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Funny too as both Alphabet & Facebook do CSAM Detection. Believe iOS only uploads the neural-hash if & before the photos are uploaded to iCloud. https://suppor

Funny too as both Alphabet & Facebook do CSAM Detection. Believe iOS only uploads the neural-hash if & before the photos are uploaded to iCloud. https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/10330933?hl=en https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/1033093... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/04/google-child-abuse-ncmec-internet-watch-gmail https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/04/google-ch... https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/facebook-adds-new-tools-to-stop-sharing-search-for-child-sexual-abuse-material-7203161/ https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...

slownews45 5y ago
Right - but without getting into the merits of apple's approach - what is the support for this claim that apple has worse reputation here than facebook etc? I see the links to EFF groups which have (repeatedly) gone crazy over this. But the broader public? Are we even clear that the public doesn't like the new features (snitching on porn going to kids / CSAM detection)? These types of things tend to be pretty politically popular. In other words, if govt does get involved - will it actually block apple from blocking porn sent to children to help prevent apple from "destroying" their users trust? How does that even work politically? I get the HN crowd is majorly against this in aggregate - but that is not the general public (and obviously not all HN folks are making the kinds of claims we are seeing get upvoted here - destroyed all trust, committing felonies etc).
- haswell 5y ago
  IMO, the degree of violation has a lot to do with the history of each of these companies up to today. Drawing a somewhat crude analogy, if a person is a serial cheater in their relationships, and they are known for such cheating, and they don't really claim to be anything but a cheater, it doesn't really surprise anyone when they cheat. If someone agrees to be in a relationship with such a person with the full knowledge that they tend to cheat, that person cheats, no one is very surprised. On the other hand, if someone is known as "generally a standup individual", and they're generally seen as trustworthy, reliable and faithful, and someone starts a relationship with that person, the degree of betrayal when that "trustworthy" person cheats is much greater than the betrayal of the serial cheater. Basically, Google/Facebook haven't built their business on claiming to care about privacy. Apple has. Even if Apple does exactly the same things that Google/Facebook are doing, it's a greater betrayal.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    Interesting - the sales numbers for the new iphone will test these claims very concretely indeed given this massive betrayal! Either they will flop as people reject apple for this betrayal, or they may be amazing if it turns out these claims of worse than google and facebook are totally false.
    - haswell 5y ago
      You seem to have concluded that sales numbers somehow change the nature of what Apple is doing here. Good sales numbers would be a strong signal that users don't care (or don't understand). This doesn't change the fundamental issues with these changes.
      - slownews45 5y ago
        We are getting lots of claims that apple has "destroyed" it's reputation. Other comments say that apple has "destroyed" is brand. This is a very significant set of claims, because apple's brand is KEY to what apple offers, what they charge, and what they sell. In other words - $X in parts cost $Y with the apple brand on it - because of users trust in apple. This is why brand surveys are done. You can see that brands (alone) make a huge difference in pricing / sales power vs basic functionality (sometimes ridiculously so in things like handbags). You are making my point for me. It is possible - very possible - that despite the outrage on HN at these efforts around child porn, the demands that govt criminally prosecute apple etc, that in actual fact users may not care or may LIKE these types of features, and that similarly, govt may not prosecute apple for the supposedly felonies they are committing but will LIKE what they are doing here and thank them for it. In the end apple may not have "destroyed" users trust so that they are seen as worse than facebook (!!) but may continue to be trusted (at least as much as facebook - which is NOT AT ALL), and be able to sell products at a premium etc. When you say Apple is worse than facebook - that is a VERY strong claim. Do folks on HN not understand this? When folks claim apple is committing felonies those are strong claims. So you need some strong evidence. Apple is a business - they may decide they want to take an anti-child porn stance. Is this bad for business? We will see. They will make the argument I'm sure that they will continue to do privacy as well - but the balance there is different than what HN wants, but may be fine by users. It just gets a bit tiring hearing that apple is destroyed (which comes up in lots of ways) when my own read is they are long way from being destroyed.
haswell 5y ago
While some folks have legitimate concerns about any scanning, the majority of pushback isn't about the fact that scanning is occurring. It's about the fact that the scanning occurs locally on your device, which is meaningfully different, and rightly raises a million and one concerns about the future of such a feature. The pushback is about the continued erosion of boundaries between what is "mine" and what is in Apple's purview. Questions/criticisms about security theater aside, this is the difference between the TSA looking in my bags when I get to the airport vs. the TSA having the ability to look in all of my suitcases while I'm still at home. One might immediately respond "but they can only look when you intend to take that bag directly to the airport to fly", to which I say "it's really fucking creepy that they can look in my bag while it's still sitting in my living room". This is not equivalent to existing server-side scanning.
- azinman2 5y ago
  But it’s not “scanning” on your device. It’s uploading a hash at the same time as the photo, and the server then does additional work to determine if it’s a match or not. Scanning implies you’re going over all my files with some frequency and then acting upon some violation. Here the system is designed so the device doesn’t know when the server has found a match or not.
  - haswell 5y ago
    > It’s uploading a hash And where did that hash come from?
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Your device computed it during the upload process.
      - haswell 5y ago
        And that computation is something that did not exist prior to the introduction of this feature, nor is that computation useful for anything other than the operation of this feature. You can split hairs over terminology and call this "scanning" or "analysis" or "inspection", but the end result is the same. Your device is now computing information with the sole intent of using that information to make a judgement about the content you're uploading and about you/your account. Without that "scan/inspection/analysis", the server-side process can't do anything on its own.
GeekyBear 5y ago
Even more funny, as Apple's method of scanning the photos you upload to it's online server is much more private than Google or Facebook's method. Apple can't see the results of the scans until a threshold of 30 matches is reported by your device. To protect against false positives, Apple's servers have no idea a single match has occurred until you cross that threshold. Google and Facebook see the results of each individual CSAM scan performed on their server and retain that data where it's open to misuse by anyone who can issue a subpoena. We've seen Google's data horde about everyone lead to abuse before. >Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arrested-innocent-man-murder-using-Google-location-data.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

slownews45 5y ago

Right - but without getting into the merits of apple's approach - what is the support for this claim that apple has worse reputation here than facebook etc? I see the links to EFF groups which have (repeatedly) gone crazy over this. But the broader public? Are we even clear that the public doesn't like the new features (snitching on porn going to kids / CSAM detection)? These types of things tend to be pretty politically popular. In other words, if govt does get involved - will it actually block apple from blocking porn sent to children to help prevent apple from "destroying" their users trust? How does that even work politically? I get the HN crowd is majorly against this in aggregate - but that is not the general public (and obviously not all HN folks are making the kinds of claims we are seeing get upvoted here - destroyed all trust, committing felonies etc).

haswell 5y ago
IMO, the degree of violation has a lot to do with the history of each of these companies up to today. Drawing a somewhat crude analogy, if a person is a serial cheater in their relationships, and they are known for such cheating, and they don't really claim to be anything but a cheater, it doesn't really surprise anyone when they cheat. If someone agrees to be in a relationship with such a person with the full knowledge that they tend to cheat, that person cheats, no one is very surprised. On the other hand, if someone is known as "generally a standup individual", and they're generally seen as trustworthy, reliable and faithful, and someone starts a relationship with that person, the degree of betrayal when that "trustworthy" person cheats is much greater than the betrayal of the serial cheater. Basically, Google/Facebook haven't built their business on claiming to care about privacy. Apple has. Even if Apple does exactly the same things that Google/Facebook are doing, it's a greater betrayal.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Interesting - the sales numbers for the new iphone will test these claims very concretely indeed given this massive betrayal! Either they will flop as people reject apple for this betrayal, or they may be amazing if it turns out these claims of worse than google and facebook are totally false.
  - haswell 5y ago
    You seem to have concluded that sales numbers somehow change the nature of what Apple is doing here. Good sales numbers would be a strong signal that users don't care (or don't understand). This doesn't change the fundamental issues with these changes.
    - slownews45 5y ago
      We are getting lots of claims that apple has "destroyed" it's reputation. Other comments say that apple has "destroyed" is brand. This is a very significant set of claims, because apple's brand is KEY to what apple offers, what they charge, and what they sell. In other words - $X in parts cost $Y with the apple brand on it - because of users trust in apple. This is why brand surveys are done. You can see that brands (alone) make a huge difference in pricing / sales power vs basic functionality (sometimes ridiculously so in things like handbags). You are making my point for me. It is possible - very possible - that despite the outrage on HN at these efforts around child porn, the demands that govt criminally prosecute apple etc, that in actual fact users may not care or may LIKE these types of features, and that similarly, govt may not prosecute apple for the supposedly felonies they are committing but will LIKE what they are doing here and thank them for it. In the end apple may not have "destroyed" users trust so that they are seen as worse than facebook (!!) but may continue to be trusted (at least as much as facebook - which is NOT AT ALL), and be able to sell products at a premium etc. When you say Apple is worse than facebook - that is a VERY strong claim. Do folks on HN not understand this? When folks claim apple is committing felonies those are strong claims. So you need some strong evidence. Apple is a business - they may decide they want to take an anti-child porn stance. Is this bad for business? We will see. They will make the argument I'm sure that they will continue to do privacy as well - but the balance there is different than what HN wants, but may be fine by users. It just gets a bit tiring hearing that apple is destroyed (which comes up in lots of ways) when my own read is they are long way from being destroyed.

haswell 5y ago

While some folks have legitimate concerns about any scanning, the majority of pushback isn't about the fact that scanning is occurring. It's about the fact that the scanning occurs locally on your device, which is meaningfully different, and rightly raises a million and one concerns about the future of such a feature. The pushback is about the continued erosion of boundaries between what is "mine" and what is in Apple's purview. Questions/criticisms about security theater aside, this is the difference between the TSA looking in my bags when I get to the airport vs. the TSA having the ability to look in all of my suitcases while I'm still at home. One might immediately respond "but they can only look when you intend to take that bag directly to the airport to fly", to which I say "it's really fucking creepy that they can look in my bag while it's still sitting in my living room". This is not equivalent to existing server-side scanning.

azinman2 5y ago
But it’s not “scanning” on your device. It’s uploading a hash at the same time as the photo, and the server then does additional work to determine if it’s a match or not. Scanning implies you’re going over all my files with some frequency and then acting upon some violation. Here the system is designed so the device doesn’t know when the server has found a match or not.
- haswell 5y ago
  > It’s uploading a hash And where did that hash come from?
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Your device computed it during the upload process.
    - haswell 5y ago
      And that computation is something that did not exist prior to the introduction of this feature, nor is that computation useful for anything other than the operation of this feature. You can split hairs over terminology and call this "scanning" or "analysis" or "inspection", but the end result is the same. Your device is now computing information with the sole intent of using that information to make a judgement about the content you're uploading and about you/your account. Without that "scan/inspection/analysis", the server-side process can't do anything on its own.

GeekyBear 5y ago

Even more funny, as Apple's method of scanning the photos you upload to it's online server is much more private than Google or Facebook's method. Apple can't see the results of the scans until a threshold of 30 matches is reported by your device. To protect against false positives, Apple's servers have no idea a single match has occurred until you cross that threshold. Google and Facebook see the results of each individual CSAM scan performed on their server and retain that data where it's open to misuse by anyone who can issue a subpoena. We've seen Google's data horde about everyone lead to abuse before. >Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arrested-innocent-man-murder-using-Google-location-data.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...