3 ms·

Explain which aspect of this feature involves an erosion of the right to privacy.

ziddoap 4y ago
I'm not getting into the middle of the debate on whether or not this feature is good/bad, but I think this is a pretty easy question to answer. There is now a feature that scans every photo you receive. There previously was not something scanning every photo you receive. What used to be a conversation between 2 people is now a conversation between 2 people and an Apple blackbox (assuming you turn the feature on). As with most of these types of tech, the proponents of the "this involves erosion of privacy" aren't necessarily concerned with the exact implementation as described on release, but with how the blackbox works and how the blackbox (and the laws/regulations/obligations around it) will change in the future, and the inability to change the settings of the blackbox, effectively letting Apple become the touchstone for what is 'appropriate', even if it doesn't align with your view of 'appropriate'.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- corrral 4y ago
  > There is now a feature that scans every photo you receive. There previously was not something scanning every photo you receive. 1) Seen the automatic-text-recognition-on-images features in recent iOS? It's already scanning ~every photo you look at, and not just in iMessage. If you put an image in Photos, it's also doing some object recognition on it (which you can see if you search for e.g. "books" or "chairs" in Photos). Dunno if it does that elsewhere, but the text-recognition thing, yeah, that happens all over the OS in all kinds of apps. Maybe (probably) you can turn that off, but this feature folks are complaining about is opt-in so that shouldn't be relevant for this line of reasoning. And furthermore: > Messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo appears to contain nudity. The feature is designed so that Apple doesn’t get access to the photos. 2) If you don't like this because you don't trust this statement to be true, then I have some bad news for you about who writes the entire closed-source operating system that runs on iOS devices and are the only ones who can deploy any code they like to them, basically at any time.

I'm not getting into the middle of the debate on whether or not this feature is good/bad, but I think this is a pretty easy question to answer. There is now a feature that scans every photo you receive. There previously was not something scanning every photo you receive. What used to be a conversation between 2 people is now a conversation between 2 people and an Apple blackbox (assuming you turn the feature on). As with most of these types of tech, the proponents of the "this involves erosion of privacy" aren't necessarily concerned with the exact implementation as described on release, but with how the blackbox works and how the blackbox (and the laws/regulations/obligations around it) will change in the future, and the inability to change the settings of the blackbox, effectively letting Apple become the touchstone for what is 'appropriate', even if it doesn't align with your view of 'appropriate'.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
corrral 4y ago
> There is now a feature that scans every photo you receive. There previously was not something scanning every photo you receive. 1) Seen the automatic-text-recognition-on-images features in recent iOS? It's already scanning ~every photo you look at, and not just in iMessage. If you put an image in Photos, it's also doing some object recognition on it (which you can see if you search for e.g. "books" or "chairs" in Photos). Dunno if it does that elsewhere, but the text-recognition thing, yeah, that happens all over the OS in all kinds of apps. Maybe (probably) you can turn that off, but this feature folks are complaining about is opt-in so that shouldn't be relevant for this line of reasoning. And furthermore: > Messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo appears to contain nudity. The feature is designed so that Apple doesn’t get access to the photos. 2) If you don't like this because you don't trust this statement to be true, then I have some bad news for you about who writes the entire closed-source operating system that runs on iOS devices and are the only ones who can deploy any code they like to them, basically at any time.