25 ms·

The All-Seeing “i”: Apple Just Declared War on Your Privacy

861 points by ttctciyf 5y ago

endisneigh 5y ago
When Apple sells yet again another record amount of iPhones next quarter which device should we move to? Fundamentally this illustrates that software has become too inherently intrusive. What’s the solution tho that could ever be mainstream? The other issue is that software has become too complicated and too many (potentially) bad things are happening in the background. How can the layperson fight back?
- nkozyra 5y ago
  I think this kind of defeatism really feeds the public's lax attitude toward privacy. Yes, the iPhone and Apple products are very popular. And they will probably continue to grow. Does that mean we just accept anything they do, antithetical to one of their core promises to their customers? Or do we make a big deal about it so everyone sees what's happening and what the implications are?
  - n8cpdx 5y ago
    I've been making a big stink about it. I switched to Signal for my iMessage buddies and that seems to be sticking. The more people seen visibly taking proactive steps to create privacy, the better.
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  GrapheneOS on Pixel 4 has been a dream, as has Elementary OS on an XPS 13 is similarly great. WebUSB installer for graphene is a game changer, it made the process incredibly easy. Also it seems most apps work fine without Play services. Synology Photos is a great local icloud photos replacement. I made the switch this past weekend. Aside from the impact on my wallet and hassle of needing to sell my Apple equipment, it was surprisingly painless.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Apple is the only device I know of doing on-device scanning.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    On device scanning vs in the cloud scanning with a distinction without a difference.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      What? No way. One is owned by the vendor, the other is owned by me. The physical device is mine. I don’t consent to a search.
      - imwillofficial 5y ago
        Yes you do, when you turn on use of their servers. Think of it as a pat down in the hallway before you can enter the building. No difference. Only done when you use their service
    - klipklop 5y ago
      For now...
    - n8cpdx 5y ago
      Have you considered reading the article? It makes the difference clear as day.
      - imwillofficial 5y ago
        Have you considered I disagree with the articles assertions? Outright fabrications and misstatements aren’t my problem. The article has them in spades.
- alexfromapex 5y ago
  The solution is privacy-safe open standards that decouple corporations’ proprietary hold over phone network tech
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  Stop keeping your needs of a computer locked behind service agreements.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Do you mean that both the state and corporations will make you a generous gift of privacy? Right when it goes against their best interest of grabbing more power and profit? Nope. If you want privacy, like any other rights, you will need to fight for them. Rights can only be gained by a fight; whatever is given is a privilege, which is often taken back as easily as is granted. So be prepared to (continue to) fight for your rights: in courts, in Congress, etc, but also by choosing less convenient, less featureful, more expensive devices and software which does not violate the rights you care about. And no, the majority of the consumers won't care until you show some signs of winning.
  - weikju 5y ago
    that's exactly correct. We have to accept discomfort NOW (to our convenience, wallets) so that everyone can benefit later. We cannot give up.
- snuser 5y ago
  > How can the layperson fight back? Simply not using a smartphone is fine, they aren't that great and there doesn't need to be an alternative. it feels like we've been trained as consumers to the point where saying no isn't realistic anymore, there must be something else to buy that represents me more.. etc
- pope_meat 5y ago
  I was very very close to ditching my Android device for an Apple device because it seemed like Apple was on the side of privacy. I don't feel that way anymore, and watching the FOSS projects like the PinePhone with a lot of interest.
  - jwalton 5y ago
    I made the switch from Android to Apple a few months ago for exactly this reason, and boy do I feel like I’ve been bait-and-switched.
    - abecedarius 5y ago
      Same here, exactly.
    - brokenmachine 5y ago
      Is it impossible for you to return the device because you don't agree with this change?
  - mackrevinack 5y ago
    i actually had an ipad picked out and in the basket ready to buy it! although i have been thinking of buying one for a good few months now, ive just been hesitating a lot because i was not sure if i could handle how restrictive ios is compared to android. the thing that really has me torn is that there is nothing else like it for simole/fun/creative music making apps (samplr, reason compact etc), which is the main reason i was going to buy one. at the same time i don't want to be part of apple's figures next quarter
- swiley 5y ago
  Software must be open source by law. Apple has shown closed software is too dangerous.
gkoberger 5y ago
I don't know... I have a really hard time getting too upset about this. I'm a big proponent of privacy and have always been a Snowden supporter. And while "protecting children" is a trope in politics, I think everyone with an iPhone knows they're giving up some privacy to own one. It's constantly tracking their location and sending other data to Apple. This isn't a government agency. Apple has been incredibly thoughtful about privacy in the past, and I feel like they've earned the benefit of the doubt here. I hope I'm not wrong, but I don't see how this is insane. They're just making sure the files you upload to them aren't illegal.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Time has proven otherwise. All censorship systems start with protecting the kids, and grow to eventually encompass all undesirable content…
  - robertoandred 5y ago
    How have Google’s, Facebook’s, or Microsoft’s CSAM scanning grown?
    - shuckles 5y ago
      To be fair, Google and Facebook both do plenty of content scanning, but you’re right that it likely doesn’t use the CSAM pipelines. Apple’s pipeline is probably even harder to repurpose since it’s designed very closely for this use case.
    - vayeate 5y ago
      Facebook filters and censors content on a massive scale. They even block private messages with certain keywords or domains
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      Unknown re private scanning, however Australia and UK have rigorous internet censorship regimes that block copyright infringement and gambling that use exactly the same censorship infrastructure that was build to block CSAM in the early 00s.
sushiburps 5y ago
Apple has through side channels leaked iCloud is the largest open host of CSAM among big tech. It's the only large provider that hosts images that doesn't automatically scan. The only difference is Apple wants to do it while leaving your photos in the cloud encrypted. This isn't rational, it's an anti-Apple culture war position.
- _jal 5y ago
  Can you point to any examples of these leaks? (Edit: Thanks for the links.)
  - shuckles 5y ago
    It’s not a leak. It’s an observation from evidence that came out during discovery in the Apple vs. Epic trial that’s being reported now that it’s useful context: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/08/19/apple-exec-we-are-the-greatest-platform-for-distributing-child-porn/?sh=5661c9c03c20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/08/19/apple-e...
  - sushiburps 5y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-project-liberty-app-store-schiller-sweeney-cook-jobs https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-projec... #71, from the Epic v. Apple anti-trust trial discovery.
    - diebeforei485 5y ago
      That's referring to iMessage. Predators grooming children is not something the on-device photo library scanning is going to fix. They could let users report such messages to Apple, but that requires having a team of humans to review iMessage reports.
      - genewitch 5y ago
        They could pay 10,000,000 total per year to 100 people and it'd be a rounding error, with their nearly 2,000,000,000,000 market cap.
musesum 5y ago
I stopped work on a memo app. Was piggybacking on Apple's branding around privacy. Am going to wait a year to see how this shakes out. Super disappointed. [Edit] Here is/was the privacy statement https://www.deepmuse.com/privacy https://www.deepmuse.com/privacy - I'm kinda embarrassed.
rz2k 5y ago
This is a very well-written post. Ever since this program has been announced I have struggled with talking about the implications succinctly. Online, I never know if an interlocutor is even arguing in good faith, but even in person it's difficult to balance talking about all the ways that the claimed safeguards are meaningless, how the benefits don't really make sense, how this is markedly different from other infringements on privacy with the need to be concise and explain that the real problems aren't just theoretical because similar invasions of privacy are killing actual people around the world already. Anyway, I think the only practical way that this could resolve well, is if Apple saw a precipitous decline in its iCloud brand, then it could be argued that they had to abandon this plan for purely business reasons. A serious movement to abandon Apple services ($17.5B revenue in 2021 q3), might empower the people within Apple who opposed this reckless plan from the beginning.
- cyanydeez 5y ago
  i still think its more about dmca2.0 than any save the chiodren bullshit
  - russh 5y ago
    Today it’s CP, next year it will be copyright violations…
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      CP first, then terrorist propaganda, then copyright violations, then foreign propaganda, then misinformation... That seems to be how the cycle goes.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... (it's actually linked from the blog post)
diebeforei485 5y ago
This is a reduction in privacy. Do what you want on your servers, but hands off my phone. Also the whole "Apple is planning to encrypt iCloud Photos end-to-end anyway" thing is just fanfiction. I'll believe it when they announce it.
- chmod775 5y ago
  > This is a reduction in privacy. Do what you want on your servers, but hands off my phone. Apple devices might not be precisely the smartest purchase if the concept of your hardware is important to you.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > Apple devices might not be precisely the smartest purchase if the concept of your hardware is important to you. Maybe a handful of HN users are aware of that, but the majority of users think that their property belongs to them. It also goes against what Apple marketing says about privacy and your data. I wouldn't fault most consumers for not understanding that Apple's PR doesn't reflect reality.
    - nicce 5y ago
      Actually the fact that you don’t really own your Apple hardware is supportive for the Apple’s privacy arguments. Since it does not really matter in that case where those images are scanned, as long as the end result is the same.
      - brokenmachine 5y ago
        Not owning anything == privacy now?
  - diebeforei485 5y ago
    As you are well aware, the market is not very competitive and there aren't dozens of vendors to pick from. "Use something else" (or even more laughably, "start your own") is not a reasonable argument anymore.
readonthegoapp 5y ago
Dude can write, too. Good job, ES. Apple prob going to about-face like OnlyPorn But it should set off some soul searching in the tech community at least about the consolidation of power
whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
I don’t understand why this outrage seems so US-centric. This is the same Apple that hands over all your iCloud data (photos and otherwise) to the CCP if you happen to live in China. And they’ve done this openly for the last several years. What am I missing? Isn’t that a much much much much worse thing for Apple to do? Why are we only suddenly suspicious of Apple’s privacy claims with this matter?
- shuckles 5y ago
  As far as is documented, the behavior of iCloud does not change, just the operator. In particular, the difference is that end to end encrypted data in iCloud remains that way, so saying all iCloud data is handed over is incorrect. In fact, iMessage is the only end to end encrypted messaging service operating in the country (for example).
  - whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
    It’s my understanding that the keys used in that “end-to-end” encryption are also under the control of the operator [1], so from a privacy perspective it is the same as handing over that data in plaintext. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
    - shuckles 5y ago
      It’s an incorrect reading of the article. The HSMs in the data center are operated by the Chinese company so any CloudKit data escrowed by Apple could be accessed, but end to end encryption keys are synced through iCloud Keychain which uses a different protocol with device secrets.
      - whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
        Do you have any sources for that? I ask because the article I linked specifically states that Apple was forced to discard the entire encryption system it uses elsewhere. It’s also hard to understand why a government would insist on this sort of data custody without the benefit of plaintext access.
hirundo 5y ago
In the essay the "i" in the headline is lower case, which is significant and chilling. It's a homunculus of Apple's new direction: the meaning changed from "me" to "panopticon".
- dang 5y ago
  Yes. Our title caser doesn't understand such nuances, but we've corrected it now.
slg 5y ago
>So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering “extremist” political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"? What I don't get is what prevented these things from happening last month? Apple controls the hardware, the software, and the cloud services so the point at which the scanning is done is mostly arbitrary from a process standpoint (I understand people believe there are huge differences philosophically). They could have already scanned our files because they already have full control over the entire ecosystem. If they can be corrupted by authoritative governments, then shouldn't we assume that have already been corrupted? If so, why did we trust them with full control of the ecosystem?
- barsonme 5y ago
  Because that door hasn’t been opened yet. “Scan every photo on users devices” or “scan for non-CSAM” are much easier requests once they’ve already started scanning on-device. It’s just how life and politics work.
  - anonuser123456 5y ago
    The door has been opened for quite some time. What do you think spotlight is? It scans an indexes all your data. What's prevented the government from saying "hey if you see Osama Bin Laden in a spotlight scan, you need to send us all that guys data." The answer is, Apple can just say FU. And that's exactly what will happen here. In particular, the US DOJ needs to stay in Apple's good graces here and not be overly aggressive. If DOJ pulls any funny business, that's a pretty good reason for Apple to just say "OK, we're picking up our toys and going home. You get nothing now and we're turning on E2EE."
Animats 5y ago
Be seeing you.[1] [1] https://archive.org/details/ThePrisoner01Arrival https://archive.org/details/ThePrisoner01Arrival
temp0826 5y ago
Are there any self-hosted equivalents to icloud photos? (e.g. automated backup/sync. Does the camera app have a way to save to other places, etc?)
- guerrilla 5y ago
  I think your best bet might be NextCloud. You can either host it yourself on a storage VPS or find a provider who provides managed NextCloud (or however they repackage it.) Be aware there are many more providers than listed on the NextCloud website and you'd do well to search about. If you're in Europe, take a look at Hetzner's "Storage Share" as an example of what's possible and prices for high-quality hosting, but like I said there's a million operators out there doing this and you can get it dirt cheap if you want. I don't know how it works on an iPhone but on Android NextCloud detects when save pictures in a different directory due to some app and asks me if I want it to track that directory. It was already configured by default to track stuff taken with the default camera app.
- genewitch 5y ago
  Synology disk station software does this, but that's a significant investment. If you open the DS file software it defaults to syncing your photos. I don't run mine public, so I've never checked how their VPN/cloud sync thing works. If I want to share a photo from my phone I use syncthing hosted on one of my VMs on a server I bought and built, but that I don't have physical access to easily (I'll never see it, probably). At home to share a photo I either use mattermost to get a public link to the stored image or ssh to the same box as syncthing runs on. I also host mattermost, on a different VM on a different server in the same datacenter. I don't like apps seeing my stuff so I just don't use stuff like imgur or whatever.
- timbit42 5y ago
  OwnCloud
nicce 5y ago
> the fact that, in just a few weeks, Apple plans to erase the boundary dividing which devices work for you, and which devices work for them. A very overdramatic sentence. It is a bit scary to realise that only now people think that this border is being crossed. It has happened a very long time ago already. The first years of Android, owners were the product, not the phone. Privacy features in the past years might have improved this a little. Google’s massive success on many services is based on the fact how phones and their software were collecting data for them. User interfaces are just illusions for non-tech persons. They might give you a sense of control. Now that Apple does not trust us with CSAM material, the end is near. There are arguments for both sides, and many are taking sides to just get attention. However, you can only solve this problem with politics.
zakki 5y ago
are we close enough for the government to scan anything passing its road?
harryvederci 5y ago
I was surprised to not see an RSS link there, but apparently a feed does exist: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/feed https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/feed
mrits 5y ago
I think iPhone is superior and would hate to leave it. Although I barely do much with my phone outside 2FA, browsing, and texting. A switch won't be too bad in that regard. I do love my Macbooks though. So while these privacy invasions make me angry I'm not willing to drop Apple all together. I've been meaning to keep most of my sensitive information on a usually disconnected Linux machine anyways. I'll keep using my Macbook for development.
morpheos137 5y ago
i(lluminati) phone. How did we get to place (speaking of America where there is a bill of rights) where it is normal to have a multimodal tracker on or near your person at all times? George Orwell's telescreen at least could not fit in your pocket and Orwell never imagined things like GPS or facebook or digital phones. We are the slow boiled frog as the most expansive totilitarian infrastructure in history is built up.
- bigiain 5y ago
  > How did we get to place (speaking of America where there is a bill of rights) where it is normal to have a multimodal tracker on or near your person at all times? > George Orwell's telescreen at least could not fit in your pocket and Orwell never imagined things like GPS or facebook or digital phones. Because we're not living in 1984's dystopia where the government oppresses us, we're living in Brave New World's dystopia where we choose to oppress ourselves.
- jjgreen 5y ago
  Phones are not mandatory, if you care about privacy throw your phone in the bin (better, someone else's bin).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cryptoquick 5y ago
A powerful piece... For the privacy-minded Apple users among us (I mean, that's who they marketed to, yeah?), I'd recommend turning off automatic software updates... For as long as it makes sense to. I hope they reverse their decision, but I'm already looking for alternatives. I'm certainly not buying another Apple device, even though I'm about due. They really lost a lot of fans with this, myself included.
- istingray 5y ago
  Yeah turned it off and iCloud too! I was all in on Apple. Now got a System76 laptop on the way. Transitioning off iPhone to Linux will be tough but something new to explore.
_carbyau_ 5y ago
The article mentions the slippery slope and "what happens in a year or two when..." scenarios. The article even calls it a cliff. But doesn't expand on timelines of concern. As it currently stands, this concept would be sitting in plain sight waiting eternally for any lawmaker anywhere. In your country, either side of the political spectrum - with a majority in lawmaking - can simply tap Apple on the shoulder and potentially turn ALL those devices against you. Guns won't help. When information technology is used against you, when you are separated from society in a manner where people dare not risk their own livelihood for fear of being similarly marked. And if Apple goes ahead with this, this risk is sitting there for the rest of your life just waiting for [that one politician that represents everything you hate] to use it against you. Maybe that politician hasn't been born yet. But they will come. Don't let this Pandora's Box sit waiting for them.
- Covzire 5y ago
  It's the same reason free speech is something akin to sacred even for your worst enemies, because those who start taking away the bad people's speech are themselves always going to be one political actor away from having theirs taken away.
nbzso 5y ago
I see this Apple move as a warning. I have lived part of my life under communistic regime. For me my Apple addiction ends here. There is no "magic" left in their products, only "bait & switch" dark patterns. No hardware or UX will lure me again to suppress my instincts. This is the beginning of global politically and financially motivated race for public control. Apple is just giving a spark to the fire. Imagine a future in which your beloved Face ID will be tied to everything, your beloved iDevices, Teslas, or home appliances will scanning and reporting, scanning and reporting. There is no middle ground in this for me. No benefits or conveniences are so important. FOSS and public oversight of software must be demanded by law. Posted earlier this without getting any reactions. https://docplayer.net/1287799-Fourth-amendment-search-and-the-power-of-the-hash.html https://docplayer.net/1287799-Fourth-amendment-search-and-th...
nr2x 5y ago
A little melodramatic, but the guy is a talented writer.
motohagiography 5y ago
This distinction of changing the defacto ownership of your device and data is the real inflection point. The surveillance technology itself is not really that novel, as functionally it's applying established anti-virus techniques to data instead of code. Ask any AV company how their detection works, and it will include a variation on this. This same tech can (and will likely) be used to find the owners of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency wallets, honeypot tokens, community identities, and to provide profiling information to the company's political masters. The collisions in the hashing scheme mean that you can insert anything you want onto peoples devices and get them pulled into the legal system once it is flagged, where the process itself is the punishment. The whole scheme is too stupid to ever have been about reason, it's just pretexts and narrative, and this is as good a time as any to exit their ecosystem. Apple really picked the wrong time to attempt this, as I do not see anyone who understands how evil this is ever forgiving them. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that they're probably just doing it as part of a deal to avoid anti-trust plays, where Apple plays ball with the feds and its parties, and the storm just magically passes them over. The good news is running OSX made me lazy, and getting back into running a linux or freebsd laptop again is going to be fun.
- hypothesis 5y ago
  Supporting and advocating for “Right to Repair” laws was never more crucial, because this is not going to stop at iPhone or mac.
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    Just to extend my comment in response to how this problem will spread: By doing surveillance on types of images, Apple is in effect implementing anti-virus - for ideas. That's only a bit hyperbolic, as the perceptual hash for a viral meme can be searched on, just like the material they're using as a pretext for it. I could even see them announcing it at a launch. We should be concerned that the company has skipped its Black Mirror stage and jumped right into its Universal Paperclips endgame. (I'm also appreciating the irony that people like me being angry about Apple announcing they're going to implement a version of what Google has already been technically able to do for the last decade, and what Microsoft has probably been doing in secret since even before then.)
userbinator 5y ago
IMHO this is really another continuation of the "you will own nothing and be happy" trend that has been around for a while, but companies have started to really push in the last few years. Slowly eroding ownership and normalising mass surveillance is their goal, so they can continue to extract more $$$ out of you.
yyyk 5y ago
I have a modest suggestion in the spirit of Apple's move. As we know, there are people in the world who are running meth labs or creating explosives for terrorists in their homes. In order to safeguard the public, we shall have a detachment of dogs which will sniff everyone's houses every once in a while. When they sense something bad they'll alert their handlers and there'll be a manual inspection before reporting to police. There's no risk to privacy here - dogs being dogs can't tell their handlers what they sense. We can also show the training publicly so people can verify the iDogs are trained to only sense drugs or explosives. So it's all even more secure than Apple's iPhone scanning! What says you?
- himaraya 5y ago
  Agreed, I have nothing to hide & love dogs.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    And hate terrorists!
- mellavora 5y ago
  damn, what if the dog gets excited and barks because I'm dry-aging some of my (fully legally hunted!) wild game? or because the handler accidentally stepped on the dog's tail?
  - yyyk 5y ago
    Don't worry, these are well-trained, well-bred and very well-fed iDogs. 'Not eating when not fed by the handler' is part of the basic training. Also, there's a manual verification step where the handlers search your property before reporting to the police. The chances of an error are less than a billion to one. It's worth it to beat the drug dealers and terrorists.
  - avnigo 5y ago
    That's why we have the manual human reviewers, you see.
tyingq 5y ago
I wonder if any current or future President might revisit the idea of granting Snowden a pardon. He is is still viewed unfavorably by a fair amount of the US population, but it seems like that's changing with time.
- ttyprintk 5y ago
  Around here, people view him favorably but are wary because his choices make him look like an agent for Russia. I think it would change only after a pardon.
bhawks 5y ago
Why stop at photos you take? Since we're doing this on device we can just turn the camera on every few minutes and ask an ai if the camera sees something interesting. If it sees that you're in trouble it can start streaming to the authorities. We will finally be safe. By the way, if your phone is off or left at home we will know you're in trouble and send assistance right away. I wish I could say /s.
femto 5y ago
Australia has already shown what the end-game is, with its "The Assistance and Access Act 2018" [1]. It's not illegal to have end-to-end encryption, but it's illegal to deny access to the ends of the encrypted pipe. As an aside, Australia has just implemented the next step: the "Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2021" [2], which makes it legal to hack your device to access the ends of the pipe. Useful if the ends of the pipe are not controlled by a malleable corporation. [1] https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/national-security/lawful-access-telecommunications/data-encryption https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio... [2] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r6623 https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  This is so disgusting.
- Tarq0n 5y ago
  This actually sounds like the right way to go. Individual, warrant based access is comparable to wiretapping in a way that Apple's dragnet approach is not.
- Youden 5y ago
  Ah, this old bogeyman. The media drastically overreacted to that act, to the point where the Department of Home Affairs now has an entire page dedicated to addressing the false reporting [0]. The TL;DR is that the act doesn't allow the government to introduce mass surveillance. Section 317ZG [1] expressly forbids any law enforcement request from _having the effect_ of introducing any systemic vulnerability or weakness and _explicitly_ calls out new decryption capabilities as under that umbrella. Your claim that a company can't deny access to the ends of an e2e-encrypted pipe is false. And yes, that new act exists. The government will be able to hack into your devices and take over your accounts _with a warrant_, just like they can break into your house or take money from your bank account _with a warrant_. [0]: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/national-security/lawful-access-telecommunications/myths-assistance-access-act https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio... [1]: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214/s317zg.html http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997...
chx 5y ago
Sigh. You poor fools. I guess us poor fools? I haven't thought the day will come when Apple news brings up very strongly, as a knee jerk reaction, one short part of a one long sentence Hungarian poem indeed called One Sentence On Tyranny. It is a poem many of us know from heart, to remember what was even if many back in Hungary forgot. I fail to convey my emotions here in just a few words but I am incredibly saddened. Anyways, I checked a few translations, they lose some of the power of the original but let me try, the first two lines only for context: [...] you would like to look, but you can only see what Tyranny conjured up for you already forest fire surrounds you fanned into flame from a matchstick you threw down without stamping it out Oh yes, nothing new under the Sun. And it might be too late now. These things have been so much on my mind because I saw an anti masker protest in Vancouver peacefully escorted by police. My mind melted. I remember, remember all too well, it was only 35 years ago when Hungarian police have broken up a protests with batons -- it's called the Battle Of the Elizabeth Bridge to this day. It was a very one sided battle, mind you. And while I don't remember, my parents do when they broke it up with tanks....
LetThereBeLight 5y ago
My question after reading this article is, what can I do as a current iPhone user? Is there a reasonable alternative phone out there that can run the same apps but that isn't effectively controlled by Apple or Google?
- askafriend 5y ago
  Simple: don't store your photos on Apple's property (iCloud). That's the only time this fingerprinting will affect you. If you store photos locally, then no type of fingerprinting will happen. While you're at it, don't store them on anyone's servers, because they all fingerprint for the same exact reasons. There's no service out there that doesn't do this at some level.
  - LetThereBeLight 5y ago
    Sorry, I should have been more clear in my post. I meant to say that, if I no longer want to support Apple (or Google) because of their behavior, are there any reasonable smartphone options available? It seems to me that this is the only way I can protest against what Apple is doing.
    - askafriend 5y ago
      The problem here isn't the hardware. The problem is the location you're choosing to store your photos. If you want to protest what they're doing, then stop storing photos on iCloud which means you need to spend less on iCloud storage. That's the most realistic option.
georgeplusplus 5y ago
Are there any decent open source alternatives out there we can contribute to? A quick search revealed that there is Librem 5, a Linux based smart phone. I would love to hear more about it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
- Lio 5y ago
  There’s also Pine Phone. https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
fkfowl3 5y ago
This is what happens when a businessman takes over a founder led company. Soulless and liars are the only the words which comes to my mind.
beezischillin 5y ago
What would happen if in a new paradigm shift multi-nationals decided to use their enormous lobbying power to push back on the government in favor of their users for once instead of only lobbying to screw them over?
BuckRogers 5y ago
IBM gleefully cooperated with the Nazis. It won’t be long until Apple is using this framework to alert the PRC about Chinese dissidents. Just to merely stay in their market. iOS 15 effectively is the point where Apple kicks off the holocaust that they’re going to be responsible for. I hope they enjoy their place in history because they’re earning it. I’ve loved my iPhones, but there’s a warm place in hell waiting for all Apple employees involved in this endeavor. Apple is an enemy more threatening to mankind’s freedoms than Al Qaeda ever could’ve been.
noisy_boy 5y ago
I think 1TB[^] would be enough to hold most people's privacy concerns. [^]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/17/iphone-13-third-week-september-1tb/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/17/iphone-13-third-week-se...
Digit-Al 5y ago
If you hear a loud bang, that will be the RMS smug-o-meter exploding.
stinos 5y ago
So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? Isn't this essentially what might happen with so-called ChatControl in Europe? https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/message-screening/?lang=en https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/message-screening/?la...
GoodJokes 5y ago
Snowden should get an editor or stick to tweets or video interviews.
atok1 5y ago
This is your chance to break free. Please consider switching to an opensource OS. Our freedom depends on it.
Grustaf 5y ago
Edward Snowden just went full Stallman. Take a good idea and ride it over the cliff of sanity. Of course privacy can't be absolute, we live in a society. Be realistic. Focus on evil things. If you think Apple have an evil plan, sure, but most people who object don't even think that. And for a tech spy he seems to not understand tech. "What if some evil regime wants Apple to scan for anti-government propaganda". Well then they won't be using the CSAM system that's for sure, they can just scan the images directly, either on iCloud or on device. Co-opting the CSAM scanner is probably the most impractical way imaginable to spy on Uighur separatists.
- nbzso 5y ago
  Let me see: Who I will trust more about "security" or "privacy"? Some guy on hackernews, full with well payed Apple employees or renowned spy? Hard thing to do? Right?
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    I'm not saying you should "trust" me, or anyone. Just consider the facts: A) - Apple have complete control over the hardware, the OS and all the most popular apps, including Photos and Mail. - They also have complete control over iCloud, which is not encrypted - They can and do scan your photos and emails so that they can classify photos, find possible appointments, emails etc, and now they even OCR your photos. B) - They are now building a very high profile, limited and locked in system that relies on hashes, external databases, a large number of matches, human review etc. Do you really think they would use B if they, the FBI, the Chinese government or whoever, would want to spy on users? For all we know they are already spying, it would be completely trivial to do so. Clearly system B is a complete red herring when it comes to spying. They don't need it.
    - nbzso 5y ago
      The point is not to lose yourself in the technical implementation. Design of the system is corrupt, implementation is done in a way to hide this with layers of complication and false "privacy" for "normal" users. For me and many other people there is difference in knowing that Apple is the only responsible part in a contract and on other hand adding third party private corporation (funded by DOJ with more than 30 million dollars), which will "provide" the hashes and because of the sensitive nature of hashed material nobody will have access for auditing. Nobody in their right mind believed Apple about "privacy". The difference here are that this is intrusion on my property from assumption that I am guilty until proven innocent. A lot of normal people, without technical knowledge can see that this is a big problem.
091234mnbvcxz 5y ago
This whole switch to Linux is not a solution. Privacy advocates need to be like second amendment activists. We need to use their playbook. They raise a big stink about anything, no matter who big or small, that could curtail their rights. No number of Sandy Hook events will result in meaningful changes in laws. Pushing everyone to Linux will eventually lead to all hardware falling under some national security law, allowing hardware to be imported if only they allow certain OSs to be installed on them and boot loaders will be locked. Free market has no impact here, the masses don't care. And privacy supporters are too logical to whip up any type of movement. Till privacy advocates come up with emotional reasons why privacy is absolutely necessary (like grandma is gonna die without it), this is a losing battle.
- fsflover 5y ago
  > Till privacy advocates come up with emotional reasons why privacy is absolutely necessary (like grandma is gonna die without it), this is a losing battle. They have already come up with good reasons. "Every time you use encryption, you're protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive." -- Bruce Schneier "“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -- Edward Snowden Surveillance harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say. > Pushing everyone to Linux will eventually lead to all hardware falling under some national security law I don't see any connection here. Linux is already used on all servers and nothing happens.
- no_time 5y ago
  The problem is that the NRA is not big because of the people. It is big because of gun companies. Thats why their budget is 20x larger than EFF's. Privacy doesn't move units like gun rights move guns. Until this changes, privacy is a lost cause in the digital world.
theonlybutlet 5y ago
Great to see someone influential framing it this way. At the end of the day, what it's there for doesn't matter and unfortunately way too many of us stumble on this mistake in reasoning.
joelbondurant 5y ago
Big surprise the betacucks in the military institute of communist Karenifornia would do this.

861 points by ttctciyf 5y ago

When Apple sells yet again another record amount of iPhones next quarter which device should we move to? Fundamentally this illustrates that software has become too inherently intrusive. What’s the solution tho that could ever be mainstream? The other issue is that software has become too complicated and too many (potentially) bad things are happening in the background. How can the layperson fight back?

nkozyra 5y ago
I think this kind of defeatism really feeds the public's lax attitude toward privacy. Yes, the iPhone and Apple products are very popular. And they will probably continue to grow. Does that mean we just accept anything they do, antithetical to one of their core promises to their customers? Or do we make a big deal about it so everyone sees what's happening and what the implications are?
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  I've been making a big stink about it. I switched to Signal for my iMessage buddies and that seems to be sticking. The more people seen visibly taking proactive steps to create privacy, the better.
n8cpdx 5y ago
GrapheneOS on Pixel 4 has been a dream, as has Elementary OS on an XPS 13 is similarly great. WebUSB installer for graphene is a game changer, it made the process incredibly easy. Also it seems most apps work fine without Play services. Synology Photos is a great local icloud photos replacement. I made the switch this past weekend. Aside from the impact on my wallet and hassle of needing to sell my Apple equipment, it was surprisingly painless.
mdoms 5y ago
Apple is the only device I know of doing on-device scanning.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  On device scanning vs in the cloud scanning with a distinction without a difference.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    What? No way. One is owned by the vendor, the other is owned by me. The physical device is mine. I don’t consent to a search.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      Yes you do, when you turn on use of their servers. Think of it as a pat down in the hallway before you can enter the building. No difference. Only done when you use their service
  - klipklop 5y ago
    For now...
  - n8cpdx 5y ago
    Have you considered reading the article? It makes the difference clear as day.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      Have you considered I disagree with the articles assertions? Outright fabrications and misstatements aren’t my problem. The article has them in spades.
alexfromapex 5y ago
The solution is privacy-safe open standards that decouple corporations’ proprietary hold over phone network tech
yepthatsreality 5y ago
Stop keeping your needs of a computer locked behind service agreements.
nine_k 5y ago
Do you mean that both the state and corporations will make you a generous gift of privacy? Right when it goes against their best interest of grabbing more power and profit? Nope. If you want privacy, like any other rights, you will need to fight for them. Rights can only be gained by a fight; whatever is given is a privilege, which is often taken back as easily as is granted. So be prepared to (continue to) fight for your rights: in courts, in Congress, etc, but also by choosing less convenient, less featureful, more expensive devices and software which does not violate the rights you care about. And no, the majority of the consumers won't care until you show some signs of winning.
- weikju 5y ago
  that's exactly correct. We have to accept discomfort NOW (to our convenience, wallets) so that everyone can benefit later. We cannot give up.
snuser 5y ago
> How can the layperson fight back? Simply not using a smartphone is fine, they aren't that great and there doesn't need to be an alternative. it feels like we've been trained as consumers to the point where saying no isn't realistic anymore, there must be something else to buy that represents me more.. etc
pope_meat 5y ago
I was very very close to ditching my Android device for an Apple device because it seemed like Apple was on the side of privacy. I don't feel that way anymore, and watching the FOSS projects like the PinePhone with a lot of interest.
- jwalton 5y ago
  I made the switch from Android to Apple a few months ago for exactly this reason, and boy do I feel like I’ve been bait-and-switched.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    Same here, exactly.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    Is it impossible for you to return the device because you don't agree with this change?
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  i actually had an ipad picked out and in the basket ready to buy it! although i have been thinking of buying one for a good few months now, ive just been hesitating a lot because i was not sure if i could handle how restrictive ios is compared to android. the thing that really has me torn is that there is nothing else like it for simole/fun/creative music making apps (samplr, reason compact etc), which is the main reason i was going to buy one. at the same time i don't want to be part of apple's figures next quarter
swiley 5y ago
Software must be open source by law. Apple has shown closed software is too dangerous.

gkoberger 5y ago

I don't know... I have a really hard time getting too upset about this. I'm a big proponent of privacy and have always been a Snowden supporter. And while "protecting children" is a trope in politics, I think everyone with an iPhone knows they're giving up some privacy to own one. It's constantly tracking their location and sending other data to Apple. This isn't a government agency. Apple has been incredibly thoughtful about privacy in the past, and I feel like they've earned the benefit of the doubt here. I hope I'm not wrong, but I don't see how this is insane. They're just making sure the files you upload to them aren't illegal.

randomhodler84 5y ago
Time has proven otherwise. All censorship systems start with protecting the kids, and grow to eventually encompass all undesirable content…
- robertoandred 5y ago
  How have Google’s, Facebook’s, or Microsoft’s CSAM scanning grown?
  - shuckles 5y ago
    To be fair, Google and Facebook both do plenty of content scanning, but you’re right that it likely doesn’t use the CSAM pipelines. Apple’s pipeline is probably even harder to repurpose since it’s designed very closely for this use case.
  - vayeate 5y ago
    Facebook filters and censors content on a massive scale. They even block private messages with certain keywords or domains
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    Unknown re private scanning, however Australia and UK have rigorous internet censorship regimes that block copyright infringement and gambling that use exactly the same censorship infrastructure that was build to block CSAM in the early 00s.

sushiburps 5y ago

Apple has through side channels leaked iCloud is the largest open host of CSAM among big tech. It's the only large provider that hosts images that doesn't automatically scan. The only difference is Apple wants to do it while leaving your photos in the cloud encrypted. This isn't rational, it's an anti-Apple culture war position.

_jal 5y ago
Can you point to any examples of these leaks? (Edit: Thanks for the links.)
- shuckles 5y ago
  It’s not a leak. It’s an observation from evidence that came out during discovery in the Apple vs. Epic trial that’s being reported now that it’s useful context: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/08/19/apple-exec-we-are-the-greatest-platform-for-distributing-child-porn/?sh=5661c9c03c20 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/08/19/apple-e...
- sushiburps 5y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-project-liberty-app-store-schiller-sweeney-cook-jobs https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-projec... #71, from the Epic v. Apple anti-trust trial discovery.
  - diebeforei485 5y ago
    That's referring to iMessage. Predators grooming children is not something the on-device photo library scanning is going to fix. They could let users report such messages to Apple, but that requires having a team of humans to review iMessage reports.
    - genewitch 5y ago
      They could pay 10,000,000 total per year to 100 people and it'd be a rounding error, with their nearly 2,000,000,000,000 market cap.

musesum 5y ago

I stopped work on a memo app. Was piggybacking on Apple's branding around privacy. Am going to wait a year to see how this shakes out. Super disappointed. [Edit] Here is/was the privacy statement https://www.deepmuse.com/privacy https://www.deepmuse.com/privacy - I'm kinda embarrassed.

rz2k 5y ago

This is a very well-written post. Ever since this program has been announced I have struggled with talking about the implications succinctly. Online, I never know if an interlocutor is even arguing in good faith, but even in person it's difficult to balance talking about all the ways that the claimed safeguards are meaningless, how the benefits don't really make sense, how this is markedly different from other infringements on privacy with the need to be concise and explain that the real problems aren't just theoretical because similar invasions of privacy are killing actual people around the world already. Anyway, I think the only practical way that this could resolve well, is if Apple saw a precipitous decline in its iCloud brand, then it could be argued that they had to abandon this plan for purely business reasons. A serious movement to abandon Apple services ($17.5B revenue in 2021 q3), might empower the people within Apple who opposed this reckless plan from the beginning.

cyanydeez 5y ago
i still think its more about dmca2.0 than any save the chiodren bullshit
- russh 5y ago
  Today it’s CP, next year it will be copyright violations…
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    CP first, then terrorist propaganda, then copyright violations, then foreign propaganda, then misinformation... That seems to be how the cycle goes.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... (it's actually linked from the blog post)

diebeforei485 5y ago

This is a reduction in privacy. Do what you want on your servers, but hands off my phone. Also the whole "Apple is planning to encrypt iCloud Photos end-to-end anyway" thing is just fanfiction. I'll believe it when they announce it.

chmod775 5y ago
> This is a reduction in privacy. Do what you want on your servers, but hands off my phone. Apple devices might not be precisely the smartest purchase if the concept of your hardware is important to you.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > Apple devices might not be precisely the smartest purchase if the concept of your hardware is important to you. Maybe a handful of HN users are aware of that, but the majority of users think that their property belongs to them. It also goes against what Apple marketing says about privacy and your data. I wouldn't fault most consumers for not understanding that Apple's PR doesn't reflect reality.
  - nicce 5y ago
    Actually the fact that you don’t really own your Apple hardware is supportive for the Apple’s privacy arguments. Since it does not really matter in that case where those images are scanned, as long as the end result is the same.
    - brokenmachine 5y ago
      Not owning anything == privacy now?
- diebeforei485 5y ago
  As you are well aware, the market is not very competitive and there aren't dozens of vendors to pick from. "Use something else" (or even more laughably, "start your own") is not a reasonable argument anymore.

readonthegoapp 5y ago

Dude can write, too. Good job, ES. Apple prob going to about-face like OnlyPorn But it should set off some soul searching in the tech community at least about the consolidation of power

whatgoodisaroad 5y ago

I don’t understand why this outrage seems so US-centric. This is the same Apple that hands over all your iCloud data (photos and otherwise) to the CCP if you happen to live in China. And they’ve done this openly for the last several years. What am I missing? Isn’t that a much much much much worse thing for Apple to do? Why are we only suddenly suspicious of Apple’s privacy claims with this matter?

shuckles 5y ago
As far as is documented, the behavior of iCloud does not change, just the operator. In particular, the difference is that end to end encrypted data in iCloud remains that way, so saying all iCloud data is handed over is incorrect. In fact, iMessage is the only end to end encrypted messaging service operating in the country (for example).
- whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
  It’s my understanding that the keys used in that “end-to-end” encryption are also under the control of the operator [1], so from a privacy perspective it is the same as handing over that data in plaintext. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
  - shuckles 5y ago
    It’s an incorrect reading of the article. The HSMs in the data center are operated by the Chinese company so any CloudKit data escrowed by Apple could be accessed, but end to end encryption keys are synced through iCloud Keychain which uses a different protocol with device secrets.
    - whatgoodisaroad 5y ago
      Do you have any sources for that? I ask because the article I linked specifically states that Apple was forced to discard the entire encryption system it uses elsewhere. It’s also hard to understand why a government would insist on this sort of data custody without the benefit of plaintext access.

hirundo 5y ago

In the essay the "i" in the headline is lower case, which is significant and chilling. It's a homunculus of Apple's new direction: the meaning changed from "me" to "panopticon".

dang 5y ago
Yes. Our title caser doesn't understand such nuances, but we've corrected it now.

slg 5y ago

>So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering “extremist” political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"? What I don't get is what prevented these things from happening last month? Apple controls the hardware, the software, and the cloud services so the point at which the scanning is done is mostly arbitrary from a process standpoint (I understand people believe there are huge differences philosophically). They could have already scanned our files because they already have full control over the entire ecosystem. If they can be corrupted by authoritative governments, then shouldn't we assume that have already been corrupted? If so, why did we trust them with full control of the ecosystem?

barsonme 5y ago
Because that door hasn’t been opened yet. “Scan every photo on users devices” or “scan for non-CSAM” are much easier requests once they’ve already started scanning on-device. It’s just how life and politics work.
- anonuser123456 5y ago
  The door has been opened for quite some time. What do you think spotlight is? It scans an indexes all your data. What's prevented the government from saying "hey if you see Osama Bin Laden in a spotlight scan, you need to send us all that guys data." The answer is, Apple can just say FU. And that's exactly what will happen here. In particular, the US DOJ needs to stay in Apple's good graces here and not be overly aggressive. If DOJ pulls any funny business, that's a pretty good reason for Apple to just say "OK, we're picking up our toys and going home. You get nothing now and we're turning on E2EE."

Animats 5y ago

Be seeing you.[1] [1] https://archive.org/details/ThePrisoner01Arrival https://archive.org/details/ThePrisoner01Arrival

temp0826 5y ago

Are there any self-hosted equivalents to icloud photos? (e.g. automated backup/sync. Does the camera app have a way to save to other places, etc?)

guerrilla 5y ago
I think your best bet might be NextCloud. You can either host it yourself on a storage VPS or find a provider who provides managed NextCloud (or however they repackage it.) Be aware there are many more providers than listed on the NextCloud website and you'd do well to search about. If you're in Europe, take a look at Hetzner's "Storage Share" as an example of what's possible and prices for high-quality hosting, but like I said there's a million operators out there doing this and you can get it dirt cheap if you want. I don't know how it works on an iPhone but on Android NextCloud detects when save pictures in a different directory due to some app and asks me if I want it to track that directory. It was already configured by default to track stuff taken with the default camera app.
genewitch 5y ago
Synology disk station software does this, but that's a significant investment. If you open the DS file software it defaults to syncing your photos. I don't run mine public, so I've never checked how their VPN/cloud sync thing works. If I want to share a photo from my phone I use syncthing hosted on one of my VMs on a server I bought and built, but that I don't have physical access to easily (I'll never see it, probably). At home to share a photo I either use mattermost to get a public link to the stored image or ssh to the same box as syncthing runs on. I also host mattermost, on a different VM on a different server in the same datacenter. I don't like apps seeing my stuff so I just don't use stuff like imgur or whatever.
timbit42 5y ago
OwnCloud

nicce 5y ago

> the fact that, in just a few weeks, Apple plans to erase the boundary dividing which devices work for you, and which devices work for them. A very overdramatic sentence. It is a bit scary to realise that only now people think that this border is being crossed. It has happened a very long time ago already. The first years of Android, owners were the product, not the phone. Privacy features in the past years might have improved this a little. Google’s massive success on many services is based on the fact how phones and their software were collecting data for them. User interfaces are just illusions for non-tech persons. They might give you a sense of control. Now that Apple does not trust us with CSAM material, the end is near. There are arguments for both sides, and many are taking sides to just get attention. However, you can only solve this problem with politics.

zakki 5y ago

are we close enough for the government to scan anything passing its road?

harryvederci 5y ago

I was surprised to not see an RSS link there, but apparently a feed does exist: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/feed https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/feed

mrits 5y ago

I think iPhone is superior and would hate to leave it. Although I barely do much with my phone outside 2FA, browsing, and texting. A switch won't be too bad in that regard. I do love my Macbooks though. So while these privacy invasions make me angry I'm not willing to drop Apple all together. I've been meaning to keep most of my sensitive information on a usually disconnected Linux machine anyways. I'll keep using my Macbook for development.

morpheos137 5y ago

i(lluminati) phone. How did we get to place (speaking of America where there is a bill of rights) where it is normal to have a multimodal tracker on or near your person at all times? George Orwell's telescreen at least could not fit in your pocket and Orwell never imagined things like GPS or facebook or digital phones. We are the slow boiled frog as the most expansive totilitarian infrastructure in history is built up.

bigiain 5y ago
> How did we get to place (speaking of America where there is a bill of rights) where it is normal to have a multimodal tracker on or near your person at all times? > George Orwell's telescreen at least could not fit in your pocket and Orwell never imagined things like GPS or facebook or digital phones. Because we're not living in 1984's dystopia where the government oppresses us, we're living in Brave New World's dystopia where we choose to oppress ourselves.
jjgreen 5y ago
Phones are not mandatory, if you care about privacy throw your phone in the bin (better, someone else's bin).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cryptoquick 5y ago

A powerful piece... For the privacy-minded Apple users among us (I mean, that's who they marketed to, yeah?), I'd recommend turning off automatic software updates... For as long as it makes sense to. I hope they reverse their decision, but I'm already looking for alternatives. I'm certainly not buying another Apple device, even though I'm about due. They really lost a lot of fans with this, myself included.

istingray 5y ago
Yeah turned it off and iCloud too! I was all in on Apple. Now got a System76 laptop on the way. Transitioning off iPhone to Linux will be tough but something new to explore.

_carbyau_ 5y ago

The article mentions the slippery slope and "what happens in a year or two when..." scenarios. The article even calls it a cliff. But doesn't expand on timelines of concern. As it currently stands, this concept would be sitting in plain sight waiting eternally for any lawmaker anywhere. In your country, either side of the political spectrum - with a majority in lawmaking - can simply tap Apple on the shoulder and potentially turn ALL those devices against you. Guns won't help. When information technology is used against you, when you are separated from society in a manner where people dare not risk their own livelihood for fear of being similarly marked. And if Apple goes ahead with this, this risk is sitting there for the rest of your life just waiting for [that one politician that represents everything you hate] to use it against you. Maybe that politician hasn't been born yet. But they will come. Don't let this Pandora's Box sit waiting for them.

Covzire 5y ago
It's the same reason free speech is something akin to sacred even for your worst enemies, because those who start taking away the bad people's speech are themselves always going to be one political actor away from having theirs taken away.

nbzso 5y ago

I see this Apple move as a warning. I have lived part of my life under communistic regime. For me my Apple addiction ends here. There is no "magic" left in their products, only "bait & switch" dark patterns. No hardware or UX will lure me again to suppress my instincts. This is the beginning of global politically and financially motivated race for public control. Apple is just giving a spark to the fire. Imagine a future in which your beloved Face ID will be tied to everything, your beloved iDevices, Teslas, or home appliances will scanning and reporting, scanning and reporting. There is no middle ground in this for me. No benefits or conveniences are so important. FOSS and public oversight of software must be demanded by law. Posted earlier this without getting any reactions. https://docplayer.net/1287799-Fourth-amendment-search-and-the-power-of-the-hash.html https://docplayer.net/1287799-Fourth-amendment-search-and-th...

nr2x 5y ago

A little melodramatic, but the guy is a talented writer.

motohagiography 5y ago

This distinction of changing the defacto ownership of your device and data is the real inflection point. The surveillance technology itself is not really that novel, as functionally it's applying established anti-virus techniques to data instead of code. Ask any AV company how their detection works, and it will include a variation on this. This same tech can (and will likely) be used to find the owners of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency wallets, honeypot tokens, community identities, and to provide profiling information to the company's political masters. The collisions in the hashing scheme mean that you can insert anything you want onto peoples devices and get them pulled into the legal system once it is flagged, where the process itself is the punishment. The whole scheme is too stupid to ever have been about reason, it's just pretexts and narrative, and this is as good a time as any to exit their ecosystem. Apple really picked the wrong time to attempt this, as I do not see anyone who understands how evil this is ever forgiving them. The most charitable thing I can say about it is that they're probably just doing it as part of a deal to avoid anti-trust plays, where Apple plays ball with the feds and its parties, and the storm just magically passes them over. The good news is running OSX made me lazy, and getting back into running a linux or freebsd laptop again is going to be fun.

hypothesis 5y ago
Supporting and advocating for “Right to Repair” laws was never more crucial, because this is not going to stop at iPhone or mac.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  Just to extend my comment in response to how this problem will spread: By doing surveillance on types of images, Apple is in effect implementing anti-virus - for ideas. That's only a bit hyperbolic, as the perceptual hash for a viral meme can be searched on, just like the material they're using as a pretext for it. I could even see them announcing it at a launch. We should be concerned that the company has skipped its Black Mirror stage and jumped right into its Universal Paperclips endgame. (I'm also appreciating the irony that people like me being angry about Apple announcing they're going to implement a version of what Google has already been technically able to do for the last decade, and what Microsoft has probably been doing in secret since even before then.)

userbinator 5y ago

IMHO this is really another continuation of the "you will own nothing and be happy" trend that has been around for a while, but companies have started to really push in the last few years. Slowly eroding ownership and normalising mass surveillance is their goal, so they can continue to extract more $$$ out of you.

yyyk 5y ago

I have a modest suggestion in the spirit of Apple's move. As we know, there are people in the world who are running meth labs or creating explosives for terrorists in their homes. In order to safeguard the public, we shall have a detachment of dogs which will sniff everyone's houses every once in a while. When they sense something bad they'll alert their handlers and there'll be a manual inspection before reporting to police. There's no risk to privacy here - dogs being dogs can't tell their handlers what they sense. We can also show the training publicly so people can verify the iDogs are trained to only sense drugs or explosives. So it's all even more secure than Apple's iPhone scanning! What says you?

himaraya 5y ago
Agreed, I have nothing to hide & love dogs.
- fsflover 5y ago
  And hate terrorists!
mellavora 5y ago
damn, what if the dog gets excited and barks because I'm dry-aging some of my (fully legally hunted!) wild game? or because the handler accidentally stepped on the dog's tail?
- yyyk 5y ago
  Don't worry, these are well-trained, well-bred and very well-fed iDogs. 'Not eating when not fed by the handler' is part of the basic training. Also, there's a manual verification step where the handlers search your property before reporting to the police. The chances of an error are less than a billion to one. It's worth it to beat the drug dealers and terrorists.
- avnigo 5y ago
  That's why we have the manual human reviewers, you see.

tyingq 5y ago

I wonder if any current or future President might revisit the idea of granting Snowden a pardon. He is is still viewed unfavorably by a fair amount of the US population, but it seems like that's changing with time.

ttyprintk 5y ago
Around here, people view him favorably but are wary because his choices make him look like an agent for Russia. I think it would change only after a pardon.

bhawks 5y ago

Why stop at photos you take? Since we're doing this on device we can just turn the camera on every few minutes and ask an ai if the camera sees something interesting. If it sees that you're in trouble it can start streaming to the authorities. We will finally be safe. By the way, if your phone is off or left at home we will know you're in trouble and send assistance right away. I wish I could say /s.

femto 5y ago

Australia has already shown what the end-game is, with its "The Assistance and Access Act 2018" [1]. It's not illegal to have end-to-end encryption, but it's illegal to deny access to the ends of the encrypted pipe. As an aside, Australia has just implemented the next step: the "Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2021" [2], which makes it legal to hack your device to access the ends of the pipe. Useful if the ends of the pipe are not controlled by a malleable corporation. [1] https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/national-security/lawful-access-telecommunications/data-encryption https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio... [2] https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r6623 https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...

matheusmoreira 5y ago
This is so disgusting.
Tarq0n 5y ago
This actually sounds like the right way to go. Individual, warrant based access is comparable to wiretapping in a way that Apple's dragnet approach is not.
Youden 5y ago
Ah, this old bogeyman. The media drastically overreacted to that act, to the point where the Department of Home Affairs now has an entire page dedicated to addressing the false reporting [0]. The TL;DR is that the act doesn't allow the government to introduce mass surveillance. Section 317ZG [1] expressly forbids any law enforcement request from _having the effect_ of introducing any systemic vulnerability or weakness and _explicitly_ calls out new decryption capabilities as under that umbrella. Your claim that a company can't deny access to the ends of an e2e-encrypted pipe is false. And yes, that new act exists. The government will be able to hack into your devices and take over your accounts _with a warrant_, just like they can break into your house or take money from your bank account _with a warrant_. [0]: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/national-security/lawful-access-telecommunications/myths-assistance-access-act https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio... [1]: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214/s317zg.html http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997...

chx 5y ago

Sigh. You poor fools. I guess us poor fools? I haven't thought the day will come when Apple news brings up very strongly, as a knee jerk reaction, one short part of a one long sentence Hungarian poem indeed called One Sentence On Tyranny. It is a poem many of us know from heart, to remember what was even if many back in Hungary forgot. I fail to convey my emotions here in just a few words but I am incredibly saddened. Anyways, I checked a few translations, they lose some of the power of the original but let me try, the first two lines only for context: [...] you would like to look, but you can only see what Tyranny conjured up for you already forest fire surrounds you fanned into flame from a matchstick you threw down without stamping it out Oh yes, nothing new under the Sun. And it might be too late now. These things have been so much on my mind because I saw an anti masker protest in Vancouver peacefully escorted by police. My mind melted. I remember, remember all too well, it was only 35 years ago when Hungarian police have broken up a protests with batons -- it's called the Battle Of the Elizabeth Bridge to this day. It was a very one sided battle, mind you. And while I don't remember, my parents do when they broke it up with tanks....

LetThereBeLight 5y ago

My question after reading this article is, what can I do as a current iPhone user? Is there a reasonable alternative phone out there that can run the same apps but that isn't effectively controlled by Apple or Google?

askafriend 5y ago
Simple: don't store your photos on Apple's property (iCloud). That's the only time this fingerprinting will affect you. If you store photos locally, then no type of fingerprinting will happen. While you're at it, don't store them on anyone's servers, because they all fingerprint for the same exact reasons. There's no service out there that doesn't do this at some level.
- LetThereBeLight 5y ago
  Sorry, I should have been more clear in my post. I meant to say that, if I no longer want to support Apple (or Google) because of their behavior, are there any reasonable smartphone options available? It seems to me that this is the only way I can protest against what Apple is doing.
  - askafriend 5y ago
    The problem here isn't the hardware. The problem is the location you're choosing to store your photos. If you want to protest what they're doing, then stop storing photos on iCloud which means you need to spend less on iCloud storage. That's the most realistic option.

georgeplusplus 5y ago

Are there any decent open source alternatives out there we can contribute to? A quick search revealed that there is Librem 5, a Linux based smart phone. I would love to hear more about it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5

Lio 5y ago
There’s also Pine Phone. https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

fkfowl3 5y ago

This is what happens when a businessman takes over a founder led company. Soulless and liars are the only the words which comes to my mind.

beezischillin 5y ago

What would happen if in a new paradigm shift multi-nationals decided to use their enormous lobbying power to push back on the government in favor of their users for once instead of only lobbying to screw them over?

BuckRogers 5y ago

IBM gleefully cooperated with the Nazis. It won’t be long until Apple is using this framework to alert the PRC about Chinese dissidents. Just to merely stay in their market. iOS 15 effectively is the point where Apple kicks off the holocaust that they’re going to be responsible for. I hope they enjoy their place in history because they’re earning it. I’ve loved my iPhones, but there’s a warm place in hell waiting for all Apple employees involved in this endeavor. Apple is an enemy more threatening to mankind’s freedoms than Al Qaeda ever could’ve been.

noisy_boy 5y ago

I think 1TB[^] would be enough to hold most people's privacy concerns. [^]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/17/iphone-13-third-week-september-1tb/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/17/iphone-13-third-week-se...

Digit-Al 5y ago

If you hear a loud bang, that will be the RMS smug-o-meter exploding.

stinos 5y ago

So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? Isn't this essentially what might happen with so-called ChatControl in Europe? https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/message-screening/?lang=en https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/message-screening/?la...

GoodJokes 5y ago

Snowden should get an editor or stick to tweets or video interviews.

atok1 5y ago

This is your chance to break free. Please consider switching to an opensource OS. Our freedom depends on it.

Grustaf 5y ago

Edward Snowden just went full Stallman. Take a good idea and ride it over the cliff of sanity. Of course privacy can't be absolute, we live in a society. Be realistic. Focus on evil things. If you think Apple have an evil plan, sure, but most people who object don't even think that. And for a tech spy he seems to not understand tech. "What if some evil regime wants Apple to scan for anti-government propaganda". Well then they won't be using the CSAM system that's for sure, they can just scan the images directly, either on iCloud or on device. Co-opting the CSAM scanner is probably the most impractical way imaginable to spy on Uighur separatists.

nbzso 5y ago
Let me see: Who I will trust more about "security" or "privacy"? Some guy on hackernews, full with well payed Apple employees or renowned spy? Hard thing to do? Right?
- Grustaf 5y ago
  I'm not saying you should "trust" me, or anyone. Just consider the facts: A) - Apple have complete control over the hardware, the OS and all the most popular apps, including Photos and Mail. - They also have complete control over iCloud, which is not encrypted - They can and do scan your photos and emails so that they can classify photos, find possible appointments, emails etc, and now they even OCR your photos. B) - They are now building a very high profile, limited and locked in system that relies on hashes, external databases, a large number of matches, human review etc. Do you really think they would use B if they, the FBI, the Chinese government or whoever, would want to spy on users? For all we know they are already spying, it would be completely trivial to do so. Clearly system B is a complete red herring when it comes to spying. They don't need it.
  - nbzso 5y ago
    The point is not to lose yourself in the technical implementation. Design of the system is corrupt, implementation is done in a way to hide this with layers of complication and false "privacy" for "normal" users. For me and many other people there is difference in knowing that Apple is the only responsible part in a contract and on other hand adding third party private corporation (funded by DOJ with more than 30 million dollars), which will "provide" the hashes and because of the sensitive nature of hashed material nobody will have access for auditing. Nobody in their right mind believed Apple about "privacy". The difference here are that this is intrusion on my property from assumption that I am guilty until proven innocent. A lot of normal people, without technical knowledge can see that this is a big problem.

091234mnbvcxz 5y ago

This whole switch to Linux is not a solution. Privacy advocates need to be like second amendment activists. We need to use their playbook. They raise a big stink about anything, no matter who big or small, that could curtail their rights. No number of Sandy Hook events will result in meaningful changes in laws. Pushing everyone to Linux will eventually lead to all hardware falling under some national security law, allowing hardware to be imported if only they allow certain OSs to be installed on them and boot loaders will be locked. Free market has no impact here, the masses don't care. And privacy supporters are too logical to whip up any type of movement. Till privacy advocates come up with emotional reasons why privacy is absolutely necessary (like grandma is gonna die without it), this is a losing battle.

fsflover 5y ago
> Till privacy advocates come up with emotional reasons why privacy is absolutely necessary (like grandma is gonna die without it), this is a losing battle. They have already come up with good reasons. "Every time you use encryption, you're protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive." -- Bruce Schneier "“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -- Edward Snowden Surveillance harms journalism and activism, making the government too powerful and not accountable. If only activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to protect them. It’s sort of like freedom of speech is necessary not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have nothing to say. > Pushing everyone to Linux will eventually lead to all hardware falling under some national security law I don't see any connection here. Linux is already used on all servers and nothing happens.
no_time 5y ago
The problem is that the NRA is not big because of the people. It is big because of gun companies. Thats why their budget is 20x larger than EFF's. Privacy doesn't move units like gun rights move guns. Until this changes, privacy is a lost cause in the digital world.

theonlybutlet 5y ago

Great to see someone influential framing it this way. At the end of the day, what it's there for doesn't matter and unfortunately way too many of us stumble on this mistake in reasoning.

joelbondurant 5y ago

Big surprise the betacucks in the military institute of communist Karenifornia would do this.