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Has 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
by DisjointedHunt 4y ago
Has 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.
- ec109685 4y agoThat’s not how Apple’s system worked. The matching only happened server side. Your device had no knowledge of whether a photo was csam or not.
- mrtksn 4y agoNope. In the proposed system the scan was performed by the device, the entity that evaluated the result of the scan is a implementation detail. Technically it was also Apple that would call the police but that’s also an implementation detail. It’s just your device scanning your files for content deemed illegal by authorities and snitching you to the authorities but with extra steps.
- ec109685 4y agoYour device attached an encrypted fingerprint of each photo as you uploaded it. The scanning and matching happened server side.
- mrtksn 4y agoAnd how do you think that fingerprint is attached exactly? By scanning your files on your device. Anyway what is the point of this conversation? Are we going to argue over what scanning means? I’m sorry but I find this intellectually dampening. Okay, not scanning but analyzing and sending the results of the analysis to Apple where Apple can scan. So?
- ec109685 4y agoBecause you said this: “personal devices become the police and snitch you” Which makes it seem like Apple’s approach is worse than what Google does where they actually do scan through everyone’s full resolution photos on the server doing what they please with the results. My point in making this distinction is that if a company is going to do server side scanning, apple’s approach is far more privacy preserving than a company like Google’s and that point is being lost.