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Apple kills plans to scan for CSAM in iCloud
- Nginx487 4y agoWe, Apple users, won the battle. Nothing more to add.
- nicolemichael 4y ago
- ashton314 4y ago> Children can be protected without companies combing through personal data Darn right they can.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
- jdlshore 4y agoOkay, that's a nice soundbite. Now let's steelman it. I believe the following to be true: 1. Children are sexually abused. This abuse is far more widespread than we as a society want. 2. Images of this abuse is called CSAM (child sexual abuse material). CSAM is easily distributed over the Internet. 3. People who intentionally download CSAM are criminals who deserve to be punished. 4. Services that scan for CSAM (using hashes provided by the NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and similar bodies) identify these criminals, who are in turn prosecuted by the police. In fact, hundreds of thousands of CSAM are reported by cloud services every year. This, along with the fear of being caught, reduces the demand for CSAM. 5. Some of those caught are found to be creating as well as consuming CSAM. Catching them reduces the creation of CSAM as well as the demand for it. 6. Reducing demand and creation of CSAM protects children. 7. Scanning files for CSAM catches criminals that would not otherwise be caught. Therefore, "combing through personal data" protects children that would not otherwise be protected. When you agreed with "children can be protected without companies combing through personal data," did you mean that my sequence of reasoning is wrong? If so, how? Or were you expressing a personal philosophy that's closer to "I think the benefits to privacy (from not scanning) are more important than the benefits to children (from scanning)?" If so, why do you believe it?
- lzaaz 4y ago
- lupire 4y ago#1 is 99% of the problem, and #2-#7 is 1%.
- athrowaway12 4y agoI always thought starting with CSAM was just a convenient pretext for slowly introducing surveillance tech in the U.S. #1-#7 are all bad. I don't think saying "some aspects of [bad thing] aren't so bad" is an effective argument against surveillance tech. Better just to call bullshit on the surveillance tech itself.
- falcolas 4y ago> Reducing demand and creation of CSAM protects children. You're thinking of this as if CSAM production follows a rational supply/demand relationship (such as with food, or furniture). But is there really evidence to back up the idea that CSAM production follows the same rational relationship? Child abuse is not rational, and an abuser provides their own demand for the CSAM they create; a child will not be saved from abuse even if there's nobody for their abuser to share the photos with.
- XorNot 4y agoThe existence of international trading networks of CSAM material speaks otherwise to this, as well as the frequency with which participants in trading but not active producers are usually an ingress point into compromising them. Even if the currency is barter - i.e. "more unique content" - that means the incentive is for people operating unchecked to feed their thirst for it have a market for the creation of it. Temporarily cornering the market with new content no one's seen before means you can trade for huge amounts of other content successfully. After all, everyone involved is taking a huge risk by even being a participant.
- nonbirithm 4y ago
- mikece 4y agoApple wins points for being less evil than Google but I'm not going to abandon my Graphene OS phone for an iPhone anytime soon.
- testfrequency 4y ago
- spanktheuser 4y agoI'd love if there was someplace we could go to test this assertion instead of relying on unbacked statements. I'm not saying it's untrue, but there is a lot of ambiguity in this claim as things stand. Are you referring to abuse of their monopoly power to censor speech? Abuse of same to compromise human rights? Nefarious trickery to subvert their own security model? Use of forced labor to assemble devices? Each is its own form of evil; the evidence for each ranges from beyond doubt to (afaik) non-existent; typing them out every time one wishes to discuss apple is daunting.
- mindslight 4y agoI'm as cynical as the next person - probably even more so. But, I have come to recognize that there is value in "pretending". It establishes what our societal values are, even if we don't live up to them. This allows us to critique the failures, and work towards a better world with fewer failings. So, is Apple actually going to back down from this and respect that computing devices should fully serve the interests of the owner? Perhaps not, and likely not to the point of allowing end user customization, software modification, etc. But I'd much rather live in the world where we say that Apple should do so, and they nominally agree. Where we keep holding their feet to the fire, by pointing to the hypocrisy when they reference lofty values. The alternative is to continue down the path where we just accept Surveillance Valley's expedient panopticons, and they move on to destroying the next societal value they find inconvenient.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway349902 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hobbitstan 4y ago
- satvikpendem 4y agoHave they actually killed it? Or will they resurrect it once the media frenzy dies down?
- concinds 4y agoThe media frenzy died down a year and a half ago. They announced it's dead for good.
- post_break 4y agoThey also appear to have killed the crazy part of scanning on device. That’s the crazy part, not scanning in iCloud.
- billyhoffman 4y agoThey were wanting to implement end-to-end encryption for Photos and iCloud backups (both announced today). Scanning uploaded data in the cloud for CSAM wouldn’t work then. Hence on device scanning
- unityByFreedom 4y agoBut they backtracked on on-device scanning. So that's not happening unless I missed something. There was a huge outcry when they proposed that.
- Gigachad 4y agoThat was just for scanning photos in general. Doing it on device is probably preferable to on cloud and at worst no different.
- unityByFreedom 4y ago> That was just for scanning photos in general. Are you trolling? What Federighi proposed before was scanning "for CSAM" on device [1]. Same angle. > Doing it on device is probably preferable to on cloud and at worst no different. Please elaborate. How is it better to force users to run software they don't want than to let them decide whether or not to have their photos scanned when they choose to upload them to the cloud? Anyway it's a false dichotomy. Apple isn't doing on-device scanning, and now they've announced they won't do it in the cloud either. [1] https://youtu.be/OQUO1DSwYN0?t=426 https://youtu.be/OQUO1DSwYN0?t=426
- Gigachad 4y agoiOS is closed source. Literally every part is unverifiable and "forced". I have no way of proving that my iphone isn't and hasn't always been scanning my photos. But I don't have the time or energy to care about that, I've decided that using an Apple product is safer than an Android I didn't audit (which is essentially impossible). By scanning on device it enables the possibility of end to end encryption which reduces the risk of a hack or bug exposing my photos.
- NoPicklez 4y agoI've followed this for quite some time now, not just Apples implementation of CSAM detection tools but the many other large cloud players including Cloudflare and Google who have had this in place for a number of years. Whilst Apple's initial implementation might have been more aggressive than some of the other players. I do think that CSAM detection technology is a good way of being able to detect this type of information. However with all things, there is an opportunity to use it for good and bad. We love using technology to improve our lives, but seem to actively despite using technology to plug the dangerous gaps in these cloud services. The public don't mind using cloud services despite terrible CSAM and terrorist content being circulated throughout them undetected, but resist when other technology might try detect it.
- lalopalota 4y agoThe public also doesn't mind using postal services despite terrible CSAM and terrorist content being circulated throughout them undetected, but rightfully resist when other technology might try detect it.
- oneplane 4y agoYou know that it's a distinction WITH a big difference right? Physical items take up physical space, have to physically be in transit and can be physically on a person on at a persons property. Hiding one phone is much easier than hiding many boxes of pictures of children being raped or abused in various different ways. The phone can also contain much more material than an entire room or house could contain. Personally I don't care about the argument that privacy is oh-so-special, you can have that all day long, as long as you also fight equally for the prevention and containment of CSAM, which most self-proclaimed privacy advocates tend to not do.
- randomdata 4y agoWhat's the difference? The only significance of the pictures is that serves to prove that you were party to the rape/abuse, either directly or indirectly (i.e. gave reason for someone else to produce the content). The quantity of content makes little difference. The child wasn't doubly abused by someone behind the camera being shutter happy. Stashing away one physical photo or one phone with hundreds of pictures of the act doesn't really change anything.
- gonehome 4y agoInteresting - their approach to hash checking prior to iCloud upload (only when upload was enabled) seemed intended to allow them to support e2ee which they announced today (without the tradeoff of enabling CSAM). I guess they decided it wasn’t worth it and it’d be good to ship e2ee anyway despite that meaning it may protect CSAM. I had figured they’d enable e2ee first and then reannounce the hash check if you enable it but I guess not. I can’t see the rest of the article due to the paywall, but I wonder what changed. Maybe the risks with imperfect hash matches or the recent news of Google reporting that guy to police made it not worth it? It’s in someways to Apple’s benefit to do this, they can’t see the data and are no longer responsible for policing its contents. They can’t accidentally leak it or get social engineered to restore access to a fraudster (how some celebrities got their images leaked). Whatever it is, it’s nice when the incentives are aligned around user privacy. It’s cool (and a little surprising) to see real consumer device facing e2ee for cloud storage, even if behind an advanced flag.
- yyyk 4y ago>I guess they decided it wasn’t worth it and it’d be good to ship e2ee anyway despite that meaning it may protect CSAM. I had figured they’d enable e2ee first and then reannounce the hash check if you enable it but I guess not. I read the e2ee message as allowing the device to upload an hash to the server (it depends on what a 'raw byte checksum' actually is), and then Apple can do a check using that checksum server-side. IMHO, so long as the actual check is server-side it's fine privacy-wise.
- Despegar 4y agoThere's no point in marring good PR from the news they announced today with the CSAM tech. When governments pass legislation targeted at E2E they will likely land on Apple's proposed solution as a good compromise, at which point it will be out of Apple's hands and they can just go forward with it.
- gonehome 4y agoI suspect they were related and the earlier CSAM tech was announced because of plans to enable e2ee like they announced today (otherwise the tech didn't make sense since they could just scan the unencrypted photos on their servers).
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoWhy did they start this PR disaster in the first place? Who was/is supposed ro pay the bills for development, operation and storage of this service? Because they really want to prevent child abuse? Because they want to offer technology to governments like China that can then look for anti-Chinese-government content?
- jwagenet 4y agoI’m sure the CSAM detection disaster gives Apple some leeway/plausible deniability with the governments who would have liked them to scan for illegal data being uploaded to iCloud before encryption, since they can say “well we tried!”
- rootusrootus 4y ago> Because they really want to prevent child abuse? It's pretty likely that the vast majority of people involved with anti-CSAM efforts are in it for precisely that reason. Apple is just an organization of people, after all. For every free speech absolutist that believes child porn is a necessary evil we must accept in order to preserve our freedom of expression, there are probably a thousand people who are comfortable with scanning hashes if it stands a good chance of catching the assholes making it and spreading it around.
- magicjosh 4y agoA related question is why did they wait to cancel it until today? Announcing end-to-end encryption the same day suggests this program was blocking end-to-end encryption from moving forward, too.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
- joshgachnang 4y agoCan you point me to the Google Drive/Photos/etc source code? Android itself might be open source, but the parts that most people care about are not.
- walrus01 4y agoAnd let's not even get started on the LTE radio baseband firmware (Qualcomm etc), which is a totally opaque thing. The radio itself has its own operating system, firmware, it's a magic black box as far as anyone is concerned.
- encryptluks2 4y agoAnd this differs from Apple hardware how?
- terrorOf 4y ago
- encryptluks2 4y agoThe parts that people care about, like cloud are not in the user's control. If you want your own cloud file sharing then there are apps for Nextcloud, and even an open source AppStore called F-Droid that has the open source apps. Google Drive offers E2E as well, and these announcements are nothing but lip service to something that is already being offered elsewhere to give something for Apple cultist to feel good about.
- joshgachnang 4y agoI'd love a source on Google Drive offering actual E2E, all I've seen is that they encrypt everything but still have access themselves.
- extantproject 4y agohttps://archive.ph/d4VaQ https://archive.ph/d4VaQ
- LASR 4y agoI have a young child. For me, this news over a year ago has significantly curbed sharing of baby pictures/videos through iMessage/WhatsApp etc. I don’t even record as much video of our son since everything is backed up to iCloud and Google Photos. I have an auto-adding album where any picture taken of our son goes directly into a shared album with my parents and my wife’s parents. My wife wanted to record us giving our son a bath because it is cute how he plays with the water. We didn’t do that because of this worry that it might be construed as CSAM. I can’t have my Google account be suspended because I use the same account for most of my freelance work. The whole situation seems to be a huge violation of the principles of privacy. I understand this is intended to protect children from terrible evils. But still, I don’t feel this is the best way to do it.
- gonehome 4y agoThe apple one was only hash matches with known ncmec images over a certain threshold. Even then there was a human in the loop iirc. So it wouldn’t have been an issue. Google was doing novel image detection though and mistakes there are more possible and more serious. As evidenced by the recent NYT article about that guy.
- autoexec 4y agoYou were smart not to risk it. Even if you can get your hands on a digital camera that lets you record those moments privately you'll have to be careful about what the OS is on the computer where you store/view those images because now or at some point in the future it could also decide to do the same thing. No matter how terrible or illegal something is, even if it's abuse or terrorism our own devices shouldn't be treating us as an adversary, watching everything we do to make sure we don't step out of line, and reporting violations to the police.
- killingtime74 4y agoBecause of this I moved my email to my own domain hosted by Proton mail (many providers out there). Can't risk your livelihood on an error on their part or yours. I can just switch my DNS to another provider in minutes if they ban me.
- 4y ago
- tiffanyh 4y agoIs it possible to scan when user has E2EE enabled? (The other announcement today)
- gpt5 4y agoIn the past they've announced local scanning on the iPhone. They postponed it indefinitely after the public feedback, and now completely cancelled it.
- DisjointedHunt 4y agoThe last paragraph of the story literally says that they're using it as an alternative to the icloud scanning plan.
- souplesse 4y agoThe last paragraph of the story is a concluding statement by the author on the difficulty of countering CSAM, and it says no such thing. The announced opt-in feature for iCloud family accounts (Communication Safety for Messages) will scan content that is sent and received by the Messages app, and alert the associated parent or caregiver directly, without informing Apple.
- DisjointedHunt 4y agoThis was the last paragraph before WIRED edited the article to add commentary from RAINN as the last paragraph: >"Technology that detects CSAM before it is sent from a child’s device can prevent that child from being a victim of sextortion or other sexual abuse, and can help identify children who are currently being exploited,” says Erin Earp, interim vice president of public policy at the anti-sexual violence organization RAINN. “Additionally, because the minor is typically sending newly or recently created images, it is unlikely that such images would be detected by other technology, such as Photo DNA. While the vast majority of online CSAM is created by someone in the victim’s circle of trust, which may not be captured by the type of scanning mentioned, combatting the online sexual abuse and exploitation of children requires technology companies to innovate and create new tools. Scanning for CSAM before the material is sent by a child’s device is one of these such tools and can help limit the scope of the problem.” Those quotes are a continuation of the statement from "The Company" ie Apple.
- mikefallen 4y agoWith their plans to encrypt icloud contents by the the end of the year they would not be able to scan anyways if i user has that enabled anyways right?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- diebeforei485 4y agoThe proposed scanning was on-device. They could have done it regardless of iCloud encryption.
- judge2020 4y agoBut it only did so if the user had iCloud photos enabled.
- diebeforei485 4y agoWe don't actually know because they never shipped the feature. But having iCloud enabled was not a required part of their scanning system, it was simply an if-else check, and we just had to take their word for it that they wouldn't scan anyway. Still, even if the scanning was only if iCloud was enabled, that's still a step too far in my book because Apple makes it very difficult for alternate photo backup apps to work well. iCloud uses background syncing/upload in ways that third-party apps are prevented from using.
- fsflover 4y agoWhich could be easily changed without users' knowledge any time.
- ec109685 4y agoIt wasn’t scanning. They took a fingerprint of every photo and encrypted it so only if that fingerprint matched on the server side and only if 5 of those matches occurred, they could view a photo thumbnail.
- breakpointalpha 4y agoFor now.
- knaik94 4y agoApple still scans all sent or received messages for explicit images if the phone is registered to a minor and if a specific setting is turned on by a parent. It blurs received NSFW pictures and gives a warning if sending one. This client side scanning is already implemented. Parents are no longer notified, thankfully. I am glad the more blatantly privacy violating policy was canceled, but I can't help but be cynical. Especially as Apple has "followed local laws" when strong armed by certain governments, and a recent class action was filed for lying about if Apple tracks you ignoring explicit settings not to. https://www.apple.com/child-safety/ https://www.apple.com/child-safety/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/11/21/ios-privacy-concerns-deepen/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/11/21/ios-privacy-concerns-deepen/ https://twitter.com/mysk_co/status/1594515229915979776 https://twitter.com/mysk_co/status/1594515229915979776
- oneplane 4y agoBut what are your opinions on child sexual abuse? Because that's the true topic at hand. It's very easy to complain about stuff, but it doesn't really help with anything does it... so what would be your method?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ngcc_hk 4y agoThere is another issue. If they can do it, they may have to compile … better not to touch it unless it is shared via some sharing device which explicitly said it will be shared with authority. For individual devices and backup, I were they I would not touch it. Too liable for both ends.
- indymike 4y agoThe headline really does not read well.
- logic_probe 4y agoI'm fairly certain, based on things I've see while under NDA at other vendors with cloud offerings for media files, that other companies are running CSAM scanners, at the Government's request, on their servers. (The one's I've seen searched for known CSAM based on signatures and didn't try to use AI to guess if an image contained it.) I think this Wired article is referring to scanning on the User's device. Apple may have wanted to do this so they could enable end-to-end encryption and still be able to comply with "secret" government requests. I'm not sure why companies agree to do this scanning in the first place. Somehow our government applies pressure to the companies to add these scanners. And it's hard for be to believe that "CSAM" is all they're looking for.
- jrockway 4y agoI'm really surprised that they tried it in the first place. I'm sure governments want it (China would love to see your Winnie the Pooh meme stash), but Apple is pretty good at fighting the US government and should have felt 100% free to say "in the absence of a law that compels us to write software, which is unconstitutional btw, we're not doing it". They have done it many times, so it felt really out of character. There must have been some contract / favor they were going after, and the opportunity must have expired. (I'm sure some large department of the federal government has some shiny new Android phones today.) It would be interesting to figure out the real story. My favorite part of the whole saga is that leaked letter that said "the screeching voice of the minority" will kill the project. We did indeed, and I'm happy to screech again the next time the government wants a tool they can use to scan my phone without a search warrant.
- magicjosh 4y agoDo you have a source for the "not constitutional" bit? I referenced it in a post below and was looking for a source.
- jrockway 4y agoI'm not a lawyer, but my current theory is that code is speech, and the government cannot compel you to say something you don't want to say. There is some case law on the saying something you don't want to say part: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-speech https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/933/compelled-s... And there is some case law on the whole "code is speech" thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States (Apple has cited Bernstein v. US as the reason they didn't have to write an app to unlock some mass shooter's phone for a fishing expedition, so that's why I think they agree with my didn't-go-to-law-school opinion there.) (BTW, an aside aside. DJB represented himself in that case. Just some random number theory lover / C programmer that increased freedom for everyone in the country in his spare time. Super cool guy.)
- cormacrelf 4y ago
- ummonk 4y agoThis is great news for individuals who don’t want companies snooping on their private images and don’t want to get ensnared with legal issues due to false positives. It also ensures a barrier against governments demanding scanning for dissident material and the like. But let’s not pretend it’s a move that doesn’t come with a cost. Scanning for CSAM by companies does catch a lot of child abusers and result in children being rescued from abuse, and it’s likely that Apple implementing such scanning would have done the same.
- naturalpb 4y agoThis is true in general, but not in Apple's CSAM detections that have been abandoned. They were only scanning for images that matched a know hash of CSAM. This did nothing to prevent new CSAM from being created, only possession of existing material.
- ummonk 4y agoThat still catches abusers, as abusers are often consumers of material.
- snowwrestler 4y agoDetecting known CSAM does help fight its creation. There's a Venn diagram of people who possess of library of CSAM and are also active child abusers themselves. Detecting possession is one way to try to get people who fit into that overlap. It can also help reveal criminal networks. Prosecuting possession of CSAM works like it does for other networked crimes like drugs. CSAM is material that is illegal and hard to get. People who possess quantities of it almost certainly acquired it from suppliers, who themselves acquired from suppliers, etc. Law enforcement's goal is to find and flip possessors to walk this network back to the source: people who are abusing children and documenting it to create new material. They also hope to discourage its creation by suppressing demand and raising risks and costs for abusers who create it (in both cases, by the threat of prosecution).
- roamerz 4y agoFreedom is rarely free of costs.
- pengaru 4y agoIf they're embracing convergent encryption then it'll still be trivial to check if specific blocks (or files if at the file level) exist in user backups.
- AceJohnny2 4y agoI think this really demonstrates how companies aren't monolithic, even ones that take pains to present a unified front like Apple. One group wanted to implement a tool to improve child safety, another team wanted to enforce user privacy. At one point, the former was about to complete their project, but was stymied by the second. Of course, it's surely more complicated than "one team" vs "another team", but the concept of conflicting goals within the same entity applies. It's not some top-down dictat.
- ec109685 4y agoTheir solution of sending encrypted fingerprints as photo metadata was extremely convoluted precisely because the first group wanted to enforce user privacy. Otherwise, they could have pulled a Google and just scanned server side.
- skoskie 4y agoEnter team C, the US government. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-committee-wants-everyone-know-its-concerned-about-encryption https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-commi...
- DisjointedHunt 4y agoHas no one read the article? >"Technology that detects CSAM before it is sent from a child’s device can prevent that child from being a victim of sextortion or other sexual abuse, and can help identify children who are currently being exploited,” says Erin Earp, interim vice president of public policy at the anti-sexual violence organization RAINN. “Additionally, because the minor is typically sending newly or recently created images, it is unlikely that such images would be detected by other technology, such as Photo DNA. While the vast majority of online CSAM is created by someone in the victim’s circle of trust, which may not be captured by the type of scanning mentioned, combatting the online sexual abuse and exploitation of children requires technology companies to innovate and create new tools. Scanning for CSAM before the material is sent by a child’s device is one of these such tools and can help limit the scope of the problem.” I see so many top level comments about how they're stopping on-device scanning of any photo which is more intrusive. This is not true. It appears the opt-in is limited to receiving alerts and blocking sending harmful images, but the implications here is that Apple is moving iCloud scanning of media onto the device. If anyone is going to vote on this comment or respond, please atleast go to your iPhone settings -> Accessibility -> Hearing -> Sound Recognition. Those are on device ML models working on an audio buffer that is ALWAYS ON. The idea is to do the same for visual media. Any images you take or potentially even hit the image buffer of your device could potentially be classified by increasingly powerful ML models. It doesn't matter if the actual content is then end to end encrypted, because the knowledge of the content is now available to Apple. This is DANGEROUS.
- mrtksn 4y agoI think you confuse two different things: The optional nudity detection and the mandatory iCloud CSAM scanning. They abandoned the later and that’s what the article is about. The first one is a child safety feature that scans content and warns the user, if enabled. The second one scans everyone’s all content and if it detects more items than some number your data is decrypted and you are reported to the police. A deeply disturbing, dystopian feature where your personal devices become the police and snitch you. Today they say it’s CSAM but there’s no technical reason not to expand it to anything.
- 4y ago
- pfoof 4y agoRemember that saying: It's always darkest under the lamp. And it's not about Apple in this context.
- Hackbraten 4y agoNice but too late. Tomorrow, I’ll be wiping (and returning) my last Mac after 22 years of using Apple products. My iPhone will follow suit once I receive my Librem 5.
- helloworld11 4y agoSo I guess that this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33897793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33897793 is part of the reason why? Or will there be a backdoor in their supposed "end-to-end" encryption of iCloud data?
- winReInstall 4y agoI guess with the advent of Image generating AI that endavour was hopeless from the start.
- chris_wot 4y agoSo is it going to pick up innocent naked baby photos? It’s quite concerning an algorithm could ruin someone’s life over incorrectly flagged material.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoGood riddance, but, just to make sure, they should: 1) Stuff garlic down its throat. 2) Decapitate it. 3) Draw and quarter it. 4) Bury each piece under a crossroad, so it cannot find its way out. 5) Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Like all of these efforts, the driving goal is laudable, but that's not actually how it will be used. I remember reading in The Register, about British housing councils, using antiterrorism tools to find unauthorized swimming pools. "Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be." -Lyndon B. Johnson
- qubex 4y agoI’m a nudist. This kind of technology has crucified us as a community. I’m glad to see any sign of it being walked back.
- qwerty456127 4y agoGood for the people who send their kids nude pictures to doctors for medical examination as well as for false positive victims who got theit life ruined.
- VLM 4y agoThere are only two important points about CSAM scanning. The first is that the business model of implementing dystopia is always rolled out as "to save the children". Rest assured once the infrastructure is in place the oppression will have nothing to do with "saving children" and everything to do with oppressing people for wrongthink or "the fifth amendment doesn't apply to IP / digital property" and so on. The second is that the point of dystopia is to stabilize a society by enforcing classism, for better or worse. The point of this system is to make everyone understand perfectly that the purpose of the system is to ensure that, for example, if the president's son were caught he would be unpunished, in fact the story would be aggressively censored, but if a poor person were falsely accused by some kind of mistake they would go to prison because our legal system is entirely monetary based. Its a loud message of "everyone get on that hamster wheel and run faster because we say so and we need more concentration of money and power at the top". The powers that be think there's too much class mobility, too much social instability, too much equality, we need to lock down to preserve their position at the top, and if they just lock down harder and harder they'll never fall. Historically this strategy has always been implemented because it works in the short term yet usually fails in the long term.
- Sporktacular 4y agoThis is conjectural, bordering on paranoid. It could happen, but you present no evidence that it will, or even that the effort to make it so is deliberate and coordinated.
- Sporktacular 4y agoIt's a relief to see the end of this anti-privacy wedge. It's also a relief not having to listen to wailing paranoiacs whinge about how new Apple features, such as communication safety in messages, is a cynical, nefarious or reckless step down the road to a police state. I still hope something can be done to address child abuse images being shared. I guess if anti-virus profiles can stop certain files being spread, and if we are prepared to accept the risk of that not being abused to cover up leaks or politically embarrassing information, then it could be used to stop known CP from being passed around. As for unknown material it looks like there may not be a way to prevent it that doesn't risk everyone's privacy.
- Corrado 4y agoThis article[0] on Apple's new iCloud encryption system seems to be related to the CSAM project. I wonder if this is a sign that Apple are moving in the right direction. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-plans-new-encryption-system-to-ward-off-hackers-and-protect-icloud-data-11670435635 https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-plans-new-encryption-syst...
- Jzush 4y agoAny tool that can scan for X can easily be modified to scan for Y. The “for the kids” excuse has been used to systematically invade our privacy before. Was anyone under the impression that this would never have been used for evil? Today it’s CSAM, tomorrow it’s political memes used to identify dissenters. If you think you’re not living in the worst timeline, you’re wrong.
- hirvi74 4y agoNot to mention there have been multiple occasions of agents charged and convicted of such crimes within the 3-letter organizations (or receiving no punishment at all) [1]. There is no telling how many/how long those sick individuals got away with it too. All of this leads me to believe that these organizations do not care about the children, but merely want more power/control over the populace and use "think of the children" as a way to convince people to give up their freedoms to privacy. However, I do think some of the individuals that work for these organizations actually do care and actually do want to help people, but they themselves are not representative of the organizations as a whole. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/15/justice/ex-fbi-agent-pornography/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/15/justice/ex-fbi-agent-porn... https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdtn/pr/fbi-electronics-technician-charged-child-pornography-crimes https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdtn/pr/fbi-electronics-technic... https://sarahwestall.com/cia-caught-covering-up-rampant-child-sex-crimes-inside-agency-and-no-one-has-gone-to-jail/ https://sarahwestall.com/cia-caught-covering-up-rampant-chil... etc..
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago
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- qubex 4y agoI’m a nudist. We’re going to be crucified by this kind of technology because it’s coarse, context-unaware, and enforced with draconian consequences by automated systems and corporate functionaries with absolutely no understanding of other people’s lifestyles. I’m as horrified by child abuse as anybody else but I’ve seen members of my community put through endless grief and even families broken up because of it. There’s so much more to identifying child abuse than spotting a naked child, and the tech giants that rolled out this tech have demonstrated they really don’t understand (and aren’t interested in understanding) other’s lifestyles and “err on the side of caution” dictated by their mainstream guidelines. Without a proper superstructure this infrastructure is just police-state level crap.