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Is this just a smokescreen around slowly sneaking CSAM scanning back in after the pushback last time? The "default on" behavior is suspect. [1] https://www.wir

Is this just a smokescreen around slowly sneaking CSAM scanning back in after the pushback last time? The "default on" behavior is suspect. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-communication-safety-messages/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-commun...

KerrAvon 2y ago
No, it is not. Whatever their other failings, Apple doesn’t think that way. The cynical reason: consider that you can’t plan engineering features of this scale without written documentation, which will always surface in court. The prima facie reason: Apple genuinely wants to provide useful features requiring server participation.
- pkkkzip 2y ago
  This is incredibly naive and curiously defensive. If this was a feature on its own then it would not be popular. Citing national security, some danger will justify its existence. Apple alone does not control and dictate what goes in, once you reach their level of size and wealth that exceed even developed countries, you ultimately cannot be the controller of your destiny purely as a profit orientated corporation. ex) Meta, Microsoft, Google
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
Exactly like how Microsoft "backed off" Recall. Uuuuuntil they shoved it back in and made it undeleteable.
- sgammon 2y ago
  By removing it from the market, making enormous technical tweaks based on user feedback, and then putting it back on the market.
amatecha 2y ago
Yup, this is their way of injecting the "phone home" element via an innocuous rationale, "location matching". The global index will of course also match against other markers they deem worthy of matching, even if they don't return that to the user.
- avianlyric 2y ago
  Honestly, why the hell would Apple bother with such a contrived and machiavellian strategy to spy on their users? They literally own the code to iOS. If they wanted to covertly track their customers, they could just have their devices phone home with whatever data they wanted to collect. Realistically there would be no way to know if this was actually happening, because modern devices emit so much encrypted data anyway, it wouldn’t be hard to hide some nefarious in all the noise. Time Cook isn’t some Bond villain, sitting in a giant chair, stroking a white cat, plotting to take over the world by lulling everyone into a false sense of privacy (I mean Zuckerburg already did that). Apple is just a large giant corporation that wants to make money, and is pretty damn open about that fact. They clearly think that they can make more money by doubling down on more privacy, but that doesn’t work if you don’t actually provide the privacy, because ultimately, people are really crap at keeping secrets, especially when a media group would happily pay for a story, even at Apple.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Yeah, that sorta already exists. If you've ever done remote customer support, they can send a query to remotely-view your screen -- a query which you have to accept or deny. There's really zero reason there couldn't be a similar feature, but without asking you, and without putting a big red bar a the top of your screen that says "Apple Support is viewing your screen". Wish I had a screenshot or photo of that, can't seem to find a screenshot online unfortunately.
- Thorrez 2y ago
  But wouldn't the homomorphic encryption prevent Apple's servers from knowing if there was a match or not?
gojomo 2y ago
My thoughts exactly: "we've got this crafty image fingerprinting, the CSAM detection use proved too controversial to roll out, but let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users, so the code atays alive, improving, & ready for future expansion." Whether such fingerprinting can reliably be limited to public "landmarks" is an interesting question, dependent on unclear implementation details. Even if the user-visible search is limited to 'landmarks', does the process pre-create (even if only on-device) fingerprints of many other things as well? If so, it suddenly becomes possible for briefly-active non-persistent malware to instantly find images of interest without the wider access & additional processing it'd otherwise take.
- NooneAtAll3 2y ago
  > let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users is it even that? I don't see the benefit of this whatsoever
  - swores 2y ago
    The search feature is useful at times, and while local processing is good enough to find (some of the) photos I've taken that match a search term like "table", it can't currently find a photo from a search term of "specific neighbourhood in my city" or "name of specific mountain I climbed years ago" - so if by processing on their servers allows them to do that then it would be genuinely beneficial. But not beneficial enough to make up for the loss of privacy, so I've disabled it without finding out how useful or not the functionality is.
gigel82 2y ago
Very likely yes. Why else would they add a feature that incurs costs for them as an update, at no cost to the users (and not even make a fuss about it)? It is obvious they are monetizing this feature somehow. Could be as innocuous as them training their AI dataset, or feeding into their growing ad business (locations and other things identified in the photos), or collaboration with law enforcement for various purposes (such as notifying the CCP about people's Winnie-the-Pooh memes), or a lot more ominous things.
- avianlyric 2y ago
  > Very likely yes. Why else would they add a feature that incurs costs for them as an update, at no cost to the users (and not even make a fuss about it)? Erm, you’re aware of the whole Apple intelligence thing right? An entire product that costs Apple money, provided at “no cost” to the user (if you had an iPhone 15). Also every feature in an OS update has a costs associated with it, and iOS updates have cost money for the best part of a decade now. Has it occurred to you that reason Apple includes new features in their updates is to provide customers with more reasons to buy more iPhones? Just because feature are provided at “no cost” at point of consumption, doesn’t mean Apple won’t make money in the long run, and selling user data isn’t the only way to monetise these features. Companies have been giving out “freebies” for centuries before the internet existed, and the possibility of large scale data collection and trading was even imaginable.
  - gigel82 2y ago
    Of course, but those would be features in the product code deployed on users' devices (one time investment), not a service that has ongoing costs of operation associated with each call. They wouldn't just give this out for free (especially to older iPhones), it makes no business sense. If you're not paying for a product, you are the product!
EagnaIonat 2y ago
That whole incident was so misinformed. CSAM scanning takes place on the cloud with all the major players. It only has hashes for the worst of the worst stuff out there. What Apple (and others do) is allow the file to be scanned unencrypted on the server. What the feature Apple wanted to add was scan the files on the device and flag anything that gets a match. That file in question would be able to be decrypted on the server and checked by a human. For everything else it was encrypted in a way it cannot be looked at. If you had icloud disabled it could do nothing. The intent was to protect data, children and reduce the amount of processing done on the server end to analyse everything. Everyone lost their mind yet it was clearly laid out in the papers Apple released on it.
- cebert 2y ago
  > The intent was to protect data, children and reduce the amount of processing done on the server end to analyse everything. If it’s for the children, then giving up our civil liberties is a small price to pay. I’d also like to give up liberties in the name of “terrorism”. When we willingly give up our rights out of fear, these evil people have won.
  - EagnaIonat 2y ago
    > If it’s for the children, then giving up our civil liberties is a small price to pay. All your pictures and videos are currently scanned. What civil liberty did their approach change in that?
- rzimmerman 2y ago
  I can't believe how uninformed, angry, and still willing to argue about it people were over this. The whole point was a very reasonable compromise between a legal requirement to scan photos and keeping photos end-to-end encrypted for the user. You can say the scanning requirement is wrong, there's plenty of arguments for that. But Apple went so above and beyond to try to keep photo content private and provide E2E encryption while still trying to follow the spirit of the law. No other big tech company even bothers, and somehow Apple is the outrage target.
larusso 2y ago
Yes my thoughts as well. The tech was so expensive I guess that they had a need to test / run it to proof it’s private? I mean the model to find landmarks in your photos could run locally as well or? Ok I’m not 100% sure here.
- hmottestad 2y ago
  I assume that the model couldn’t run locally for some reason. Probably either uses too much power or needs too much memory.

KerrAvon 2y ago

No, it is not. Whatever their other failings, Apple doesn’t think that way. The cynical reason: consider that you can’t plan engineering features of this scale without written documentation, which will always surface in court. The prima facie reason: Apple genuinely wants to provide useful features requiring server participation.

pkkkzip 2y ago
This is incredibly naive and curiously defensive. If this was a feature on its own then it would not be popular. Citing national security, some danger will justify its existence. Apple alone does not control and dictate what goes in, once you reach their level of size and wealth that exceed even developed countries, you ultimately cannot be the controller of your destiny purely as a profit orientated corporation. ex) Meta, Microsoft, Google

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

Exactly like how Microsoft "backed off" Recall. Uuuuuntil they shoved it back in and made it undeleteable.

sgammon 2y ago
By removing it from the market, making enormous technical tweaks based on user feedback, and then putting it back on the market.

amatecha 2y ago

Yup, this is their way of injecting the "phone home" element via an innocuous rationale, "location matching". The global index will of course also match against other markers they deem worthy of matching, even if they don't return that to the user.

avianlyric 2y ago
Honestly, why the hell would Apple bother with such a contrived and machiavellian strategy to spy on their users? They literally own the code to iOS. If they wanted to covertly track their customers, they could just have their devices phone home with whatever data they wanted to collect. Realistically there would be no way to know if this was actually happening, because modern devices emit so much encrypted data anyway, it wouldn’t be hard to hide some nefarious in all the noise. Time Cook isn’t some Bond villain, sitting in a giant chair, stroking a white cat, plotting to take over the world by lulling everyone into a false sense of privacy (I mean Zuckerburg already did that). Apple is just a large giant corporation that wants to make money, and is pretty damn open about that fact. They clearly think that they can make more money by doubling down on more privacy, but that doesn’t work if you don’t actually provide the privacy, because ultimately, people are really crap at keeping secrets, especially when a media group would happily pay for a story, even at Apple.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Yeah, that sorta already exists. If you've ever done remote customer support, they can send a query to remotely-view your screen -- a query which you have to accept or deny. There's really zero reason there couldn't be a similar feature, but without asking you, and without putting a big red bar a the top of your screen that says "Apple Support is viewing your screen". Wish I had a screenshot or photo of that, can't seem to find a screenshot online unfortunately.
Thorrez 2y ago
But wouldn't the homomorphic encryption prevent Apple's servers from knowing if there was a match or not?

gojomo 2y ago

My thoughts exactly: "we've got this crafty image fingerprinting, the CSAM detection use proved too controversial to roll out, but let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users, so the code atays alive, improving, & ready for future expansion." Whether such fingerprinting can reliably be limited to public "landmarks" is an interesting question, dependent on unclear implementation details. Even if the user-visible search is limited to 'landmarks', does the process pre-create (even if only on-device) fingerprints of many other things as well? If so, it suddenly becomes possible for briefly-active non-persistent malware to instantly find images of interest without the wider access & additional processing it'd otherwise take.

NooneAtAll3 2y ago
> let's get the core flows into something that sounds useful for users is it even that? I don't see the benefit of this whatsoever
- swores 2y ago
  The search feature is useful at times, and while local processing is good enough to find (some of the) photos I've taken that match a search term like "table", it can't currently find a photo from a search term of "specific neighbourhood in my city" or "name of specific mountain I climbed years ago" - so if by processing on their servers allows them to do that then it would be genuinely beneficial. But not beneficial enough to make up for the loss of privacy, so I've disabled it without finding out how useful or not the functionality is.

gigel82 2y ago

Very likely yes. Why else would they add a feature that incurs costs for them as an update, at no cost to the users (and not even make a fuss about it)? It is obvious they are monetizing this feature somehow. Could be as innocuous as them training their AI dataset, or feeding into their growing ad business (locations and other things identified in the photos), or collaboration with law enforcement for various purposes (such as notifying the CCP about people's Winnie-the-Pooh memes), or a lot more ominous things.

avianlyric 2y ago
> Very likely yes. Why else would they add a feature that incurs costs for them as an update, at no cost to the users (and not even make a fuss about it)? Erm, you’re aware of the whole Apple intelligence thing right? An entire product that costs Apple money, provided at “no cost” to the user (if you had an iPhone 15). Also every feature in an OS update has a costs associated with it, and iOS updates have cost money for the best part of a decade now. Has it occurred to you that reason Apple includes new features in their updates is to provide customers with more reasons to buy more iPhones? Just because feature are provided at “no cost” at point of consumption, doesn’t mean Apple won’t make money in the long run, and selling user data isn’t the only way to monetise these features. Companies have been giving out “freebies” for centuries before the internet existed, and the possibility of large scale data collection and trading was even imaginable.
- gigel82 2y ago
  Of course, but those would be features in the product code deployed on users' devices (one time investment), not a service that has ongoing costs of operation associated with each call. They wouldn't just give this out for free (especially to older iPhones), it makes no business sense. If you're not paying for a product, you are the product!

EagnaIonat 2y ago

That whole incident was so misinformed. CSAM scanning takes place on the cloud with all the major players. It only has hashes for the worst of the worst stuff out there. What Apple (and others do) is allow the file to be scanned unencrypted on the server. What the feature Apple wanted to add was scan the files on the device and flag anything that gets a match. That file in question would be able to be decrypted on the server and checked by a human. For everything else it was encrypted in a way it cannot be looked at. If you had icloud disabled it could do nothing. The intent was to protect data, children and reduce the amount of processing done on the server end to analyse everything. Everyone lost their mind yet it was clearly laid out in the papers Apple released on it.

cebert 2y ago
> The intent was to protect data, children and reduce the amount of processing done on the server end to analyse everything. If it’s for the children, then giving up our civil liberties is a small price to pay. I’d also like to give up liberties in the name of “terrorism”. When we willingly give up our rights out of fear, these evil people have won.
- EagnaIonat 2y ago
  > If it’s for the children, then giving up our civil liberties is a small price to pay. All your pictures and videos are currently scanned. What civil liberty did their approach change in that?
rzimmerman 2y ago
I can't believe how uninformed, angry, and still willing to argue about it people were over this. The whole point was a very reasonable compromise between a legal requirement to scan photos and keeping photos end-to-end encrypted for the user. You can say the scanning requirement is wrong, there's plenty of arguments for that. But Apple went so above and beyond to try to keep photo content private and provide E2E encryption while still trying to follow the spirit of the law. No other big tech company even bothers, and somehow Apple is the outrage target.

larusso 2y ago

Yes my thoughts as well. The tech was so expensive I guess that they had a need to test / run it to proof it’s private? I mean the model to find landmarks in your photos could run locally as well or? Ok I’m not 100% sure here.

hmottestad 2y ago
I assume that the model couldn’t run locally for some reason. Probably either uses too much power or needs too much memory.