7 ms·

They were moving towards E2EE when everyone freaked out about the on-device perceptual hashing trade off.

by cassonmars 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago
They should have wheeled out a better marketing spiel than "trust us ;)" then.
MBCook 4y ago
Yup. The knee-jerk privacy reaction cost us privacy.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s fair to say we need to accept either options. Yes the crime they are trying to stop is horrific and something must be done, but that doesn’t justify unlimited technological spyware. And the scope for abuse is so large. People in the UK are getting arrested for retweeting mean memes, it’s pretty easy to imagine Google and Apple added offensive images to their scanning and you get arrested for saving something that goes against the current political agenda. As well as the case where google locked the account of a parent who had taken photos to send to a medical expert.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    I have no interest in relitigating the saga or the recent Google incident. HN did that for months. I was simply agreeing with the irony. We had no privacy before, it was offered, people freaked out, we have no privacy today.
AmericanChopper 4y ago
Well… you don’t actually need to make a computing device automatically report its owner to the authorities for a serious crime based on a provably flawed automated process, prior to implementing encryption E2EE for a cloud storage service. That was simply the strategy that Apple chose to pursue. Blaming the users for reacting poorly to this strictly anti-user approach is very backwards.
- spacedcowboy 4y ago
  That wasn't what Apple was proposing though, they were quite clear [1] that it would be a human making the call to notify authorities, and only after a scoring algorithm had passed a threshold set pretty high (expected to be a trillion-to-one against false positives). [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211210163051/https:/www.apple.com/child-safety/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211210163051/https:/www.apple....
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    Yes, which isn’t a massive privacy concern and is of course not also susceptible false positives. Oh, wait a minute, it is… https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... Anytime this feature does anything, in every case, it will be acting against the interests of the user. There is no requirement, legal or otherwise, to implement this feature in order to enable E2EE for a cloud storage service. To act as if there is is simple gaslighting.
    - spacedcowboy 4y ago
      shrug Every, and I mean every cloud provider is currently scanning every image uploaded to it. If every single provider is doing that, then I'm going to think there's a good reason for that, and maybe (just maybe) there's something behind it. Some reason for it. But I'm not here to change your mind - believe what you wish.
      - AmericanChopper 4y ago
        The claim that I was replying to was that the reaction to CSAM scanning was the reason Apple didn’t implement additional E2EE for iCloud storage. When in fact CSAM scanning was neither a legal nor technical requirement for expanding E2EE in iCloud. Your question as to why so many companies gravitate towards the same anti-user patterns is both unrelated and pointless.
sneak 4y ago
Or they could just deploy e2e without turning our devices into things that spy on us. It’s a false dichotomy.
- spacedcowboy 4y ago
  Premise [1]: Anything uploaded to the cloud will be scanned for kiddy porn. Corollary: There are precisely two places that this data can be scanned 1) On the cloud servers. Anything and everything uploaded can be pushed through a scanner and anything that matches is flagged and sent off to a human to (ugh!) verify before being sent on to 3-letter agencies. 2) Within the privacy of your own device, only on things that are uploaded. Anything that "hits" is flagged and the same process (ugh!) as above is followed. This is not a false dichotomy. Once you accept that the scanning will happen (and it does), then it either happens at the source or at the destination. Right now everyone offering a cloud service scans at the destination (the cloud servers themselves), and everything is scanned. It is not possible to have e2e if the server can read the data to scan it - this ought to be obvious. Apple was offering to not do that scanning in their domain, but to trust that the device could do it in your own private domain, and that could have led to no further requirement for the server-side to be able to read the data (to do the scan). Which could have led to a fully end-to-end encrypted service for data, while still helping prevent ugly crimes. Users chose option (1), that is: scan everything uploaded on the server all the time and deny the ability for end-to-end encryption to occur. This is why we can't have nice things. ------------- [1]: This isn't quite a legal requirement, but every cloud service does it because the lawyers won't issue advice to CYA (cover your arse as the service provider) if you don't do it. To mount a successful defence against being sued, you need to make an effort to detect, seems to be the legal opinion.
  - sneak 4y ago
    Nah, if it is end to end encrypted, it is rightfully opaque to the service owner. Who would sue them, and why?
    - spacedcowboy 4y ago

They were moving towards E2EE when everyone freaked out about the on-device perceptual hashing trade off.

smoldesu 4y ago

They should have wheeled out a better marketing spiel than "trust us ;)" then.

MBCook 4y ago

Yup. The knee-jerk privacy reaction cost us privacy.

Gigachad 4y ago
I don’t think it’s fair to say we need to accept either options. Yes the crime they are trying to stop is horrific and something must be done, but that doesn’t justify unlimited technological spyware. And the scope for abuse is so large. People in the UK are getting arrested for retweeting mean memes, it’s pretty easy to imagine Google and Apple added offensive images to their scanning and you get arrested for saving something that goes against the current political agenda. As well as the case where google locked the account of a parent who had taken photos to send to a medical expert.
- MBCook 4y ago
  I have no interest in relitigating the saga or the recent Google incident. HN did that for months. I was simply agreeing with the irony. We had no privacy before, it was offered, people freaked out, we have no privacy today.

AmericanChopper 4y ago

Well… you don’t actually need to make a computing device automatically report its owner to the authorities for a serious crime based on a provably flawed automated process, prior to implementing encryption E2EE for a cloud storage service. That was simply the strategy that Apple chose to pursue. Blaming the users for reacting poorly to this strictly anti-user approach is very backwards.

spacedcowboy 4y ago
That wasn't what Apple was proposing though, they were quite clear [1] that it would be a human making the call to notify authorities, and only after a scoring algorithm had passed a threshold set pretty high (expected to be a trillion-to-one against false positives). [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20211210163051/https:/www.apple.com/child-safety/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211210163051/https:/www.apple....
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  Yes, which isn’t a massive privacy concern and is of course not also susceptible false positives. Oh, wait a minute, it is… https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... Anytime this feature does anything, in every case, it will be acting against the interests of the user. There is no requirement, legal or otherwise, to implement this feature in order to enable E2EE for a cloud storage service. To act as if there is is simple gaslighting.
  - spacedcowboy 4y ago
    shrug Every, and I mean every cloud provider is currently scanning every image uploaded to it. If every single provider is doing that, then I'm going to think there's a good reason for that, and maybe (just maybe) there's something behind it. Some reason for it. But I'm not here to change your mind - believe what you wish.
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      The claim that I was replying to was that the reaction to CSAM scanning was the reason Apple didn’t implement additional E2EE for iCloud storage. When in fact CSAM scanning was neither a legal nor technical requirement for expanding E2EE in iCloud. Your question as to why so many companies gravitate towards the same anti-user patterns is both unrelated and pointless.

sneak 4y ago

Or they could just deploy e2e without turning our devices into things that spy on us. It’s a false dichotomy.

spacedcowboy 4y ago
Premise [1]: Anything uploaded to the cloud will be scanned for kiddy porn. Corollary: There are precisely two places that this data can be scanned 1) On the cloud servers. Anything and everything uploaded can be pushed through a scanner and anything that matches is flagged and sent off to a human to (ugh!) verify before being sent on to 3-letter agencies. 2) Within the privacy of your own device, only on things that are uploaded. Anything that "hits" is flagged and the same process (ugh!) as above is followed. This is not a false dichotomy. Once you accept that the scanning will happen (and it does), then it either happens at the source or at the destination. Right now everyone offering a cloud service scans at the destination (the cloud servers themselves), and everything is scanned. It is not possible to have e2e if the server can read the data to scan it - this ought to be obvious. Apple was offering to not do that scanning in their domain, but to trust that the device could do it in your own private domain, and that could have led to no further requirement for the server-side to be able to read the data (to do the scan). Which could have led to a fully end-to-end encrypted service for data, while still helping prevent ugly crimes. Users chose option (1), that is: scan everything uploaded on the server all the time and deny the ability for end-to-end encryption to occur. This is why we can't have nice things. ------------- [1]: This isn't quite a legal requirement, but every cloud service does it because the lawyers won't issue advice to CYA (cover your arse as the service provider) if you don't do it. To mount a successful defence against being sued, you need to make an effort to detect, seems to be the legal opinion.
- sneak 4y ago
  Nah, if it is end to end encrypted, it is rightfully opaque to the service owner. Who would sue them, and why?
  - spacedcowboy 4y ago