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There are other kinds of hashes besides cryptographic hashes, which tolerate differences, e.g. you can change things around and still get the same hash. This is

There are other kinds of hashes besides cryptographic hashes, which tolerate differences, e.g. you can change things around and still get the same hash. This is what Apple does (or rather did) for their cloud scanner. Then there are other non-hash methods, similar to how Shazam determines a song in a noisy room. Poles, zeros, FFTs, there are many other strategies that are fault-tolerant.

snarf21 5y ago
Sure but it becomes an arms race. There is also a lot of people that have shown that you can make images of dogs and cats that hash to Apple's hash detector. At some point a white hat is going to start making memes that cause hash collisions. When 300M all violate some hash trigger, it will cause a stir and restart the game.
kurthr 5y ago
Sure, but just compress and encrypt. It won't play in place, but otherwise it's nondetectable (other than by out of band timing/metadata or very rough size estimates).
- bshipp 5y ago
  ...which is what floors me when Google made this statement. I thought the whole benefit of their Google drive system was deduplication of common files to minimize storage space costs. If they start tinkering with private files then people have no choice but to encrypt everything. This will cause their storage requirement to explode. However, if the goal is only to prevent public sharing of content in contravention of the user agreement then I'm surprised it took them this long to implement this.
  - 41b696ef1113 5y ago
    How many people have the wherewithal to encrypt their content? Even if some have the technical capability, how many are willing to take the reduced quality of life required for what is probably a low probability risk?
    - RachelF 5y ago
      You can use something like Syncdocs https://syncdocs.com https://syncdocs.com which supports encryption/decryption on the fly to Google Drive
- jmclnx 5y ago
  Came here to say this. Only an idiot (should say people without knowledge) would upload any personal data to the "Cloud" without encrypting it first. That includes pictures. As for size, you can always tar/encrypt its dir and include dummy files to modify its size.

snarf21 5y ago

Sure but it becomes an arms race. There is also a lot of people that have shown that you can make images of dogs and cats that hash to Apple's hash detector. At some point a white hat is going to start making memes that cause hash collisions. When 300M all violate some hash trigger, it will cause a stir and restart the game.

kurthr 5y ago

Sure, but just compress and encrypt. It won't play in place, but otherwise it's nondetectable (other than by out of band timing/metadata or very rough size estimates).

bshipp 5y ago
...which is what floors me when Google made this statement. I thought the whole benefit of their Google drive system was deduplication of common files to minimize storage space costs. If they start tinkering with private files then people have no choice but to encrypt everything. This will cause their storage requirement to explode. However, if the goal is only to prevent public sharing of content in contravention of the user agreement then I'm surprised it took them this long to implement this.
- 41b696ef1113 5y ago
  How many people have the wherewithal to encrypt their content? Even if some have the technical capability, how many are willing to take the reduced quality of life required for what is probably a low probability risk?
  - RachelF 5y ago
    You can use something like Syncdocs https://syncdocs.com https://syncdocs.com which supports encryption/decryption on the fly to Google Drive
jmclnx 5y ago
Came here to say this. Only an idiot (should say people without knowledge) would upload any personal data to the "Cloud" without encrypting it first. That includes pictures. As for size, you can always tar/encrypt its dir and include dummy files to modify its size.