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Apple doesn't "sneak in" stuff like this. That's complete bullshit. Could we at least discuss in good faith?

by Bud 5y ago

post_break 5y ago
Well I don't mean by doing it without telling everyone. I mean wait until it dies down, then just be like oh btw 15.X includes CSAM scanning as a change log bulletin.
- haswell 5y ago
  Given the uproar on this change, and the fact that the uproar was big enough to cause this delay, can you imagine the bad press if they come back later and roll this out quietly? Editing to add: I think this will play out more like the butterfly keyboard debacle. They won’t ever really acknowledge how bad the original thing was, but they’ll return to a solution the community finds palatable (server side scanning), and wrap it up in a bow like they did with the “magic keyboard, now on our laptops”.
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    They just need to time it right.
api 5y ago
Google or (worse) Facebook would have just put this in with no press release. My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by throwing them a bone without totally abandoning their privacy stance, hence the drive to put the scanning on the actual device so all your photos don't have to be shared as-is with Apple. That way they can encrypt iCloud but still keep the feds from accusing them (in bad faith) of being a child porn trading platform. The alternative is to keep iCloud unencrypted and scan in the cloud, which is what they and everyone else already does. One of the pieces of feedback they got though is that people are more okay with that than with scanning on the device. People expect that things that go to the cloud are no longer private unless you run some kind of local encryption that you control. The reason they don't care about photos not sent to iCloud is the trading platform angle. It's one thing to let people store shit on their own devices. It's another thing to be a large scale and easy to use secure channel that people can use to share CP. The nightmare scenario for Apple would be to become a de-facto standard in the CP underworld for sharing content. Sure people can use Tor, private VPNs and mesh networks, PGP, or many other things, but that requires a level of technical knowledge that greatly reduces the size of the audience. Maybe a better alternative for Apple would be to add iCloud encryption but to stipulate that any sharing of content disables encryption for the shared content. That way they could scan shared content only. For unshared content iCloud is basically just an encrypted backup.
- simion314 5y ago
  >My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by throwing them a bone You would believe this if you only read/watch Apple PR and ignore reality. The actual reality is that Apple always collaborates with all governments. The reality is that Apple did not announce any new end to end encryption that would use this feature and did not promise such a feature.
  - api 5y ago
    Apple isn't altruistic, but I do think they want to have strong privacy. They cooperate with governments to what seems to be the minimum extent required to do business in a given country. They can't change governments. In China and other more authoritarian nations that means cooperating a lot. If you don't you do no business in China. In the USA they seem to be looking for a new minimum level of cooperation, or trying to enhance privacy a little without moving the needle. In any case this particular strategy looks like a failure in the market. They might re-engineer it or backpedal or just toss the whole idea of encrypting iCloud.
    - simion314 5y ago
      >Apple isn't altruistic, but I do think they want to have strong privacy. Maybe if you define privacy that Google and FB do not track you and only Apple do. You open an application on your Mac and the event was sent insecure to Apple , find a definition of privacy that is not contradictory with what Apple was doing.
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  what apple are trying to do is minimise damage to their bottom line from bad PR. At the end of the day, more people must realise that corporations are beholden to one thing - money. Morality barely matters and legality is something easily skirted around with the right legal argument. Apple, google etc with continue working with governments so long as their profit can flow from those countries.
- nick__m 5y ago
  If it was the trading platform angle, could they just scan on share or am I missing something ?
npteljes 5y ago
I think OP referred to the finding that Apple already rolled out parts of the detection thing https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/p6hsoh/p_appleneuralhash2onnx_reverseengineered_apple/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/p6hsoh/p_a...
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Isn't this the bad part? Like... it being there is the problem, not apple specifically using it for child porn detection. Right?
  - macksd 5y ago
    Correct. If we could magically end the rape of children and stop the propagation of images of such, I think we'd all be on board. But when a system would realistically just push most of it elsewhere and violate a bunch of innocent people's privacy, people get nervous. It's like being asked to have an invasive, detailed scan of your body shown to TSA personnel (and recorded) when you fly. The motive is apparently to prevent violence. But there were still incidents on flights when that was being done. It wouldn't have caught the box cutters on 9/11. The stated motive ceases to be part of the equation for me.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Pushing it elsewhere is still a win. You don’t want this to have easy cover. Keep in mind FB reported close to 17M pieces of CSAM last year. So if having the ability to detect it was such a deterrent, why are their numbers so high?
      - sbuk 5y ago
        Because the don't tell anyone what they are scanning?
        azinman2 5y ago
        They literally publicize these numbers. It’s not like I somehow know this FB secret. Every cloud provider scans, except Apple.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yummypaint 5y ago
Their practice of suripticiously pushing updates to older phones to kill the battery life would seem to fit that bill. Their updates aren't open either, people just take them at their word. If the law or EULA doesn't ouright prohibit them from doing something it's prudent to assume they already are.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
They were trying to make a small press release about it and be done hoping no one would notice. Instead everyone got mad and called them out on it. That is where they attempted to sneak it in. Not everything is black and white and the terminology is sufficient to describe the situation.
- azinman2 5y ago
  A press release is the exact opposite of sneaking something in.
- djrogers 5y ago
  Wait a sec - this wasn’t a ‘small press release’, it was a huge one, made several months in advance of the feature launching, accompanied by a bunch of interviews with execs. If you look at the tone of all of it, they also honestly felt this was the most privacy preserving way to do CSAM scanning - likely so they can enable E2EE on everything iCloud. What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to it.
  - sneak 5y ago
    > likely so they can enable E2EE on everything iCloud. Refers to facts not in evidence. Additionally, they have previously voluntarily declined to enable e2e on systems to aid government surveillance. This is baseless speculation, and, given what we know about Apple's history with e2e, not only baseless but actually unlikely.
  - Zak 5y ago
    What they got very very wrong is the idea that spyware running on the user's device is the most privacy preserving way to scan for illegal content hosted on their servers. Apple has not announced E2EE for files stored on iCloud. If that is their intent, they likely would have had a somewhat improved public response by announcing it at the same time as the on-device spyware.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    > What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to it. What they got very wrong is that this fundamentally changes the nature of iPhones -- they are no longer user agents; in fact, they're actively scanning user data on behalf of another party. That change doesn't just make people feel uncomfortable, it opens the door for untold myriads of abuses. It's one thing if iCloud servers scan user data - those servers never were assumed to be user agents. It's entirely different when user-owned devices do this.
behnamoh 5y ago
> Could we at least discuss in good faith? I'm afraid good faith is not gonna protect your privacy.

Apple doesn't "sneak in" stuff like this. That's complete bullshit. Could we at least discuss in good faith?

by Bud 5y ago

Apple doesn't "sneak in" stuff like this. That's complete bullshit. Could we at least discuss in good faith?

Well I don't mean by doing it without telling everyone. I mean wait until it dies down, then just be like oh btw 15.X includes CSAM scanning as a change log bulletin.

haswell 5y ago
Given the uproar on this change, and the fact that the uproar was big enough to cause this delay, can you imagine the bad press if they come back later and roll this out quietly? Editing to add: I think this will play out more like the butterfly keyboard debacle. They won’t ever really acknowledge how bad the original thing was, but they’ll return to a solution the community finds palatable (server side scanning), and wrap it up in a bow like they did with the “magic keyboard, now on our laptops”.
- vxNsr 5y ago
  They just need to time it right.

api 5y ago

Google or (worse) Facebook would have just put this in with no press release. My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by throwing them a bone without totally abandoning their privacy stance, hence the drive to put the scanning on the actual device so all your photos don't have to be shared as-is with Apple. That way they can encrypt iCloud but still keep the feds from accusing them (in bad faith) of being a child porn trading platform. The alternative is to keep iCloud unencrypted and scan in the cloud, which is what they and everyone else already does. One of the pieces of feedback they got though is that people are more okay with that than with scanning on the device. People expect that things that go to the cloud are no longer private unless you run some kind of local encryption that you control. The reason they don't care about photos not sent to iCloud is the trading platform angle. It's one thing to let people store shit on their own devices. It's another thing to be a large scale and easy to use secure channel that people can use to share CP. The nightmare scenario for Apple would be to become a de-facto standard in the CP underworld for sharing content. Sure people can use Tor, private VPNs and mesh networks, PGP, or many other things, but that requires a level of technical knowledge that greatly reduces the size of the audience. Maybe a better alternative for Apple would be to add iCloud encryption but to stipulate that any sharing of content disables encryption for the shared content. That way they could scan shared content only. For unshared content iCloud is basically just an encrypted backup.

simion314 5y ago
>My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by throwing them a bone You would believe this if you only read/watch Apple PR and ignore reality. The actual reality is that Apple always collaborates with all governments. The reality is that Apple did not announce any new end to end encryption that would use this feature and did not promise such a feature.
- api 5y ago
  Apple isn't altruistic, but I do think they want to have strong privacy. They cooperate with governments to what seems to be the minimum extent required to do business in a given country. They can't change governments. In China and other more authoritarian nations that means cooperating a lot. If you don't you do no business in China. In the USA they seem to be looking for a new minimum level of cooperation, or trying to enhance privacy a little without moving the needle. In any case this particular strategy looks like a failure in the market. They might re-engineer it or backpedal or just toss the whole idea of encrypting iCloud.
  - simion314 5y ago
    >Apple isn't altruistic, but I do think they want to have strong privacy. Maybe if you define privacy that Google and FB do not track you and only Apple do. You open an application on your Mac and the event was sent insecure to Apple , find a definition of privacy that is not contradictory with what Apple was doing.
eldaisfish 5y ago
what apple are trying to do is minimise damage to their bottom line from bad PR. At the end of the day, more people must realise that corporations are beholden to one thing - money. Morality barely matters and legality is something easily skirted around with the right legal argument. Apple, google etc with continue working with governments so long as their profit can flow from those countries.
nick__m 5y ago
If it was the trading platform angle, could they just scan on share or am I missing something ?

npteljes 5y ago

I think OP referred to the finding that Apple already rolled out parts of the detection thing https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/p6hsoh/p_appleneuralhash2onnx_reverseengineered_apple/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/p6hsoh/p_a...

spywaregorilla 5y ago
Isn't this the bad part? Like... it being there is the problem, not apple specifically using it for child porn detection. Right?
- macksd 5y ago
  Correct. If we could magically end the rape of children and stop the propagation of images of such, I think we'd all be on board. But when a system would realistically just push most of it elsewhere and violate a bunch of innocent people's privacy, people get nervous. It's like being asked to have an invasive, detailed scan of your body shown to TSA personnel (and recorded) when you fly. The motive is apparently to prevent violence. But there were still incidents on flights when that was being done. It wouldn't have caught the box cutters on 9/11. The stated motive ceases to be part of the equation for me.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Pushing it elsewhere is still a win. You don’t want this to have easy cover. Keep in mind FB reported close to 17M pieces of CSAM last year. So if having the ability to detect it was such a deterrent, why are their numbers so high?
    - sbuk 5y ago
      Because the don't tell anyone what they are scanning?
      - azinman2 5y ago
        They literally publicize these numbers. It’s not like I somehow know this FB secret. Every cloud provider scans, except Apple.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yummypaint 5y ago

Their practice of suripticiously pushing updates to older phones to kill the battery life would seem to fit that bill. Their updates aren't open either, people just take them at their word. If the law or EULA doesn't ouright prohibit them from doing something it's prudent to assume they already are.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

They were trying to make a small press release about it and be done hoping no one would notice. Instead everyone got mad and called them out on it. That is where they attempted to sneak it in. Not everything is black and white and the terminology is sufficient to describe the situation.

azinman2 5y ago
A press release is the exact opposite of sneaking something in.
djrogers 5y ago
Wait a sec - this wasn’t a ‘small press release’, it was a huge one, made several months in advance of the feature launching, accompanied by a bunch of interviews with execs. If you look at the tone of all of it, they also honestly felt this was the most privacy preserving way to do CSAM scanning - likely so they can enable E2EE on everything iCloud. What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to it.
- sneak 5y ago
  > likely so they can enable E2EE on everything iCloud. Refers to facts not in evidence. Additionally, they have previously voluntarily declined to enable e2e on systems to aid government surveillance. This is baseless speculation, and, given what we know about Apple's history with e2e, not only baseless but actually unlikely.
- Zak 5y ago
  What they got very very wrong is the idea that spyware running on the user's device is the most privacy preserving way to scan for illegal content hosted on their servers. Apple has not announced E2EE for files stored on iCloud. If that is their intent, they likely would have had a somewhat improved public response by announcing it at the same time as the on-device spyware.
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  > What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to it. What they got very wrong is that this fundamentally changes the nature of iPhones -- they are no longer user agents; in fact, they're actively scanning user data on behalf of another party. That change doesn't just make people feel uncomfortable, it opens the door for untold myriads of abuses. It's one thing if iCloud servers scan user data - those servers never were assumed to be user agents. It's entirely different when user-owned devices do this.

behnamoh 5y ago

> Could we at least discuss in good faith? I'm afraid good faith is not gonna protect your privacy.