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Interesting - their approach to hash checking prior to iCloud upload (only when upload was enabled) seemed intended to allow them to support e2ee which they ann
by gonehome 4y ago
Interesting - 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).
- ec109685 4y agoThey didn’t do hash checking on device. They uploaded an encrypted fingerprint of every photo and it was up to the sever to determine if that matched known csam.
- theshrike79 4y agoYou are wrong. They downloaded the CSAM hash database from iCloud (iCloud _HAD_ to be enabled). After that every photo was matched with the DB using their algorithm. If enough confirmed matches were found, "reduced quality images" would be sent to a human to double-check if the matches are correct and not false positives. Only after that the authorities would've been contacted. Compare this with Google's approach of "our AI just scans everything and if it sees something, it'll directly contact the police and shuts down your account with no way to recover it". (This actually happened). Which is worse?