4 ms·

I’m not a lawyer. My wife is, but she’s my lawyer. Get your own damn lawyer ;) However, I could see: - Bad person A is convicted of kiddy porn, as part of a p

I’m not a lawyer. My wife is, but she’s my lawyer. Get your own damn lawyer ;) However, I could see: - Bad person A is convicted of kiddy porn, as part of a plea deal, he gives up his sources etc - Turns out A has been sending stuff to B via iCloud - B does something nasty to C’s kid and gets caught - C sues Apple (who has money and certainly doesn’t want to be defending this in court) for making no attempt to stop this from happening to C’s kid, or worse assigns culpability due to being the medium of transport. Would this have merit ? Probably not, but it’s not something Apple want splashed all over the interwebs. The court that matters is public opinion, in this instance, and mega-corp vs parents-of-abused-kid doesn’t play well whatever the merits of the case. So Apple (and everyone else) scan, in part for self-interest, and also because I’m sure people at Apple/whoever have kids too, and have just as visceral a reaction as other people when confronted with hard evidence that this shit really happens. It’s easy to play the “think of the children is all bollocks” card - it’s harder when there’s a real abused kid that is front and center.

novok 4y ago
We send letters and parcels all the time within the USA and they are not inspected either. People also do horrible things in cars too, we don't systematically 'inspect' the content of every single car that drives on it past a bridge toll or similar. It feels rather flimsy IMO potential lawsuits without specific laws making this a liability that this would be the reason, like SESTA / FOSTA did. Once precedent shows that apple or anyone else will just never have that info because they deliver things in the equivalent of opaque letters, legal precedent of previous court cases will make these happen less and less, if at all. If I were apple, I would rather not have the responsibility of inspecting people's contents if I was a medium of transport, because it prevents an entire duty of care aspect that would pop up. You prevent more lawsuits by being E2EE IMO. You see this avoidance behavior within medicine with malpractice lawsuits, where doctors would rather patients not speculatively test so they don't create duty of care issues, and where they outsource some kinds of testing to other firms, so the 'duty of care / malpractice' aspect that pops up in case they missed something goes to the firm instead of them. There is a big 'avoid seeing things if you don't have to' energy in a lot of medicine, and it comes from malpractice anxiety. So there are things forcing apple to go this way IMO, I don't think they would do this by default.
- sneak 4y ago
  My operating theory is that Apple is being coerced by federal regulators not to release e2e software without backdoors like this. This is clearly unconstitutional and illustrates that the US and China are pretty similar when it comes to human rights policy.

novok 4y ago

We send letters and parcels all the time within the USA and they are not inspected either. People also do horrible things in cars too, we don't systematically 'inspect' the content of every single car that drives on it past a bridge toll or similar. It feels rather flimsy IMO potential lawsuits without specific laws making this a liability that this would be the reason, like SESTA / FOSTA did. Once precedent shows that apple or anyone else will just never have that info because they deliver things in the equivalent of opaque letters, legal precedent of previous court cases will make these happen less and less, if at all. If I were apple, I would rather not have the responsibility of inspecting people's contents if I was a medium of transport, because it prevents an entire duty of care aspect that would pop up. You prevent more lawsuits by being E2EE IMO. You see this avoidance behavior within medicine with malpractice lawsuits, where doctors would rather patients not speculatively test so they don't create duty of care issues, and where they outsource some kinds of testing to other firms, so the 'duty of care / malpractice' aspect that pops up in case they missed something goes to the firm instead of them. There is a big 'avoid seeing things if you don't have to' energy in a lot of medicine, and it comes from malpractice anxiety. So there are things forcing apple to go this way IMO, I don't think they would do this by default.

sneak 4y ago
My operating theory is that Apple is being coerced by federal regulators not to release e2e software without backdoors like this. This is clearly unconstitutional and illustrates that the US and China are pretty similar when it comes to human rights policy.