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Yeah, they absolutely were not scanning photos and anyone with basic knowledge of how hashing works should know that. I was really disappointed with some of the

Yeah, they absolutely were not scanning photos and anyone with basic knowledge of how hashing works should know that. I was really disappointed with some of the reactions a saw coming from this community, which totally lacked any nuance or acknowledgment of how serious the issue of child abuse is.

ericd 5y ago
How is running a detection algorithm on one’s photos not “scanning” them?
- dsomers 5y ago
  It’s a bit of a stretch to say generating a hash from a file is scanning. Most computer science terms like this are metaphors, but when I create a scan with a ‘scanner’ I can create an exact copy of what was scanned. Since creating a hash from a file is a one way process that you cannot reproduce the original file from the hash output, I would not call this a scan. All you can do is match to known child porn files. But yes, go ahead, make more pedantic excuses on why we should protect people that hold child porn.
  - ericd 5y ago
    It’s not the creation of the hash of a single file that’s the “scanning” here, the scanning is the act of doing that to all of your files and looking for a match. Scanning is just looking over something for something specific. Scanning a hard drive isn’t copying it, nor is scanning the horizon. In the case of a scanner, I suppose it’s probably called that because it moves over a page with a bright light and camera to find the dark bits. There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection using a sort of hash made out of the image features detected. The output of a neural net run on an image is also a sort of hash in a (maybe) semantically meaningful vector space. And then you can look for similar or nearby vectors. This isn’t just useful for finding one type of image. So, in case you didn’t realize, and you’re actually arguing in good faith, no one is arguing against this because they want to defend sex offenders, so you can leave that out in the future, unless you want to seem disingenuous. It’s because it makes it easy to create a population-wide dragnet for other things. It’s not hard to apply something similar to find photos taken at a protest, for example. Or pictures of a specific person you happened to meet. Anyway, have a good one.
    - dsomers 5y ago
      > There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection using a sort of hash made out of the image features detected. The output of a neural net run on an image is also a sort of hash in a (maybe) semantically meaningful vector space. And then you can look for similar or nearby vectors. This isn’t just useful for finding one type of image. What's the point you're trying to get at here. I think it's well understood that there can be false positives -- but can you tell me at what rate of false positives it makes this type of child abuse detection unjustified? Also can you tell me what rate Apples system would cause a false positive. If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make. I understand it's unpleasant for that one person, but I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop. > It’s because it makes it easy to create a population-wide dragnet for other things. It’s not hard to apply something similar to find photos taken at a protest, for example. This is in my opinion where thinking of people on your side is wrong and fundamentally dealing with these hard and nuanced issues on the wrong conceptual level. If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that. If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet. The thing that you're fundamentally missing the point on, in my opinion, is that the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest. The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts. Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Boy, there's a number of misconceptions here. I was considering not responding, but you're so wrong here that I just can't walk away and let you continue to spread this kind of blatantly wrong handwaving. > If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make. How do you know the false positive rate yet? Not only has Apple not implemented it yet, but people have shown that a. NeuralHash can correlate two completely unrelated, undoctored images b. Hash collisions are be manually designed with minimal effort and changes to the source image You're pulling this hypothetical figure out of thin air, it may as well be one in a hundred or one in a trillion. > I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop. That's not the problem here. If people want to continue to store photos of child exploitation on their iPhone, they can do it with the flip of a switch. Once you disable iCloud, Apple stops client-side scanning altogether. That arguement is a whole lot of bark with no bite, and unless Apple did the unthinkable (eg. store hashes for every photo you ever took regardless of it's status on iCloud), it's never going to hold water. > If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that. Oh, like they already[0] do[1]? iMessage has been wiretapped since 2013, it's an open secret at this point that Apple is deep in bed with domestic intelligence agencies. Denying this is just refusing to acknowledge a truth that has reared it's ugly head again and again and again. > If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet. Countries like China, who demanded that Apple give them complete control over their domestic data[2], a request that Apple happily complied with? If they give foreign markets complete control over iPhone data in their respective countries, imagine for a moment how trustworthy their behavior is in the United States, the same country that decides if they're a monopoly or not and sets their tax rates. > the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest If you think that's what they care about then you're missing the point entirely too. People aren't paranoid that they're going to be thrown in jail for legal action, that's frankly silly. What the United States wants is two things: your trust and your data. They could care less if you're cooking drugs on your property, selling weapons illegally or, in many cases, exploiting children. If they actually cared about those things, they'd divert some of the national budget to addressing those issues. Instead, they take that money and invest it in surveillance. Billions of dollars get poured into black budgets every year, with margins that constantly expand. The NSA regularly backdoors encryption standards, the FBI regularly designs exploits and incorporates them into US infrastructure. If any of our surveillance programs want to backdoor an iPhone or introduce vulnerabilities into iPhones, Apple has no recourse. > The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts. What keeps them from doing that is that it's a pointless, fruitless endeavor to try and criminalize their entire nation. It wouldn't be hard to arrest the majority of US Citizens, it would just be expensive and time-consuming. A much more appealing effort is to keep tabs on everything you do, everywhere you go and everyone you talk to. That way, if you become a legitimate threat to the state they can zero you before you cause any real damage. Make no mistake, every government is only out to save their own skin. You may disagree with it, or find it silly, but that's realpolitik for you. > Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government. Finally, your first reasonable argument (and it's a concession to the point the other commenter was making in the first place). There is no way that we're living in a world where our government lacks the competence or resources to effectively monitor us at every corner. The reason why this concerns people is that it allows governments to collect data on what kinds of photos their population has saved/synced with the cloud. Apple is given a black-box list of irreversible image signatures that the government themselves consider harmful, and there is literally zero transparency that goes into this process. We have quite literally no idea how any of this works, and have no way to verify that it isn't being abused. Your trust in Apple and the US Government has to be unreasonably high to confidently say that this won't be abused in some way. [0] https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-message-apps-are-the-most-fbi-proof/ https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-me... [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-master-key-when-it-comes-to-icloud-security-privacy/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-mast... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
bratwurst3000 5y ago
They are Not scanning the photos But if there is a positive scan of the hash of a photo then the photo will be send to a human to check. Now with a certain error rate it is sure that humans working at apple will see privat photos that don’t have child pornography in them .
- dsomers 5y ago
  What are we talking here, 1 in 1 billion. I just can’t care that much unless there’s real evidence that the error rate is really high.
  - bratwurst3000 5y ago
    I dont know the error rate of image recognition but it is certainly more than one in a million. More 1-10%. But i dont want to talk the idea of apple down. I am okey with them scanning THEIR servers for childporn. As long as the keep away from MY phone.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  Three positive matches to known child pornography. The chance of that happening in the real world is astronomically small.

ericd 5y ago

How is running a detection algorithm on one’s photos not “scanning” them?

dsomers 5y ago
It’s a bit of a stretch to say generating a hash from a file is scanning. Most computer science terms like this are metaphors, but when I create a scan with a ‘scanner’ I can create an exact copy of what was scanned. Since creating a hash from a file is a one way process that you cannot reproduce the original file from the hash output, I would not call this a scan. All you can do is match to known child porn files. But yes, go ahead, make more pedantic excuses on why we should protect people that hold child porn.
- ericd 5y ago
  It’s not the creation of the hash of a single file that’s the “scanning” here, the scanning is the act of doing that to all of your files and looking for a match. Scanning is just looking over something for something specific. Scanning a hard drive isn’t copying it, nor is scanning the horizon. In the case of a scanner, I suppose it’s probably called that because it moves over a page with a bright light and camera to find the dark bits. There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection using a sort of hash made out of the image features detected. The output of a neural net run on an image is also a sort of hash in a (maybe) semantically meaningful vector space. And then you can look for similar or nearby vectors. This isn’t just useful for finding one type of image. So, in case you didn’t realize, and you’re actually arguing in good faith, no one is arguing against this because they want to defend sex offenders, so you can leave that out in the future, unless you want to seem disingenuous. It’s because it makes it easy to create a population-wide dragnet for other things. It’s not hard to apply something similar to find photos taken at a protest, for example. Or pictures of a specific person you happened to meet. Anyway, have a good one.
  - dsomers 5y ago
    > There are types of hashes that aren’t for finding exact matches. My thesis in school way back when was building something for image near-duplicate detection using a sort of hash made out of the image features detected. The output of a neural net run on an image is also a sort of hash in a (maybe) semantically meaningful vector space. And then you can look for similar or nearby vectors. This isn’t just useful for finding one type of image. What's the point you're trying to get at here. I think it's well understood that there can be false positives -- but can you tell me at what rate of false positives it makes this type of child abuse detection unjustified? Also can you tell me what rate Apples system would cause a false positive. If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make. I understand it's unpleasant for that one person, but I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop. > It’s because it makes it easy to create a population-wide dragnet for other things. It’s not hard to apply something similar to find photos taken at a protest, for example. This is in my opinion where thinking of people on your side is wrong and fundamentally dealing with these hard and nuanced issues on the wrong conceptual level. If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that. If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet. The thing that you're fundamentally missing the point on, in my opinion, is that the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest. The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts. Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Boy, there's a number of misconceptions here. I was considering not responding, but you're so wrong here that I just can't walk away and let you continue to spread this kind of blatantly wrong handwaving. > If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make. How do you know the false positive rate yet? Not only has Apple not implemented it yet, but people have shown that a. NeuralHash can correlate two completely unrelated, undoctored images b. Hash collisions are be manually designed with minimal effort and changes to the source image You're pulling this hypothetical figure out of thin air, it may as well be one in a hundred or one in a trillion. > I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop. That's not the problem here. If people want to continue to store photos of child exploitation on their iPhone, they can do it with the flip of a switch. Once you disable iCloud, Apple stops client-side scanning altogether. That arguement is a whole lot of bark with no bite, and unless Apple did the unthinkable (eg. store hashes for every photo you ever took regardless of it's status on iCloud), it's never going to hold water. > If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that. Oh, like they already[0] do[1]? iMessage has been wiretapped since 2013, it's an open secret at this point that Apple is deep in bed with domestic intelligence agencies. Denying this is just refusing to acknowledge a truth that has reared it's ugly head again and again and again. > If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet. Countries like China, who demanded that Apple give them complete control over their domestic data[2], a request that Apple happily complied with? If they give foreign markets complete control over iPhone data in their respective countries, imagine for a moment how trustworthy their behavior is in the United States, the same country that decides if they're a monopoly or not and sets their tax rates. > the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest If you think that's what they care about then you're missing the point entirely too. People aren't paranoid that they're going to be thrown in jail for legal action, that's frankly silly. What the United States wants is two things: your trust and your data. They could care less if you're cooking drugs on your property, selling weapons illegally or, in many cases, exploiting children. If they actually cared about those things, they'd divert some of the national budget to addressing those issues. Instead, they take that money and invest it in surveillance. Billions of dollars get poured into black budgets every year, with margins that constantly expand. The NSA regularly backdoors encryption standards, the FBI regularly designs exploits and incorporates them into US infrastructure. If any of our surveillance programs want to backdoor an iPhone or introduce vulnerabilities into iPhones, Apple has no recourse. > The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts. What keeps them from doing that is that it's a pointless, fruitless endeavor to try and criminalize their entire nation. It wouldn't be hard to arrest the majority of US Citizens, it would just be expensive and time-consuming. A much more appealing effort is to keep tabs on everything you do, everywhere you go and everyone you talk to. That way, if you become a legitimate threat to the state they can zero you before you cause any real damage. Make no mistake, every government is only out to save their own skin. You may disagree with it, or find it silly, but that's realpolitik for you. > Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government. Finally, your first reasonable argument (and it's a concession to the point the other commenter was making in the first place). There is no way that we're living in a world where our government lacks the competence or resources to effectively monitor us at every corner. The reason why this concerns people is that it allows governments to collect data on what kinds of photos their population has saved/synced with the cloud. Apple is given a black-box list of irreversible image signatures that the government themselves consider harmful, and there is literally zero transparency that goes into this process. We have quite literally no idea how any of this works, and have no way to verify that it isn't being abused. Your trust in Apple and the US Government has to be unreasonably high to confidently say that this won't be abused in some way. [0] https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-message-apps-are-the-most-fbi-proof/ https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-me... [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-master-key-when-it-comes-to-icloud-security-privacy/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-mast... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insight-idUSKCN1G8060 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

bratwurst3000 5y ago

They are Not scanning the photos But if there is a positive scan of the hash of a photo then the photo will be send to a human to check. Now with a certain error rate it is sure that humans working at apple will see privat photos that don’t have child pornography in them .

dsomers 5y ago
What are we talking here, 1 in 1 billion. I just can’t care that much unless there’s real evidence that the error rate is really high.
- bratwurst3000 5y ago
  I dont know the error rate of image recognition but it is certainly more than one in a million. More 1-10%. But i dont want to talk the idea of apple down. I am okey with them scanning THEIR servers for childporn. As long as the keep away from MY phone.
theshrike79 5y ago
Three positive matches to known child pornography. The chance of that happening in the real world is astronomically small.