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From what I understand, Apple does not want to scan your phone. They want to have end-to-end encryption and store your photos encrypted. This is why they scan

by Svoka 5y ago

From what I understand, Apple does not want to scan your phone. They want to have end-to-end encryption and store your photos encrypted. This is why they scan before sending them encrypted. They won't scan anything which you would not put in the cloud anyway. This is pretty clever way to preserve end-to-end encryption and satisfy requirement not to store anything CP related on their servers. Probably too clever for journalists to understand :(

feanaro 5y ago
> This is pretty clever way to preserve end-to-end encryption and satisfy requirement not to store anything CP related on their servers. Correction: Anything in the shady government-supplied database, pushed through a private corporation, not CP. The official purpose today is CP (well, CSAM, which is already more vague than CP), but the distinction is important. Also, not only to prevent storing that content on their servers, but to report you to the authorities.
isaac21259 5y ago
What? Scanning your phone is exactly what Apple is doing. They say they won't scan anything not put on the cloud but you have no control over that and it is subject to change at anytime. They've already weakened their systems at the request of the government so it wouldn't be at all unexpected for them to scan photos not uploaded to the cloud. End-to-end encryption is completely useless if you have spyware installed on one of those ends.
brokenmachine 5y ago
>This is pretty clever way to preserve end-to-end encryption and satisfy requirement not to store anything CP related on their servers. It's a pretty clever way to normalize adversarial devices, there's no preserving of any kind of privacy going on here. I contend that if they are storing encrypted data that they cannot decode, then they are not knowingly storing CP at all. If someone then downloads that, decrypts it with the key that only they know, and it turns out to be CP, then they are the ones storing CP, which as we all know is already illegal. Obviously I'm not a lawyer and this isn't how icloud works, but lots of companies legally store encrypted data that they can't decode. There's no legal requirement that the storage provider needs to ensure there's no CP, only that they don't knowingly store it. Apple just doesn't want to allow people to have real encryption that they control, almost definitely so they can make more money by forcing people to use expensive icloud instead of local encrypted backups, and retain the ability to scan everyone's data. All under the flimsy excuse that 0.1% of people might forget their password and be unable to unlock their data. Nevermind you could only allow this for power users at their own request but "it's for your own good because you're too dumb to manage a password", lol fuck you Apple. So it's just yet another self-serving, penny pinching, thinly veiled customer privacy violation, this time wrapped in a big fat "think of the children", which as we know is corporate-speak for "turn brain off now - we want to do $thing_you_wont_like". I'm yet to think of how Apple plans to make money out of this one, but I'm sure there's an angle in there somewhere and we'll find out eventually. Maybe simply that either NSA or China said "give us this new scanning system or we shut you down" - and I'm not American but I do wonder about people who still cling to the belief that the fourth amendment would be respected post Snowden revelations. Hell, I'm Australian - they're probably just planning to push that hash-matched data through servers in Australia so they can see everything, because Australia has no bill of rights, and getting more authoritarian with every uncontested bill that passes. Or some other kind of "legal" fuckery to move even closer to the dystopia they are so hell-bent on creating.

by Svoka 5y ago

feanaro 5y ago

> This is pretty clever way to preserve end-to-end encryption and satisfy requirement not to store anything CP related on their servers. Correction: Anything in the shady government-supplied database, pushed through a private corporation, not CP. The official purpose today is CP (well, CSAM, which is already more vague than CP), but the distinction is important. Also, not only to prevent storing that content on their servers, but to report you to the authorities.

isaac21259 5y ago

What? Scanning your phone is exactly what Apple is doing. They say they won't scan anything not put on the cloud but you have no control over that and it is subject to change at anytime. They've already weakened their systems at the request of the government so it wouldn't be at all unexpected for them to scan photos not uploaded to the cloud. End-to-end encryption is completely useless if you have spyware installed on one of those ends.

brokenmachine 5y ago

>This is pretty clever way to preserve end-to-end encryption and satisfy requirement not to store anything CP related on their servers. It's a pretty clever way to normalize adversarial devices, there's no preserving of any kind of privacy going on here. I contend that if they are storing encrypted data that they cannot decode, then they are not knowingly storing CP at all. If someone then downloads that, decrypts it with the key that only they know, and it turns out to be CP, then they are the ones storing CP, which as we all know is already illegal. Obviously I'm not a lawyer and this isn't how icloud works, but lots of companies legally store encrypted data that they can't decode. There's no legal requirement that the storage provider needs to ensure there's no CP, only that they don't knowingly store it. Apple just doesn't want to allow people to have real encryption that they control, almost definitely so they can make more money by forcing people to use expensive icloud instead of local encrypted backups, and retain the ability to scan everyone's data. All under the flimsy excuse that 0.1% of people might forget their password and be unable to unlock their data. Nevermind you could only allow this for power users at their own request but "it's for your own good because you're too dumb to manage a password", lol fuck you Apple. So it's just yet another self-serving, penny pinching, thinly veiled customer privacy violation, this time wrapped in a big fat "think of the children", which as we know is corporate-speak for "turn brain off now - we want to do $thing_you_wont_like". I'm yet to think of how Apple plans to make money out of this one, but I'm sure there's an angle in there somewhere and we'll find out eventually. Maybe simply that either NSA or China said "give us this new scanning system or we shut you down" - and I'm not American but I do wonder about people who still cling to the belief that the fourth amendment would be respected post Snowden revelations. Hell, I'm Australian - they're probably just planning to push that hash-matched data through servers in Australia so they can see everything, because Australia has no bill of rights, and getting more authoritarian with every uncontested bill that passes. Or some other kind of "legal" fuckery to move even closer to the dystopia they are so hell-bent on creating.