announce it, they'd risk a whistleblower telling the story for them. In fact, the story did break a day before Apple could officially announce it. That may already have hurt them more because they weren't even part of the discussion at that point. What you want is to tell the story on your terms. If someone beats you to it you can't do that. Unrelated to Apple, but that's one of the big problems with misinformation. You can't get ahead of it because it's all made up.
    • juniperplant 5y ago
      Also, I think it would have been a matter of time before some researcher analyzing network traffic would have discovered something.
    • 5y ago
• AnonC 5y ago
  What’s going to be sad to note over the next few months is yet another record breaking year and another record breaking first quarter for Apple (this is as per Apple’s financial calendar). All these concerns and outrage don’t seem to matter to most people, and a few boycotts here for Apple, a few more boycotts there for Facebook, and some more for <name-another-for-profit-bad-company> aren’t making any difference to their bottomline. To say I’m seriously disappointed and frustrated is putting it very mildly.
• renewiltord 5y ago
  I actually really enjoy the loop of “we can trust them to police us, they are trustworthy” to “oh no, they abused that power; why did they do that” that society goes through. All this HN rebellion is a storm in a teacup. Some innocent dude will get in trouble and everyone will talk about how “tech companies need to be regulated” and then they’ll go back to “we should trust the government to police us” after a few weeks of burning through their outrage. Always exceptions. Always surprised. Always trusting.
• underseacables 5y ago
  What worries me most is that hackers and others with ulterior motives, will engineer a situation creating a false positive, or worse. If you want to absolutely destroy someone, accuse them of possessing pornographic material of children. Even if it turns out to be absolutely false, the stain is still there, the bell cannot be unrung. Damage both in the short and long-term to reputations, careers, the lives, will be devastating. None of us are safe from this. “yeah but there was that one time Apple thought she had kid porn on her phone.. she said it was a false positive, police investigated never prosecuted etc., but…better to not hire, etc..you know..just in case”
• brandon272 5y ago
  As I see people straining to defend Apple, coming up with all types of reasons about on-device image checking will not be abused or expanded, about how people shouldn't really expect to not be scanned, I can't help but just think of Apple's own words and current public position on privacy. Here's their privacy page: https://www.apple.com/privacy/ https://www.apple.com/privacy/ First sentence: "Privacy is a fundamental human right." Apple has adopted this as a "core value". Their executives use this exact phrasing. It is an extraordinary claim. They don't say, "We think privacy is important". They claim it as a fundamental human right (i.e. applying to everyone, unconditionally) and wrap themselves in the banner of it. How anyone can square that with statement, that self-described "core value" with their recent on-device image checking announcement, I really have no idea.
  • fjabre 5y ago
    They can’t. It will hurt their sales. It will hurt Apple. They will have to walk this back or face devaluation. They’ve already done a ton of damage to their brand. It’s really hard to believe they would sacrifice their brand like this. This is Apple. They made their reputation on privacy. You are 100% right. You cannot square the two.
• joelbondurant 5y ago
  I'm putting the golden gate bridge up for sale.
• anonymouswacker 5y ago
  If you recently purchased an iPhone with your Credit Card, now is the time to file a dispute. I called my company (the American one), and the person I was connected to was instantly aware when I mentioned my Apple phone was now spying on me. 5 minutes later I have a dispute and some semblance of hope. YMMV of course, but what other choice do we have than to hit them in their pocket book on our way out of their walled garden?
• HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
  I feel like this is a good thing given the circumstances we're already in. It might catch some predators while still keeping everyone's photos private. Sure, it's ripe for abuse, but when has it not been that way? Haven't we always had to trust Apple to do the right thing with our iDevices? This could marginally reduce Apple's leverage against evil governments seeking to pry into iPhones since "if you can do it for CP, you can do it for tank man". But with Apple already being the dictator of all OS-level code running on your device, this capability isn't anything fundamentally new. Do we have any guarantee that certain devices in China haven't received a "special" version of some software update that introduces a backdoor? Personally, I have an Android and hope that my next phone will run some flavor of Linux.
• manmal 5y ago
  > But Apple was surprised its stance then was not more popular, and the global tide since then has been toward more monitoring of private communication. Personally speaking, Apple denying breaking into a phone in 2016 was indeed one of the reasons I believed them when they said they stand up for privacy. This is now developing a foul after taste - when it really counts, they don’t publicly stand up against governments.
• sathio 5y ago
  I understand they are going to make perceptual hashes of images, but what are they going to do to videos? Did they not see Fight Club where frames were added on videos? Are they going to hash each frame from videos as well? All 60 fps 4k videos? I’m sure that a lot of people saw that movie, and some of them might be pedophiles. It really looks like an half assed solution
• rbrbr 5y ago
  It is the first time that I have a reason to leave Apple ecosystem. And I will if this goes trough, even though I do not live in the US.
• rdiddly 5y ago
  Can we talk about the irony that the NCMEC's database of CSAM (two abbreviations I didn't know before this week) is literally a huge child porn collection, or is that too immature? The whole story sounds like bad science fiction to me, I gotta say. But sadly I think we have to beware of anything that's packaged as anti-child-porn just like whatever's anti-terrorism, anti-crime etc. etc. You should be thinking "What is the thing that's slightly less heinous than child porn, that needed to be wrapped in the magic cloak of comparative heinousness for anyone to be horrified enough to accept it?"
  • throwaway93832 5y ago
    Only the priests of high are sacred enough to handle the artifices, to administer their truths to the gentiles. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-05/lapd-officer-arrested-on-child-pornography-charges https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-05/lapd-off...
• mrwww 5y ago
  They must comply with Chinese law. So they put iCloud data in China. So users with harmful images of "free hongkong" and winnie the pooh should be reported to authorities. Apple complies with local laws right?
• hanselot 5y ago
  Why won't you buy the new iPhone Billy? Are you a pedophile? Guilty until proven innocent.
• sebow 5y ago
  CSAM, like anything other pretensed upon "protect the children", it's not mainly about actually protecting the children.
• sharken 5y ago
  Message to Apple should they care: The next Apple iPhone upgrade is on hold, until all plans about CSAM scanning on-device is cancelled. Privacy matters.
• mlindner 5y ago
  > A fundamental problem with Apple's new plan on scanning child abuse images, critics said, is that the company is making cautious policy decisions that it can be forced to change, now that the capability is there, in exactly the same way it warned would happen if it broke into the terrorism suspect's phone. This is the most important part that seems to be missing in every denial that Apple won't work with governments to spy on various types of content. _It's not Apple's choice to make._ They have no control over whether they're forced to or not.
• icf80 5y ago
  Apple 2019: ‘what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone’ https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/05/apple-privacy-billboard-vegas-ces/ https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/05/apple-privacy-billboard-vegas... Apple 2021: but we will scan your photos anyway I don't understand something they are scanning "using a database of known CSAM image hashes" This means new photos will not be in that database, so what is the point of scanning for old photos as it will not prevent new crimes!
• nbzso 5y ago
  Can you imagine the beautiful New World we are building under the wise leadership of corporations and politicians motivated by unstoppable greed, control and power? Can you imagine "the screeching voices of minorities with critical thinking"? The big picture of hyperconnected future in which automated systems will decide your fate is in place and it's running well. It is not perfect. Yet. But it will be. Soon. You will find a way to cope. As usual. As a collective. As a "exemplary citizen with nothing to hide". "A blood black nothingness began to spin. Began to spin. Let's move on to system. System." The system will grow. Powered by emotional reasoning created by the social engineers, paid well to package and sell "The New Faith" for the masses. You are not consumers anymore. You are not the product anymore. You are the fuel. Your thoughts and dreams, emotions and work are the blood of the system. You will be consumed. "Do you get pleasure out of being a part of the system? System. Have they created you to be a part of the system? System." Yes. The pleasure of collective truism. In the name of the "common good" - the big, the bold and the brave brush, build to remove any form of suspicion or oversight. "A blood black nothingness. A system of cells. Within cells interlinked. Interlinked" Wake up, Neo...
• blub 5y ago
  Those being outraged about this decision haven’t accepted yet that one can’t solve legal issues around encryption with technology - not even with open source. The UK for example can throw people in prison if they don’t hand over their passwords/keys. Admitting this however would by necessity lead to admitting that citizens of the US/EU have almost zero say in how their government legislate encryption. All these countries wanted to subvert encryption for decades already and they have all the time in the world, unlimited budgets and every other possible tool in their arsenal.
• icf80 5y ago
  People will just go back to use normal cameras for photos where there is no scanning, the bad guys will use that anyway. It makes no sense for Apple to do that, unless they are preparing for something more big.
  • eqtn 5y ago
    What if there is a chat app(like WhatsApp) that saves the photo on to the gallery? Someone can send such a photo, apple scans it and notifies the authorities.
• tibbydudeza 5y ago
  I'd rather prefer server side than local device scanning. What prevents CSAM from being compromised on the device by a rouge state actor to smear and false flag opponents ???.
• amelius 5y ago
  Now I know what the "i" in iPhone stands for: intelligence.
  • joshxyz 5y ago
    and the s in iPhone 4s stands for signals, hahaha
• xhruso00 5y ago
  Can I take photos with 3rd party camera app + save it within its app sandbox (not to camera roll) to avoid scanning?
• franknstein 5y ago
  Seems to me like an instance of 'bundling problem'. What government actually wants is yes/no answer to the question 'does this photo contains child abuse', but with this 'solution' they get much more information than simple yes/no answer, making abuse of power possible. Is it possible to just scan photos locally for child pornography, encrypt those photos, and upload those encrypted photos and the 'yes/no' answer that the scan returns plus some cryptographic proof that the actual scan (some calculation) was performed on the uploaded encrypted photo? If this was possible it would enable privacy and also help prevent child abuse (or at least prevent child pornography from being stored on iCloud).
• 5etho 5y ago
  Good, I hope Apple will die. Not so much of value will be lost
• neximo64 5y ago
  The only reason Apple would be so cavalier with CSAM is knowing that the data is already accessible using other means. I guess that's why they have a disregard for the privacy aspect of it.
• scumcity 5y ago
  Why on earth is Apple, a good tech company, with a culture of secrecy, using slack? Can it not build its own secure version of slack?
  • beckman466 5y ago
    > Why on earth is Apple, a good tech company, with a culture of secrecy, using slack? Can it not build its own secure version of slack? What else are they going to do with all that cash they're sitting on? Also in this way they are being patriotic and supporting 'American innovation'; i.e. the American Intellectual Property regime [1]. [1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
• tempestcoder 5y ago
  Apple is already scanning photos for faces and other objects. Just search in the photos app for something like dog or baby and you’ll see (assuming you’ve taken a photo of a dog or baby before). How is this much different?
• mmeinesz 5y ago
  I happened to speak to an employee of the police here in Germany. He is in charge of backing up data from suspects. It is mostly drug related, but second most: Child Porn. It is really frightening about the amount of data he has worked on in the last week. And that is only for a county of approx. 200k inhabitants.
• beckman466 5y ago
  I don't get it, I thought my data was safely in the clouds... You're not telling me they can access the clouds right? /s
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• fortran77 5y ago
  If they’re going to be scanning in the client, wouldn’t it be better to scan when someone is downloading something—-the way viruses abs malware are scanned? This way they can -prevent- crime.
• poidos 5y ago
  I sure am happy I don't work at their retail stores any more; I shudder to imagine the abuse the folks in the stores are getting over this.
• augstein 5y ago
  I‘m still baffled by this whole issue. Snooping around on users devices, goes against anything regarding privacy they seemed to stand for. It makes me sick to think this might even be legal. It is also sad they completely ignore any valid concerns about this intrusion. Whats the next step if we as a society accept this behavior? Homepod listening in, until hashes of conversation snippets match some prehashed terms and sounds potentially related to child abuse and then alerting the authorities?
• Wo-Ho 5y ago
  Imho is Apple not so much privacy focused. From my network logs, my iPhone is always connected to Apple servers. Moving the locked iPhone a little bit on the table, very often it establishes a connection to Apple. Why? If I block all Apple servers, my iPhone tries continously connect to Apple servers - which seems to drain the battery very fast. Some years ago, I asked Apple wheter it is possilbe to switch of these 'connections'. Answer: No, I have to trust Apple. WH
• m3kw9 5y ago
  I’m a little uncomfortable about my iCloud photos being scanned but ok with Apple doing it because I will give them benefit of the doubt they can make it work and if not, reverse it. If google were to do that, that’s a hard no
• WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  A bit off topic, but I'm amazed about the huge media attention this is getting, while a far more serious precedent is being set in the EU, completely banning all private communications between individuals: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/message-screening/?lang=en https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/message-screening/?la... The short version is: all communication providers may include back doors and analyse messages of users with the same excuse. The follow-up is to make this mandatory. In practice, this will be a ban on any end-to-end encrypted communications.
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• maerF0x0 5y ago
  I maintain that I actually think Apple got told do this by the Gov't the same way AT&T was told -- and gagged- to spy on americans. see also: https://www.wired.com/2006/01/att-sued-over-nsa-eavesdropping/ https://www.wired.com/2006/01/att-sued-over-nsa-eavesdroppin... https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/17/4517480/nsa-spying-prism-surveillance-cheat-sheet https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/17/4517480/nsa-spying-prism-... https://www.courthousenews.com/companies-staying-mum-on-fbi-surveillance-of-customers-records-show/ https://www.courthousenews.com/companies-staying-mum-on-fbi-...
• frankfrankfrank 5y ago
  Is there really anyone who does not see this for what it is, a really transparent effort to introduce surveillance infrastructure under the guise of "saving the children"? If so, I would love to hear what assures you so much about this. A couple reasons I don't believe a single word: * After years of the surveillance state begging and pleading about compromising encryption, they went silent after talks with Apple and Google, over about the very time it can reasonably be expected it would take to develop this "feature". * The number of pedos this could potentially even catch is supposedly so small that it is a compromise of everyone's rights … an inherent contradiction of not only Constitutional laws, but the very concept of innocence before being proven guilty. Not to mention that we have long been told there are no pedo rings, even in spite of the fact that even without this "feature" the last administration broke up more of these pedo rings than ever before. Why do we need this "feature" now then? * Any actual pedo rings will easily work around this feature simply by altering images and changing the hash in various ways too numerous to list right now. * Innocent people could easily be swept up in this if they happen to have images that hash to something the feds are comparing against, within the threshold of tolerance. What happens then, a secret court provides a secret court order to penetrate your network and devices to confirm whether you are a pedo because you took pictures of your grandchildren in a bathing suit? * oh, did I mention the mountain of history of nothing but abuse and lies and lies and abuse in every single way possible and even to the point that he people exposing the not just illegal acts, but evil acts, are deliberately targeted by the state? Why anyone would believe Apple, let alone the government that is clearly suspiciously standing in the background, looking away, whistling into the sky trying to act as if it has nothing to do with this, is beyond me. It's all just lies, front to back, top to bottom, left to right and in every other dimension. What this clearly will be misused for is to identify or fingerprint dissidents and worngthinkers of any kind, including those who thing they are now rightthinkers, who will find themselves on the other side of the divide when they've expended their usefulness.
• hvis 5y ago
  Imagine some state decides to focus the "war on crime" efforts on scanning people's phones for selfies with handguns and/or white powder. That's what the CSAM initiatives sound like to me.
• RIMR 5y ago
  I keep hearing the same argument from people, and I'm mostly in agreement, but to summarize the argument: >"I am not afraid of personally being found with child pornography, but I don't want Apple searching my files looking for criminal intent" But I would argue that you SHOULD be afraid of personally being found with child pornography. First and foremost, this feature could be exploited for harm. If anyone ever wants to hurt you, all they have to do is get access to your unlocked Apple device long enough to drop CASM into a backed-up folder, and you get reported to the feds. Or, way more realistically, maybe you downloaded some amateur porno that you didn't know had underage participants in it, and you saved it where it got backed up to the cloud, and two years later the government has added the video to their known CSAM database and you get reported to the feds for having it. Given how the mere accusation of child sex crimes is enough to destroy careers, marriages, and lives, I see absolutely no reason anyone should trust their Apple devices with anything should this become normal practice. And if this becomes normal practice, it follows that CASM won't be the only thing they end up looking for.
• enlyth 5y ago
  If it's on device, is it possible to reverse engineer the hashing algorithm? I'm assuming some clever people can then brute force some matching images with nonsense in them that test positive
• mlang23 5y ago
  I always knew the new valium-lgbtq-ceo is going to fuck the company over.
• banach 5y ago
  I dont know, somehow since Apple decided it was going to force spyware onto its most dedicated (all-in-on iCloud) users, my excitement about the M1 and all the cool things I was going to do in the Apple ecosystem has withered away. I am looking around for alternatives, the way I was in thn 00s, when I abandoned Microsoft, initially embracing Linux, but then happily transitioning to macOS and later iOS. Unless Apple does an about-face, I know I will be going back to Linux, on some privacy-friendly hardware vendor. We have cross platform communication tools and decent alternatives to most of what Apple has to offer. Obviously it is not as pleasant an experience, but there are limits to what I can tolerate for the sake of comfort.
• pyuser583 5y ago
  I have a story to share: When my daughter was three years old, we started giving her some IPad time. She learned about Kids YouTube, and wanted to become a “Youtuber.” Unbeknownst to us, she began making extremely long, detailed videos teachings other kids how to perform her latest accomplishment: how to use the potty. She then pushed a series of icons which, she believed, uploaded the videos to YouTube for the world to see. She then offhandedly informed us that she had been teaching other kids how to use the potty. By YouTube. Much screaming and shouting ensued. Ultimately we determine she wasn’t uploading anything, and couldn’t even if she knew how. She did however have several hours worth of videos showing th world how to use the potty. She was quite upset when we deleted them. Leaving aside debate on the “scanning photos against a database of hashes”, I hope that the parent-enabled features are useful.
• skylurk 5y ago
  It makes no sense to me to create technology that incentivizes the creation of fresh, unindexed CSAM. Makes me wonder if the management at apple feels the current stock of CSAM content is getting stale? /s At a technological level, this highlights the difference between perceptual hashing and image classification, which (ostensibly) can extrapolate from the training data. Regardless of how you feel about running this thing on your phone, the approach they chose has some significant perverse incentives.
• jgowdy 5y ago
  Out of principle, I've wiped my iPhone and moved my primary SIM card to a Pixel 5 running https://calyxos.org https://calyxos.org This CSAM scanning will do effectively zero to stop children from being abused. It will only serve to breach the client side of E2E across the industry. Apple's privacy credibility is shot. We need to push hard for true open source mobile. Today's mobile duopoly (including the look don't touch that is Android), is the digital yoke of our times. Support the Calyx Institute: https://calyxinstitute.org/ https://calyxinstitute.org/
• brokenmachine 5y ago
  Yeah this makes sense, scan everyone's phones... Because if there's one thing the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing taught us, is that there's nothing more important to the authorities than children, and they'll do anything to protect them, no matter the cost, even if an actual prince or a current president is involved. Oh wait, hang on. Actually nothing happened and they don't give a shit about kids. So why do they want this again?