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It’s worse because it blurs what was a previously clear line. If the photos weren’t in iCloud, they couldn’t be scanned. In this new implementation Apple will o
by m-ee 5y ago
It’s worse because it blurs what was a previously clear line. If the photos weren’t in iCloud, they couldn’t be scanned. In this new implementation Apple will only scan photos destined for iCloud, but they now have the capability to scan photos on your device and all that’s holding them back is corporate policy.
- kemayo 5y agoApple already did scan photos on your device, though. They do a massive pass of ML classification over all photos on a pseudo-regular basis (I assume "whenever a new OS release includes a new ML classifier build") -- it's what makes things like searching for "cat" in Apple Photos work. If Apple's willing to change the new system to do a full scan of all photos on-device and send notifications to them outside of the upload-to-iCloud-with-security-tickets mechanism, they could just as easily have done that with the old system.
- thephyber 5y ago> they now have the capability What do you mean by capability here?
- m-ee 5y agoThat iOS will have a mechanism for checking for banned content and phoning home about it when found. As the comment above you mentioned all photos do get scanned for classification but as far as I know this was strictly on device, it didn’t report what was in your photos to Apple.
- thephyber 5y agoBut it’s not that different from “checking for changed content, then sending it home” (basic iCloud functionality). They already had that “capability” and the “capability” to update the OS/program code that runs on our phone to include changes. Hence, the “capability” already existed in a real way. I fully understand the difference, but I’m just saying it’s not like Apple had to build a massively different system to support this.