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Okay, so basically they are just sort of pinky-swearing that your iCloud photos are encrypted on iCloud, but not in any way that prevents Apple or the governmen
by philwelch 5y ago
Okay, so basically they are just sort of pinky-swearing that your iCloud photos are encrypted on iCloud, but not in any way that prevents Apple or the government from decrypting them anyway.
This raises the followup question of "why bother scanning the images on-device?", but I can infer two fairly obvious answers. First, the encryption still keeps AWS/Azure/GCP from seeing my photos. Second, and more cynically, they'd have to pay to do computation in the cloud; on-device computation is free to them.
> This undermines the credibility of those who are claiming, without evidence, that this clientside CSAM scanning is a prelude to launching E2E for iCloud data.
I agree; this is consistent with my initial point of confusion. Thanks!
- GeekyBear 5y ago> Okay, so basically they are just sort of pinky-swearing that your iCloud photos are encrypted on iCloud, but not in any way that prevents Apple or the government from decrypting them anyway. How do you imagine that Google and Microsoft are able to scan the entire contents of your account? They can all read the data on their servers >This raises the followup question of "why bother scanning the images on-device? Because running the scan on device and encrypting the results protects users from having their account associated with the inevitable false positives that are going to crop up. Apple can't decrypt the scan results your device produces until the threshold of 30 matching images is reached. If someone issues a warrant to Apple for every account that has a single match, they can honestly report that they don't have that information. Google and Microsoft give you no such protection. Any data held on their server is wide open for misuse by anyone who can issue a warrant.
- philwelch 5y agoI’m not arguing with anyone or expressing any opinion.