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Thanks for repeating what you got out of my post. There is a little miscommunication. I'll see if I can clear that up. I'm a "spirit of the law" kind of guy

Thanks for repeating what you got out of my post. There is a little miscommunication. I'll see if I can clear that up. I'm a "spirit of the law" kind of guy. And I think that when the bill of rights was passed, the idea was that Americans should be shielded from searches unless there is probable cause. The founding fathers didn't anticipate the technical innovations of telecommunication and the computer revolution. Nor the power this would grant private companies over the lives of US citizens. Let's be blunt, if Apple had to pay human staff to manually evaluate hard-copy documents for CSAM violations, they simply wouldn't shoulder that expense. Arguably the only entity that could "afford" it would the the US Government. Yet here we are in the modern age and these technologies exist. And these searches really do happen - without probable cause. There are at least two known cases of fathers being criminally investigated by the police based on a photo of their children that the father sent to a medical doctor after these photos were automatically scanned and flagged by automated systems[1]. The only point I'm making here is this: I feel that the bill of rights have been diminished in the digital age, and companies can do do wield automated algorithms that end in criminal investigations in ways that detrimentally impact lives of innocent people. And that these events taking place run contrary to the spirit of the bill of rights. That opinion may differ from your own. Or it may differ from how case law and legal precedent have evolved since the bill of rights was initially ratified. But I don't think dismissing that opinion as "nonsense" is either appropriate or a sign that you are debating in good faith. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

jdlshore 4y ago
Thanks for responding. You're right, I misunderstood, and I apologize for being dismissive. I thought you were making a legal argument, but instead, it sounds like you were making the moral argument: mass algorithmic searches by private entities are obviously bad if they eventually result in criminal prosecution (assuming no warrant). Presumably you don't like it when e.g., Google and Facebook conduct mass searches of your data for advertising reasons, either, but that's a separate conversation. I'm sympathetic to that argument in the abstract. When you get to the specific case of CSAM, though, that argument results in this position: mass automated searches for known CSAM hashes causes more harm than allowing that CSAM to be shared unchecked. And that I don't agree with. My logic is that Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have already been scanning for NCMEC hashes for years, and I'm not aware of any injustices as a result. Please note that I'm specifically talking about hash scanning, not the ML-based classification systems that presumably caused your [1]. I'm not an absolutist; a few cases where people were referred to police as a result of fraud (e.g., a jealous ex-lover planting evidence) is not necessarily a deal breaker for me, especially since the real source of harm is the fraud, which could have been conducted in any number of other ways. I'm also not sympathetic to the slippery slope fallacy. On the other side, I believe that there are mass pedophile rings and that these scans have helped detect them and take them down. So for me, the harm of mass CSAM hash scanning is low and the benefit is high. The balance is in favor of CSAM hash scanning, but not in favor of ML-based CSAM classification. That's a "from specific consequences" argument, not a "from abstract principles" argument—there's probably philosophy terms for those positions that I'm unaware of—and I respect that other people could see it differently. PS: I've actually been thinking about Google/Facebook/Microsoft in this thread, not Apple—since they never rolled out their system—but, in my mind, Apple's proposed system threaded the needle perfectly. Combined with their recently-announced e2e encryption, they provided just the right balance of privacy, hash scanning, and protection against abuse and false positives. I'm sad they've shut it down.

jdlshore 4y ago

Thanks for responding. You're right, I misunderstood, and I apologize for being dismissive. I thought you were making a legal argument, but instead, it sounds like you were making the moral argument: mass algorithmic searches by private entities are obviously bad if they eventually result in criminal prosecution (assuming no warrant). Presumably you don't like it when e.g., Google and Facebook conduct mass searches of your data for advertising reasons, either, but that's a separate conversation. I'm sympathetic to that argument in the abstract. When you get to the specific case of CSAM, though, that argument results in this position: mass automated searches for known CSAM hashes causes more harm than allowing that CSAM to be shared unchecked. And that I don't agree with. My logic is that Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have already been scanning for NCMEC hashes for years, and I'm not aware of any injustices as a result. Please note that I'm specifically talking about hash scanning, not the ML-based classification systems that presumably caused your [1]. I'm not an absolutist; a few cases where people were referred to police as a result of fraud (e.g., a jealous ex-lover planting evidence) is not necessarily a deal breaker for me, especially since the real source of harm is the fraud, which could have been conducted in any number of other ways. I'm also not sympathetic to the slippery slope fallacy. On the other side, I believe that there are mass pedophile rings and that these scans have helped detect them and take them down. So for me, the harm of mass CSAM hash scanning is low and the benefit is high. The balance is in favor of CSAM hash scanning, but not in favor of ML-based CSAM classification. That's a "from specific consequences" argument, not a "from abstract principles" argument—there's probably philosophy terms for those positions that I'm unaware of—and I respect that other people could see it differently. PS: I've actually been thinking about Google/Facebook/Microsoft in this thread, not Apple—since they never rolled out their system—but, in my mind, Apple's proposed system threaded the needle perfectly. Combined with their recently-announced e2e encryption, they provided just the right balance of privacy, hash scanning, and protection against abuse and false positives. I'm sad they've shut it down.