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Perhaps they don't want people to use their devices for child abuse? Radical idea I know.
by Grustaf 5y ago
Perhaps they don't want people to use their devices for child abuse? Radical idea I know.
- sfifs 5y agoThey can insist that if they are in the phone rental business and the ownership of the phone on their balance sheet, not if they're in the phone sales business. If you sell a product, it's pretty much illegal to control what people can and can't do with it. They can still control usage of iCloud which is a service they're renting out. Of course they don't care about CASM to switch their business model to do this legally... And their valuation will crash if their balance sheet expands so much and management would be fired.
- Grustaf 5y agoOf course you can have terms of use for things you sell, I don't know why you would think otherwise. In this case it IS linked to iCloud though, as you probably know. Images are only scanned on their way to iCloud, and they won't be scanned if you don't use iCloud.
- brendoelfrendo 5y agoI don't think anyone who is arguing against this capability, myself included, actually believes that it will only ever be used on photos destined for iCloud, especially if state authorities start pressuring Apple to start scanning everything.
- Grustaf 5y agoThat's because people don't understand how technology works. They think this is some kind of new system that gives Apple new access to things. It's not. They access they have here is nothing compared to what they have always had. They can and do scan all your messages and photos already, locally, for features such as photo classification and making reminders from emails. Apple could spy on anything they want, without this system. And this system is an incredibly impractical way to spy on people. It's also pretty obvious that they wouldn't tell us if they were planning to spy on us, they would just do it. In short: I have no idea if Apple spies on us, but I can say for certain that they will not use this system for it.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoTerms of use are totally different - they allow you to sue a person if they use it againt the terms, and your ability to sue based on them is going to be very limited. Putting in the TOE of a car: " you are not allowed to drive kids in it" will not be enforceable. In this case the company retains direct control over your property, and changed what it does after you bought it and paid for it.
- Grustaf 5y agoI really don’t understand why americans are so obsessed with “my property”. I guess it’s a cultural thing.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoI am not american, and I dont understand this obsession of American companies making of retaining control of items they already don't down, because they sold them. I think having these for-profit busybodies butting in how you can live your life is a great threat to invidividual liberty.
- Grustaf 5y agoHow does this threaten your liberty?
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoYou know how posting nudes gets you banned from social media, or gets your google account banned and you loose access to all your files on Drive? The same will happen with physical devices that you bought - a car, an electric bike, a smart coffee machine. Imagine a car detecting you are smoking dope, or taking an issue with your trip to the abortion clinic. You think it's not gonna happen, its too absurd? I just had to sign a 42 page lisence agreement to ride a bike.
- Grustaf 5y ago
- hypothesis 5y agoIf we’re engaging in straw-man arguments, why don’t they just force such detectors directly in safari? And in your camera feed? That should solve issue even faster, so why stop at half measures?
- Grustaf 5y agoIt's not a straw man to say that Apple is scanning for CSAM because they don't want CSAM. It may be naive or wrong, but it's not a "straw man". The stated reason they do it this way is to protect privacy. Presumably a lot more people would complain if they scanned the camera feed.
- martin_a 5y agoDon't stop there! What about terrorists, drug dealers and the organized crime?! We need to stop those, too!
- ethanbond 5y agoI bet if those crimes were proliferating at the rate that CSAM is, a lot of people would be pursuing more active counter measures
- tremon 5y agoWhat do you mean by CSAM proliferating? Do you have evidence already that CSAM's image database is being used in a much wider scope than Apple is claiming?
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIs there data to show thay CSAM proliferating at a different rate than those crimes?
- ethanbond 5y agoWell it's hard to say how much of the growth is growth in detection/reporting versus growth in underlying crime, but it's worth noting that each transmission of CSAM is considered a separate crime. I.e. even if actual sexual assault remains steady, the nature of the internet (virality and community creation) sort of pushes CSAM transmission upwards. The internet is designed to spread content that people want, CSAM is sadly just that.
- Grustaf 5y agoWe are already trying to stop those, so that's some weird sarcasm. But scanning photos is not a very efficient way to stop drug dealers, they don't tend to take photos of their stash I think.
- fsflover 5y agoIt's not a weird sarcasm, it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp....
- concordDance 5y agoAre they stopping the pictures being taken? Because the actual cloud uploading isn't child abuse, it's 90% the taking and 10% the sharing with other human beings. (Which only applies to the small subset of casm which is child abuse, rather than the majority which is "sexy" selfies)
- Grustaf 5y ago100% of the CSAM they scan for is child abuse.
- cheschire 5y agoYou’re not wrong, it could be as simple as that. What’s got some people up in arms isn’t that. The police in America have proven repeatedly that they will ignore individual freedoms to look indiscriminately for people doing bad things. Apple creates a tool that enables pattern matching without consent. But they promise they won’t use it for more than CSAM, and that only they will hold the keys. Okay so imagine that your HOA enacts a rule they’re now allowed to review all of your purchases by comparing known hashes used by drug lords to determine if you are cooking meth in your basement. And if they find a match, without your knowledge, they will report you to the police who will have a defensible justification for a warrant to come enter your house and look for meth lab stuff. Sounds fine as long as you have nothing worth hiding right? Might as well let them just go through everyone’s house preemptively looking for meth labs and skip the hash checking right? Oh you don’t support that leap? Don’t worry, others do.
- Grustaf 5y agoThe police will only be involved after their scanner has found 30 matches and Apple’s reviewer has manually concluded that it actually is CSAM, so I don’t see how the police is really relevant? If HOA means home owners association, I don’t see the connection. They can’t influence Apple either.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIts the thin end of the wedge argument, and the fact that your property 'the phone' is spying on you and reporting you to the police.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> * Apple’s reviewer has manually concluded that it actually is CSAM* There is no manual review of the image by Apple employees. What is viewed is a derivative image, which is scaled down and blurred. It would be trivial for someone to use legal pornographic images and put it through a NeuralHash collision generator, which upon viewing the scaled down derivative image, would look like CSAM.