3 ms·
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 wi
by 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 agoApple 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 agowhat 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 agoIf it was the trading platform angle, could they just scan on share or am I missing something ?