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> "Other cloud providers run checks of their own property, on their own property. This runs a check of your property, on your property. That's why people care n
by jodrellblank 5y ago
> "Other cloud providers run checks of their own property, on their own property. This runs a check of your property, on your property. That's why people care now."
iTunes Match is an iCloud service which (if you buy it and opt-in) scans your local on-device music library for copyrighted songs, tells Apple you have them, and then they let you listen to high quality versions of those songs on all your devices. And it's not filename or id3 tag matching, it's doing a fuzzy match that can identify the same song in low quality rips and in different file formats. It would be concievable for them to scan for banned audio lectures, or scan your whole device outside the iTunes library, or change it to check for other copyrighted files e.g. movies. It could concievably be reporting you to the MPAA/RIAA if it finds certain songs along with your public IP address so they can check if that IP address has ever been logged as torrenting those songs. It could "in future" be changed to look for and report evidence of torrenting or movie copying. There's nothing technical or regulatory(?) stopping Apple from saying "people with CSAM on their computers can't use iTunes Match" and making it scan the computer as a condition of use, is there? There's nothing technical stopping a government from asking "can your iTunes Match scan engine report video files in the iTunes library which match popular Tiannamen Square video MD5 hashes?", is there?
I do get that these are not the same seriousness, iTunes Match isn't (so far as we know) scanning to report crime but in so far as "Unprecedented on-device scanning for known content using an opaque database and a closed-source fuzzy-matching engine, it would only take a small change to make it look for other things, governments will definitely pressure them to do that and since they willingly built this system they will definitely agree, and all you can do is trust them", are they not samey enough to be relevant?