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I don't know where you're trying to go with this comparison. Do you think those guards would have been persecuted if their cameras would have surveilled their p

• nonbirithm 5y ago
  Although I'm more skeptical than the OP, you have to realize: the idea that the majority of society currently accepts is that privacy is less important than protecting children. Are those in opposition to the scanning of personal data willing to argue against the idea that the proliferation of CSAM directly leads to child abuse? Unless there is hard evidence that refutes such a claim, nothing about Apple's policy is going to change. And not only Apple's policy, but the policies of all other tech companies and the governments of dozens of countries throughout the world that compel the creation of those policies and the related laws. Personally, I believe that those policies have good intentions, and that ending them will cause great harm to children on a significant scale.
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    Please don't take this to imply I'm calling you out personally, because as far as I can tell, you're just stating a position you believe is common, not your own position. Almost all child abuse happens at the hands of parents and siblings. The simplest way to prevent it isn't to scan photos on iPhone. Most people at this point have webcams and microphones in their homes. Device vendors could simply make these always on and flag recordings of possible abuse to manually review and send to law enforcement. As far as I can tell, exactly no one thinks we should do this. But it's completely analogous. People who abuse children often have recording devices of some sort near them. Forcing those recording devices to automatically scan and detect abuse in their data streams would almost certainly prevent some amount of abuse. It is trivial to stop any and all crime with a sufficiently invasive police state, provided you redefine covert surveillance and the psychological harm done to people who know they are always being watched as not being crimes. So why do we accept some panopticons and not others? What is the actual difference here? People have a right to privacy and we have a formal process whereby law enforcement need to convince a judge of probable cause and only then can they be surveilled to find evidence against them. It has never been acceptable in American jurisprudence to just surveil everyone in case they might be a criminal. When did that change? Obviously, there is a tradeoff here. We allow people privacy and dominion in their homes. As a result, stronger people who live with weaker people quite often abuse them. Great harm to children and spouses and girlfriends and pets on a significant scale absolutely happens because we allow presumption of innocence and privacy in one's own home. But that has always been considered worth it.
    • nonbirithm 5y ago
      One of the major issues around this policy is the line that is drawn between privacy versus security. Why is invasive scanning of existing data generally accepted but surveillance of one's private space not? I'm thinking it has to do with the idea that "you" are the one that owns "your" device, whose subversion is the cause of a lot of the backlash. But I think that if governments are able to compel companies to not let thir data warehouses become private spaces that allow criminal enterprises to flourish, they would do so. Corporations wouldn't become triggers for outrage if other forces surveil their physical or virtual premises - regulation is expected. They can grow to have too much power, and in order to continue existing they have to cooperate with external forces that keep them in check. The standards of individual liberty seem to be applied differently between individuals' private spaces and corporations. But a lot of times, I think that there isn't an equivalent distinction between a hard drive in one's own room and one out of millions in a remote data center. Exposing a personal hard drive to the internet and breaking down someone's door both carry the possibility of criminal liability, but the former has many more legitimate use cases. It has always been possible to incriminate oneself from a sealed room with only an Internet connection depending on what kind of data you're trafficking, and maybe the possibility of on-device scanning will cause more people to learn of that fact. I believe the misunderstanding is that Apple assumes that the impression they're giving is that only those that consent to allowing the corporation to assist them in their lives will be subjected to that corporation's policies that prohibit the assistance from being criminal in nature, and it's irrelevant if that process is moved to the device. But Apple's assumption was wrong, and many people stopped trusting them. And because of that severe loss of trust in particular, their promises stopped being effective in dismissing counterarguments. Almost everything about this issue revolves around who will be compelled to implement what technological controls by whom else, and about the only things that are being used to refute the worst case scenario are what have essentially become meaningless promises because of the significant loss of trust. But even so, meaningless promises are all that reassure us that any given corporation won't go rogue at any time, regardless of what laws or morals exist, and promising that these features will save children from harm has, up to this point, been a promise that has been accepted and forgotten about. To be clear, I think Apple's strategy is a mistake, and that the scan should be kept off the device. That is from the standpoint of how to effectively hold corporations accountable, who hold a significant amount of power in incentivizing human behavior, be it addictive or criminal. And in the current society where corporations need to know if they're enabling criminals by learning about the nature of their interactions, complete privacy can never be achieved. There will have to be a loss of some amount of privacy at some step in the process, but there is still such a thing as losing too much privacy.
• threshold 5y ago
  No if they oppose this and succeed many children will be abused as a direct consequence, it’s obvious causality so don’t shy away from what is a clear material choice - make a decision and accept responsibility for that, because it says plenty about where your values are at. And the idea that this will progress into a generalized surveillance tool is wild speculation. It might. Yes I do believe this illustrates a similar social dynamic. People here could care less about the extreme suffering these children stand to experience. Email privacy is more important than preventing child rape. Does that sound right to you?