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It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. Are they perfect? Not even close, but compared to the rest of big tech theyre simply on another leve

It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. Are they perfect? Not even close, but compared to the rest of big tech theyre simply on another level. Apple could easily not do this stuff and it may even be easier to not.

cryo32 3mo ago
Indeed. But they are until they are actually defeated. I would rather plan for failure. We are in a global climate where court rulings can be ignored.
avidiax 3mo ago
> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. > It also ensured pressure from governments and plaintiffs, including CSAM victims, who preferred Apple’s more interventionist approaches, which Apple had voluntarily demonstrated it was willing to do. I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning. It proved that it was technically feasible, and was "privacy preserving". I use scare quotes there because I don't think that political or religious dissidents would find that the same or similar technology used to discover and persecute them is "privacy preserving". And that's really the problem with Apple here. They provided a model for scanning for any kind of message or material while purportedly maintaining privacy.
- mmmlinux 3mo ago
  Is it different than telling your therapist something in confidence and then finding police waiting for you in the lobby.
  - arcticbull 3mo ago
    Yes, in the sense that you have a legal doctor-patient privilege that binds what they can share with whom. There's not really an Apple cloud user privilege. No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc.
    - busterarm 3mo ago
      > No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc. And therapists are legally mandated to report you if you told them you viewed or possessed CSAM.
      - Dylan16807 3mo ago
        No matter how or why? That seems like a terrible mandate.
        busterarm 3mo ago
        > No matter how or why? That seems like a terrible mandate. Honestly shocked that anyone would even say this, but even giving you the benefit of the doubt here -- the one case where I could imagine this might not happen would be if you're a police officer investigating such cases. But they also have their own therapists dedicated/trained in police-specific issues.
        Dylan16807 3mo ago
        Even if someone went browsing for it, yes that's illegal but there's no benefit in their therapist reporting them for just visiting terrible websites. But also there are definitely ways to get accidentally exposed. That's an absolutely awful thing to call the cops over.
        busterarm 3mo ago
        I think you're demonstrating incredibly poor judgment here. CSAM is a crime with real victims. Even if your patient came across it innocently, someone is out there intentionally distributing it and that needs to be investigated.
        AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
- bayindirh 3mo ago
  > It proved that it was technically feasible, and was "privacy preserving". Didn't their paper disproved by reversing the perceptual hashes to reveal blurred version of the images being hashed, and Apple basically said "that's fair, it's not as robust as we wanted, let's visit this later"? If not, I'll happily stand corrected, but please share sources. Addenda: - Apple's original paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20210807165030/https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210807165030/https://www.apple... - Paper breaking the hash: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628 https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628 Edit: The second one is the wrong paper. I’ll find and link the correct one tomorrow. Keeping the link for transparency.
  - yogorenapan 3mo ago
    > to reveal blurred version of the images being hashed Skimmed your linked paper. It seems they were able to classify hashes up to ~8% top-1 accuracy and ~30% top-10. Not exactly a blurred version, or any images at all. So for example, they can say that you probably have images of trees, or images of buildings, but without much other data & very low accuracy. I'd still be a lot more concerned about them simply flagging political images rather than trying to get a broad understanding of what type of photos I have
    - soulofmischief 3mo ago
      It starts at a broad understanding and ends with people permanently giving up their right and ability to keep rogue corporate governments in check.
  - comex 3mo ago
    The paper you linked doesn’t reveal blurred versions of the images being hashed. It does train a classifier to determine which of 1,000 ImageNet classes an image belongs to, which “achieved a top-1 test accuracy of 4.34%”.
    - bayindirh 3mo ago
      Then, that’s the wrong paper. I’ll find it and link it as a reply to this comment. Probably tomorrow morning.
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  I thought the client side scanning was to protect children? If it suspects an image is bad, it blurs it and pops up a warning including a link to resources to go to for help. Very different than trying to narc out users to the authorities.
  - pavon 3mo ago
    That is what they actually deployed. They were planning on performing client-side scanning of all images uploaded to iCloud for CSAM and reporting it to the authorities, but backpedaled after public push-back.
  - Zak 3mo ago
    There were two different technologies. One was client-side scanning for known CSAM, which created a huge backlash and is described here: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/apple-csam-intro/ https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/apple-csam-intro/ The other is detection of images that may contain nudity, whether sent or received, when the owner/admin/parent enables the feature. It is relatively uncontroversial and is described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105069 https://support.apple.com/en-us/105069
    - EmbarrassedHelp 3mo ago
      The controversial part is having the system enabled by default with age verification required to turn it off, and having the system impact non-Apple/Google apps. The UK for example wants Apple and Google to forcibly enable nudity blocking on all devices in the UK, and they want the system to bypass app/DRM security to scan all content visible on a device.
    - tzs 3mo ago
      > The other is detection of images that may contain nudity, whether sent or received, when the owner/admin/parent enables the feature. It is relatively uncontroversial [...] That's a new version. The one that as announced the same time as client side scanning to block uploading CSAM to iCloud worked like this. 1. It could be enabled on a child's device by the parents. It was not on be default. 2. If the child received a sexual image (not necessarily just CSAM...if an adult sends a dick pic to a child that is not CSAM but would have been flagged) the image is blocked, the child is notified, told their parents are worried the image may harm them, and asked if they still want to see it. 3. If the child says no, they do not want to see it, that is the end of the matter. 4. If the child says that they do want to see it and they are at least 13 they are shown the image and that is the end of the matter. 5. If the child says that they do want to see it and they are under 13, they are again told that they parents are concerned, and that if they view it their parents will be notified, and asked if they still want to view it. 6. If they say no that is the end of the matter. 7. If they say yes they see it but the parents also are notified and will be able to see it. This should have been pretty uncontroversial, but there were objections on the grounds that if someone say sends their dick pic to your under 13 child and the child goes all the way through to step 7 and decides to view it, that is a violation of the sender's privacy because that message was only intended for the child.
- FireBeyond 3mo ago
  I still also totally don't get their policy. Trying to avoid false positives by not firing until a threshold was hit (was it 20 images?) seemed insane from a PR position... rightly or wrongly, all it would take would be the wrong court case and you can see the headlines: "Apple says users can have up to 20 CSAM images on their phone before they'll tell police"
  - xphos 3mo ago
    Imagine you have pictures of someones baptism and the kid was nude. Is it CSAM? I think the program would have to say use but morally I'd say no. The issue with client scanning is it has to assume the worst, or they are than liable. If its the person has 20+ different baptism of nude babys well huh that actually might be CSAM because the context of how that concentrated photos implies but even than its hard what if that person actually has 20 God Children its less crazy than one thinks... Especially if they have multiply phones from a single baptism. You might not like pictures that way but honestly I think more important in procescuting CSAM is to go after the large sources of CSAM generation. Its trafficing in East Asia, and in Europe. I think weirdly America actually produces less CSAM in general because Americans are lot more off put by Sex than most other cultures. Abuse definitely happens in the US but making policy decisions like this produces bad policy. Does iCloud rehost the photos to other people I don't really know because I use andriod tbh. If they are being rehosted (I assume to members of your contacts) that can be problematic but I think honestly the issue a lot more complex than just protect the children which the source of critic is a lot attacks against apples are coming from
    - nylonstrung 3mo ago
      > America actually produces less CSAM in general because Americans are lot more off put by Sex than most other cultures The US has the largest pornography industry in the world by a massive margin, and the largest consumption of online pornography per capita Meanwhile should we be surprised that CSAM production is higher in countries like the Philippines that have very weak digital policing, abject poverty, high numbers of street children etc?
- winningChild 3mo ago
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- GeekyBear 3mo ago
  > I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning. That box has been open for years now. Big brother is already watching what you do on your Android device. > A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
  - trvz 3mo ago
    Google is not Apple. Apple customers expect the higher standard.
    - brokenmachine 3mo ago
      Well, there's a lot of things you can expect from Apple customers.
  - letmevoteplease 3mo ago
    This is not client side. Images just sitting on your Android phone are probably safe (although Google could push an update at any time). Your images get scanned when you back them up, send them over RCS, etc. I have even seen criminal cases originating from reverse image search - anything that touche the servers of the big tech companies, except apparently Apple, will be scanned using questionable AI and against a secret list to Protect the Children.
    - GeekyBear 3mo ago
      This is an image that he did not send off of his device to anyone except his doctor's office, yet Google reached into his private data and scanned it anyway. Google reported him to the police based on a single false positive. To add insult to injury, even after the police contacted Google to tell them that they had cleared him of wrongdoing, Google refused to restore access to his account.
      - izacus 3mo ago
- ribosometronome 3mo ago
  The Pandora's box was already open and essentially no one noticed nor was there immense pushback that resulted in the features being removed. Photo scanning was already happening for both Android and Apple for the purpose of image search.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Engineers tend to be too people-pleasing. When someone from management asks "can you scan devices for CSAM without violating privacy?" the answer should not be "hmm... well... maybe if we did it this way it could work". The answer you should give us "no" or to hedge your bets "I don't think so". Same to the government and the court. In particular a court isn't asking for a statement of objective reality whether it's possible, they're asking whether you think you could do it.
  - notnullorvoid 3mo ago
    People pleasing is a component for some, some also like the technical challenge. The biggest factor though is that as a software engineer "No" is basically never an accepted answer (even from management with an engineering background). They'll either counter with "we need to do X, so find a way", or they'll move along the line to the next person until they get an answer they were looking for. Edit: There are some rare competent managers who will stop the enquiry before even asking the engineers.
LatencyKills 3mo ago
I was an engineer at both MS and Apple. At Apple, privacy was baked into every new feature from the start. At MS, the privacy component was glued on at the very end, if ever. Like OP said, Apple isn't perfect nor will they ever be, but they do prioritize privacy better than most.
an0malous 3mo ago
I said this in another thread a while ago, and one of these people who thinks Apple isn’t on the side of privacy cited a lawsuit they settled around Siri listened to conversations: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apple-settles-claim-for-siri-eavesdropping/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apple-settles-cla... People understood this settlement to mean Apple was spying on their conversations and selling them to advertisers, when it seems to have more to do with people accidentally triggering Siri. But people don’t care about this kind of nuance or actually tallying up all the ways Apple is pro privacy against rare issues like this one. It’s all just tribalism at the end of the day.
- bigyabai 3mo ago
  This is also a misunderstanding of the case, though. The suit wasn't filed because of accidental Siri triggers, it was filed because Apple never informed users that third-party contractors would be listening to retained recordings of accidental invocations. From the original Guardian report: > Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-contractors-regularly-hear-confidential-details-on-siri-recordings https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con... Regardless of how you feel towards Apple, this sort of data should be siloed in a way that makes it impossible to share with undisclosed third-parties. It also should not be shared anywhere until Apple can confirm that PII and other sensitive information was redacted from the data, which they did not. It generally points to a laissez-faire attitude towards personal data that is hard to abdicate without seeing the Siri server-side code or retention architecture, which is why Apple settled to avoid revealing the extent to which they retain and share data in a class-action discovery process. The settlement is a mea-culpa without admitting to wrongdoing or proving fundamental security. The lawsuit was entirely avoidable if Apple didn't play fast-and-loose with production databases. It'll be a black eye for anyone that points to Apple's whitepapers as an example of their commitment to security - some retention simply doesn't get documented by Apple.
fsflover 3mo ago
Apple is on the side of privacy, except when you want privacy from Apple: Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com) 161 points by Logans_Run on Feb 14, 2025 | 69 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952 Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com) 170 points by ingve on Nov 1, 2024 | 127 comments And whenever your privacy contradicts their control over "your" device, you are also out of luck, e.g., you can't have Ublock Origin on an iPhone. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921
- dd8601fn 3mo ago
  It's telling that these come from people trying to implement tracking and high visibility into user behavior, and complaining that Apple won't let them even though Apple conceptually could. Except ublock, which can't do what it does the way it normally does, for the same reason you can't have any plugin inspecting realtime activity and doing scriptlet injection. You can have ad blocking. You can't have plugins with that kind of low level access to your browser activity. You can prefer something that allows dangerous behavior as a trade-off for greater capabilities, but you can't deny it's a safety trade-off where Apple picked what's safer.
  - anon7000 3mo ago
    Yep, and if you want good Adblock on iPhone use Wipr.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    You need detailed access to block ads. Otherwise, ad vendors will hide in whatever access the adblocker doesn't have.
SXX 3mo ago
Apple is very much like WhatsApp. Yes you cant perfectly trust their E2EE against state actors, but both in fact put some effort into making world have little bit more privacy. At least on Desktop we have usable Linux, but on the phones there is literally nothing usable because thanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months. Yes its possible to make Andoid spy on you a little less, but even for tech savvy person its damn inconvinient and Google making platform worse with every single release. Thanks to Google "security" I can use my banking apps on 9 years old device with 6 years outdated firmware, but not on GrapheneOS.
- Cider9986 3mo ago
  > Apple is very much like WhatsApp. Yes you cant perfectly trust their E2EE against state actors, but both in fact put some effort into making world have little bit more privacy. They probably use E2EE just so they don't have to respond to court orders and such.
  - cataphract 3mo ago
    Like when Google got tired of handling geofencing warrants.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      For the uninitiated: Google stopped hosting your location timeline on its servers just because it kept getting orders to search or reveal it.
- Pfhortune 3mo ago
  > hanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months. I've been using GrapheneOS for years and that hasn't been my experience. There are two financial apps that don't work for me, and that's it. Pretty much everything else I use is fine. But, to be fair, I'm very scrupulous about my apps and tend to avoid installing an app for every little thing that wants me to.
amelius 3mo ago
Apple may be on the side of privacy, but since they are competing everybody out of the market with their slick consumer products they actually form a threat to privacy since now the government has to only implement a backdoor at one vendor.
- macintux 3mo ago
  I have a suspicion that Google and Android aren't going to just vanish.
goolz 3mo ago
It is crazy that I do not trust a multi-trillion dollar company who has forced labor in their supply chain to have my best interests in mind? It is crazy to me you would think they do not understand the concept of lip service. These companies are liars. I do not trust liars. It has served me well.
- tzs 3mo ago
  You mean the company that does hundreds of assessments per year of companies all throughout the supply chain, including surprise spot checks, and forces those it catches violating labor standards to fix the problem and also provide remedies to the affected workers? Quite a lot of the labor issues in Apple's supply chain we found out because Apple found them and included them in their annual report on these and other supply chain issues.
mikenew 3mo ago
Apple is on the side of privacy if it serves their marketing. Which is why they would rather build and normalize CLIENT SIDE CONTENT SCANNING so they can continue to market iCloud as "secure and private". If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. I'll take it. But don't attribute to this ~5 trillion dollar company some kind of altruism.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- nozzlegear 3mo ago
  > If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. Altruism or not, I've found that their interests almost always align with mine when it comes to privacy.
  - bigyabai 3mo ago
    I've found that Apple's interests are pretty fickle, concerning real-world security: https://www.securityweek.com/apple-suddenly-drops-nso-group-spyware-lawsuit/ https://www.securityweek.com/apple-suddenly-drops-nso-group-...
    - nozzlegear 3mo ago
      > Apple has abruptly withdrawn its lawsuit against NSO Group, citing increased risk that the legal battle might unintentionally reveal sensitive vulnerability data and difficulties in acquiring essential information from the spyware vendor. > In a court filing Friday, Apple said continuing the lawsuit now poses “too significant a risk” of exposing the anti-exploitation and threat intelligence efforts needed to fend off the very adversaries involved in the legal dispute. > “When it filed this lawsuit nearly three years ago, Apple recognized that it would involve sharing information with third parties. However, developments since then have reshaped the risk landscape associated with sharing such information,” the Cupertino device maker said. I mean, iOS has never been open source so Apple has always practiced security through obscurity. It doesn't seem unreasonable that they'd be concerned about this. Idk, seems like a nothingburger but maybe I'm wrong.
Isamu 3mo ago
Privacy is a natural fit for Apple in that they make money on discrete devices, but services have grown tremendously. That’s where the erosion of privacy happens. So once there’s a profit motive for violating your privacy, the justification for eroding your privacy will proceed. It’s really the inertia of Apple starting out as privacy-compatible that makes them hesitant to throw that away.
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drnick1 3mo ago
> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. Apple is on the side of making money, and the privacy claims are mostly marketing. The entire stack is closed source, which means it is difficult and expensive to independently verify any of the claims made. What's more, the "auto update" universal backdoor means that Apple can forcibly push a user-hostile "feature" like client-side scanning when it wants or is compelled to by a state actor.
Razengan 3mo ago
> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. Look up the "iCloud Keychain" API: For years Apple has let and helped Facebook, TikTok, Tinder etc. track users even after you delete an app, even ACROSS DEVICES and DEVICE RESETS. There's no way to even SEE what data the apps have stored on your device & iCloud account on iOS, only through the macOS Keychain Access app. Even then you can't be sure that that's all that being stored. They temporarily changed course and wiped iCloud Keychain data when deleting apps, but only during a single beta of iOS some years ago, and then reverted to the way it is now. This scores so many points in favor of privacy intruding corporations that it puts Apple far from being the paragon of privacy they pretend to parade as.
- nozzlegear 3mo ago
  It's misleading to claim that Apple has "let and helped Facebook, TikTok, Tinder etc. track users [...]" using the keychain API. The persistence you're talking about, which those companies exploit, is a side effect of how the API works, not an intentional surveillance feature. Furthermore, it's not some special API that those big companies made a deal with Apple to get access to – any iOS dev can use it. It's a real flaw that they should've fixed a long time ago, but your conspiratorial framing makes it seem like Apple colluded with Facebook et al. to end run their own privacy protections, while ignoring the fact that Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature has cost Facebook billions.
  - Razengan 3mo ago
    1. How many years ago was the iCloud Keychain API introduced? 2. Why in't there any UI in iOS yet to view and delete that data without using those apps, asking them nicely, and trusting them to do it? 3. Why aren't users informed about apps storing data that will carry across app reinstalls, device reinstalls, and to all your other devices?
    - nozzlegear 3mo ago
      1. Rhetorical? 2. Why would there be? Apple building a UI for people to accidentally fuck up their apps sounds like the exact kind of thing Apple would never do on iOS. 3. Users are already informed when an app wants to track them. Beyond that, having an app store data so that it carries across reinstalls and to all my other devices is what I would expect my apps to do. If I uninstall an app and reinstall it later, I want it to pick up where I left off, not with a blank slate.
daveisfera 3mo ago
I agree but sadly that's eroding. They're starting to let advertisers into the walled garden and it's becoming too big for them to ignore it. That will only get worse and then one day Uncle Sam will walk in with a big check and things will change.
Sephr 3mo ago
Apple has degraded privacy online through Safari's cookie-preferential storage partitioning (i.e. site capabilities are penalized for using private localStorage instead of cookies), requiring sites to occasionally leak data over the network for multi-subdomain same-site web applications. These applications can privately share local state offline in Firefox and Chrome but usually serve the lowest common denominator, so many webapps use cookies to support Safari. They're pro-privacy when it serves them financially.
kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago
They aren't. They're on the side of making money and using backroom deals with the DOJ to avoid antitrust regulation. This is how a broken image hashing tool was surreptitiously installed on every iPhone.
KolibriFly 3mo ago
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tjoff 3mo ago
To me it is crazy people go out of their way to defend apple in this area. They might be slightly better than some others (horray!) but given their ecosystem it is still the worst platform if you value any form of freedom. Depending on apple for your privacy is ignorance at best.
selicos 3mo ago
Their level is set where it best feeds their revenue. Their security plays equally as well into their walled garden.

cryo32 3mo ago

Indeed. But they are until they are actually defeated. I would rather plan for failure. We are in a global climate where court rulings can be ignored.

avidiax 3mo ago

> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. > It also ensured pressure from governments and plaintiffs, including CSAM victims, who preferred Apple’s more interventionist approaches, which Apple had voluntarily demonstrated it was willing to do. I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning. It proved that it was technically feasible, and was "privacy preserving". I use scare quotes there because I don't think that political or religious dissidents would find that the same or similar technology used to discover and persecute them is "privacy preserving". And that's really the problem with Apple here. They provided a model for scanning for any kind of message or material while purportedly maintaining privacy.

mmmlinux 3mo ago
Is it different than telling your therapist something in confidence and then finding police waiting for you in the lobby.
- arcticbull 3mo ago
  Yes, in the sense that you have a legal doctor-patient privilege that binds what they can share with whom. There's not really an Apple cloud user privilege. No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc.
  - busterarm 3mo ago
    > No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc. And therapists are legally mandated to report you if you told them you viewed or possessed CSAM.
    - Dylan16807 3mo ago
      No matter how or why? That seems like a terrible mandate.
      - busterarm 3mo ago
        > No matter how or why? That seems like a terrible mandate. Honestly shocked that anyone would even say this, but even giving you the benefit of the doubt here -- the one case where I could imagine this might not happen would be if you're a police officer investigating such cases. But they also have their own therapists dedicated/trained in police-specific issues.
        Dylan16807 3mo ago
        Even if someone went browsing for it, yes that's illegal but there's no benefit in their therapist reporting them for just visiting terrible websites. But also there are definitely ways to get accidentally exposed. That's an absolutely awful thing to call the cops over.
        busterarm 3mo ago
        I think you're demonstrating incredibly poor judgment here. CSAM is a crime with real victims. Even if your patient came across it innocently, someone is out there intentionally distributing it and that needs to be investigated.
        AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
bayindirh 3mo ago
> It proved that it was technically feasible, and was "privacy preserving". Didn't their paper disproved by reversing the perceptual hashes to reveal blurred version of the images being hashed, and Apple basically said "that's fair, it's not as robust as we wanted, let's visit this later"? If not, I'll happily stand corrected, but please share sources. Addenda: - Apple's original paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20210807165030/https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20210807165030/https://www.apple... - Paper breaking the hash: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628 https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628 Edit: The second one is the wrong paper. I’ll find and link the correct one tomorrow. Keeping the link for transparency.
- yogorenapan 3mo ago
  > to reveal blurred version of the images being hashed Skimmed your linked paper. It seems they were able to classify hashes up to ~8% top-1 accuracy and ~30% top-10. Not exactly a blurred version, or any images at all. So for example, they can say that you probably have images of trees, or images of buildings, but without much other data & very low accuracy. I'd still be a lot more concerned about them simply flagging political images rather than trying to get a broad understanding of what type of photos I have
  - soulofmischief 3mo ago
    It starts at a broad understanding and ends with people permanently giving up their right and ability to keep rogue corporate governments in check.
- comex 3mo ago
  The paper you linked doesn’t reveal blurred versions of the images being hashed. It does train a classifier to determine which of 1,000 ImageNet classes an image belongs to, which “achieved a top-1 test accuracy of 4.34%”.
  - bayindirh 3mo ago
    Then, that’s the wrong paper. I’ll find it and link it as a reply to this comment. Probably tomorrow morning.
trollbridge 3mo ago
I thought the client side scanning was to protect children? If it suspects an image is bad, it blurs it and pops up a warning including a link to resources to go to for help. Very different than trying to narc out users to the authorities.
- pavon 3mo ago
  That is what they actually deployed. They were planning on performing client-side scanning of all images uploaded to iCloud for CSAM and reporting it to the authorities, but backpedaled after public push-back.
- Zak 3mo ago
  There were two different technologies. One was client-side scanning for known CSAM, which created a huge backlash and is described here: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/apple-csam-intro/ https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/apple-csam-intro/ The other is detection of images that may contain nudity, whether sent or received, when the owner/admin/parent enables the feature. It is relatively uncontroversial and is described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105069 https://support.apple.com/en-us/105069
  - EmbarrassedHelp 3mo ago
    The controversial part is having the system enabled by default with age verification required to turn it off, and having the system impact non-Apple/Google apps. The UK for example wants Apple and Google to forcibly enable nudity blocking on all devices in the UK, and they want the system to bypass app/DRM security to scan all content visible on a device.
  - tzs 3mo ago
    > The other is detection of images that may contain nudity, whether sent or received, when the owner/admin/parent enables the feature. It is relatively uncontroversial [...] That's a new version. The one that as announced the same time as client side scanning to block uploading CSAM to iCloud worked like this. 1. It could be enabled on a child's device by the parents. It was not on be default. 2. If the child received a sexual image (not necessarily just CSAM...if an adult sends a dick pic to a child that is not CSAM but would have been flagged) the image is blocked, the child is notified, told their parents are worried the image may harm them, and asked if they still want to see it. 3. If the child says no, they do not want to see it, that is the end of the matter. 4. If the child says that they do want to see it and they are at least 13 they are shown the image and that is the end of the matter. 5. If the child says that they do want to see it and they are under 13, they are again told that they parents are concerned, and that if they view it their parents will be notified, and asked if they still want to view it. 6. If they say no that is the end of the matter. 7. If they say yes they see it but the parents also are notified and will be able to see it. This should have been pretty uncontroversial, but there were objections on the grounds that if someone say sends their dick pic to your under 13 child and the child goes all the way through to step 7 and decides to view it, that is a violation of the sender's privacy because that message was only intended for the child.
FireBeyond 3mo ago
I still also totally don't get their policy. Trying to avoid false positives by not firing until a threshold was hit (was it 20 images?) seemed insane from a PR position... rightly or wrongly, all it would take would be the wrong court case and you can see the headlines: "Apple says users can have up to 20 CSAM images on their phone before they'll tell police"
- xphos 3mo ago
  Imagine you have pictures of someones baptism and the kid was nude. Is it CSAM? I think the program would have to say use but morally I'd say no. The issue with client scanning is it has to assume the worst, or they are than liable. If its the person has 20+ different baptism of nude babys well huh that actually might be CSAM because the context of how that concentrated photos implies but even than its hard what if that person actually has 20 God Children its less crazy than one thinks... Especially if they have multiply phones from a single baptism. You might not like pictures that way but honestly I think more important in procescuting CSAM is to go after the large sources of CSAM generation. Its trafficing in East Asia, and in Europe. I think weirdly America actually produces less CSAM in general because Americans are lot more off put by Sex than most other cultures. Abuse definitely happens in the US but making policy decisions like this produces bad policy. Does iCloud rehost the photos to other people I don't really know because I use andriod tbh. If they are being rehosted (I assume to members of your contacts) that can be problematic but I think honestly the issue a lot more complex than just protect the children which the source of critic is a lot attacks against apples are coming from
  - nylonstrung 3mo ago
    > America actually produces less CSAM in general because Americans are lot more off put by Sex than most other cultures The US has the largest pornography industry in the world by a massive margin, and the largest consumption of online pornography per capita Meanwhile should we be surprised that CSAM production is higher in countries like the Philippines that have very weak digital policing, abject poverty, high numbers of street children etc?
winningChild 3mo ago
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GeekyBear 3mo ago
> I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning. That box has been open for years now. Big brother is already watching what you do on your Android device. > A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
- trvz 3mo ago
  Google is not Apple. Apple customers expect the higher standard.
  - brokenmachine 3mo ago
    Well, there's a lot of things you can expect from Apple customers.
- letmevoteplease 3mo ago
  This is not client side. Images just sitting on your Android phone are probably safe (although Google could push an update at any time). Your images get scanned when you back them up, send them over RCS, etc. I have even seen criminal cases originating from reverse image search - anything that touche the servers of the big tech companies, except apparently Apple, will be scanned using questionable AI and against a secret list to Protect the Children.
  - GeekyBear 3mo ago
    This is an image that he did not send off of his device to anyone except his doctor's office, yet Google reached into his private data and scanned it anyway. Google reported him to the police based on a single false positive. To add insult to injury, even after the police contacted Google to tell them that they had cleared him of wrongdoing, Google refused to restore access to his account.
    - izacus 3mo ago
ribosometronome 3mo ago
The Pandora's box was already open and essentially no one noticed nor was there immense pushback that resulted in the features being removed. Photo scanning was already happening for both Android and Apple for the purpose of image search.
inigyou 3mo ago
Engineers tend to be too people-pleasing. When someone from management asks "can you scan devices for CSAM without violating privacy?" the answer should not be "hmm... well... maybe if we did it this way it could work". The answer you should give us "no" or to hedge your bets "I don't think so". Same to the government and the court. In particular a court isn't asking for a statement of objective reality whether it's possible, they're asking whether you think you could do it.
- notnullorvoid 3mo ago
  People pleasing is a component for some, some also like the technical challenge. The biggest factor though is that as a software engineer "No" is basically never an accepted answer (even from management with an engineering background). They'll either counter with "we need to do X, so find a way", or they'll move along the line to the next person until they get an answer they were looking for. Edit: There are some rare competent managers who will stop the enquiry before even asking the engineers.

LatencyKills 3mo ago

I was an engineer at both MS and Apple. At Apple, privacy was baked into every new feature from the start. At MS, the privacy component was glued on at the very end, if ever. Like OP said, Apple isn't perfect nor will they ever be, but they do prioritize privacy better than most.

an0malous 3mo ago

I said this in another thread a while ago, and one of these people who thinks Apple isn’t on the side of privacy cited a lawsuit they settled around Siri listened to conversations: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apple-settles-claim-for-siri-eavesdropping/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apple-settles-cla... People understood this settlement to mean Apple was spying on their conversations and selling them to advertisers, when it seems to have more to do with people accidentally triggering Siri. But people don’t care about this kind of nuance or actually tallying up all the ways Apple is pro privacy against rare issues like this one. It’s all just tribalism at the end of the day.

bigyabai 3mo ago
This is also a misunderstanding of the case, though. The suit wasn't filed because of accidental Siri triggers, it was filed because Apple never informed users that third-party contractors would be listening to retained recordings of accidental invocations. From the original Guardian report: > Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-contractors-regularly-hear-confidential-details-on-siri-recordings https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con... Regardless of how you feel towards Apple, this sort of data should be siloed in a way that makes it impossible to share with undisclosed third-parties. It also should not be shared anywhere until Apple can confirm that PII and other sensitive information was redacted from the data, which they did not. It generally points to a laissez-faire attitude towards personal data that is hard to abdicate without seeing the Siri server-side code or retention architecture, which is why Apple settled to avoid revealing the extent to which they retain and share data in a class-action discovery process. The settlement is a mea-culpa without admitting to wrongdoing or proving fundamental security. The lawsuit was entirely avoidable if Apple didn't play fast-and-loose with production databases. It'll be a black eye for anyone that points to Apple's whitepapers as an example of their commitment to security - some retention simply doesn't get documented by Apple.

fsflover 3mo ago

Apple is on the side of privacy, except when you want privacy from Apple: Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com) 161 points by Logans_Run on Feb 14, 2025 | 69 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952 Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com) 170 points by ingve on Nov 1, 2024 | 127 comments And whenever your privacy contradicts their control over "your" device, you are also out of luck, e.g., you can't have Ublock Origin on an iPhone. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921

dd8601fn 3mo ago
It's telling that these come from people trying to implement tracking and high visibility into user behavior, and complaining that Apple won't let them even though Apple conceptually could. Except ublock, which can't do what it does the way it normally does, for the same reason you can't have any plugin inspecting realtime activity and doing scriptlet injection. You can have ad blocking. You can't have plugins with that kind of low level access to your browser activity. You can prefer something that allows dangerous behavior as a trade-off for greater capabilities, but you can't deny it's a safety trade-off where Apple picked what's safer.
- anon7000 3mo ago
  Yep, and if you want good Adblock on iPhone use Wipr.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  You need detailed access to block ads. Otherwise, ad vendors will hide in whatever access the adblocker doesn't have.

SXX 3mo ago

Apple is very much like WhatsApp. Yes you cant perfectly trust their E2EE against state actors, but both in fact put some effort into making world have little bit more privacy. At least on Desktop we have usable Linux, but on the phones there is literally nothing usable because thanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months. Yes its possible to make Andoid spy on you a little less, but even for tech savvy person its damn inconvinient and Google making platform worse with every single release. Thanks to Google "security" I can use my banking apps on 9 years old device with 6 years outdated firmware, but not on GrapheneOS.

Cider9986 3mo ago
> Apple is very much like WhatsApp. Yes you cant perfectly trust their E2EE against state actors, but both in fact put some effort into making world have little bit more privacy. They probably use E2EE just so they don't have to respond to court orders and such.
- cataphract 3mo ago
  Like when Google got tired of handling geofencing warrants.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    For the uninitiated: Google stopped hosting your location timeline on its servers just because it kept getting orders to search or reveal it.
Pfhortune 3mo ago
> hanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months. I've been using GrapheneOS for years and that hasn't been my experience. There are two financial apps that don't work for me, and that's it. Pretty much everything else I use is fine. But, to be fair, I'm very scrupulous about my apps and tend to avoid installing an app for every little thing that wants me to.

amelius 3mo ago

Apple may be on the side of privacy, but since they are competing everybody out of the market with their slick consumer products they actually form a threat to privacy since now the government has to only implement a backdoor at one vendor.

macintux 3mo ago
I have a suspicion that Google and Android aren't going to just vanish.

goolz 3mo ago

It is crazy that I do not trust a multi-trillion dollar company who has forced labor in their supply chain to have my best interests in mind? It is crazy to me you would think they do not understand the concept of lip service. These companies are liars. I do not trust liars. It has served me well.

tzs 3mo ago
You mean the company that does hundreds of assessments per year of companies all throughout the supply chain, including surprise spot checks, and forces those it catches violating labor standards to fix the problem and also provide remedies to the affected workers? Quite a lot of the labor issues in Apple's supply chain we found out because Apple found them and included them in their annual report on these and other supply chain issues.

mikenew 3mo ago

Apple is on the side of privacy if it serves their marketing. Which is why they would rather build and normalize CLIENT SIDE CONTENT SCANNING so they can continue to market iCloud as "secure and private". If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. I'll take it. But don't attribute to this ~5 trillion dollar company some kind of altruism.

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nozzlegear 3mo ago
> If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. Altruism or not, I've found that their interests almost always align with mine when it comes to privacy.
- bigyabai 3mo ago
  I've found that Apple's interests are pretty fickle, concerning real-world security: https://www.securityweek.com/apple-suddenly-drops-nso-group-spyware-lawsuit/ https://www.securityweek.com/apple-suddenly-drops-nso-group-...
  - nozzlegear 3mo ago
    > Apple has abruptly withdrawn its lawsuit against NSO Group, citing increased risk that the legal battle might unintentionally reveal sensitive vulnerability data and difficulties in acquiring essential information from the spyware vendor. > In a court filing Friday, Apple said continuing the lawsuit now poses “too significant a risk” of exposing the anti-exploitation and threat intelligence efforts needed to fend off the very adversaries involved in the legal dispute. > “When it filed this lawsuit nearly three years ago, Apple recognized that it would involve sharing information with third parties. However, developments since then have reshaped the risk landscape associated with sharing such information,” the Cupertino device maker said. I mean, iOS has never been open source so Apple has always practiced security through obscurity. It doesn't seem unreasonable that they'd be concerned about this. Idk, seems like a nothingburger but maybe I'm wrong.

Isamu 3mo ago

Privacy is a natural fit for Apple in that they make money on discrete devices, but services have grown tremendously. That’s where the erosion of privacy happens. So once there’s a profit motive for violating your privacy, the justification for eroding your privacy will proceed. It’s really the inertia of Apple starting out as privacy-compatible that makes them hesitant to throw that away.

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drnick1 3mo ago

> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. Apple is on the side of making money, and the privacy claims are mostly marketing. The entire stack is closed source, which means it is difficult and expensive to independently verify any of the claims made. What's more, the "auto update" universal backdoor means that Apple can forcibly push a user-hostile "feature" like client-side scanning when it wants or is compelled to by a state actor.

Razengan 3mo ago

> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy. Look up the "iCloud Keychain" API: For years Apple has let and helped Facebook, TikTok, Tinder etc. track users even after you delete an app, even ACROSS DEVICES and DEVICE RESETS. There's no way to even SEE what data the apps have stored on your device & iCloud account on iOS, only through the macOS Keychain Access app. Even then you can't be sure that that's all that being stored. They temporarily changed course and wiped iCloud Keychain data when deleting apps, but only during a single beta of iOS some years ago, and then reverted to the way it is now. This scores so many points in favor of privacy intruding corporations that it puts Apple far from being the paragon of privacy they pretend to parade as.

nozzlegear 3mo ago
It's misleading to claim that Apple has "let and helped Facebook, TikTok, Tinder etc. track users [...]" using the keychain API. The persistence you're talking about, which those companies exploit, is a side effect of how the API works, not an intentional surveillance feature. Furthermore, it's not some special API that those big companies made a deal with Apple to get access to – any iOS dev can use it. It's a real flaw that they should've fixed a long time ago, but your conspiratorial framing makes it seem like Apple colluded with Facebook et al. to end run their own privacy protections, while ignoring the fact that Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature has cost Facebook billions.
- Razengan 3mo ago
  1. How many years ago was the iCloud Keychain API introduced? 2. Why in't there any UI in iOS yet to view and delete that data without using those apps, asking them nicely, and trusting them to do it? 3. Why aren't users informed about apps storing data that will carry across app reinstalls, device reinstalls, and to all your other devices?
  - nozzlegear 3mo ago
    1. Rhetorical? 2. Why would there be? Apple building a UI for people to accidentally fuck up their apps sounds like the exact kind of thing Apple would never do on iOS. 3. Users are already informed when an app wants to track them. Beyond that, having an app store data so that it carries across reinstalls and to all my other devices is what I would expect my apps to do. If I uninstall an app and reinstall it later, I want it to pick up where I left off, not with a blank slate.

daveisfera 3mo ago

I agree but sadly that's eroding. They're starting to let advertisers into the walled garden and it's becoming too big for them to ignore it. That will only get worse and then one day Uncle Sam will walk in with a big check and things will change.

Sephr 3mo ago

Apple has degraded privacy online through Safari's cookie-preferential storage partitioning (i.e. site capabilities are penalized for using private localStorage instead of cookies), requiring sites to occasionally leak data over the network for multi-subdomain same-site web applications. These applications can privately share local state offline in Firefox and Chrome but usually serve the lowest common denominator, so many webapps use cookies to support Safari. They're pro-privacy when it serves them financially.

kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago

They aren't. They're on the side of making money and using backroom deals with the DOJ to avoid antitrust regulation. This is how a broken image hashing tool was surreptitiously installed on every iPhone.

KolibriFly 3mo ago

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tjoff 3mo ago

To me it is crazy people go out of their way to defend apple in this area. They might be slightly better than some others (horray!) but given their ecosystem it is still the worst platform if you value any form of freedom. Depending on apple for your privacy is ignorance at best.

selicos 3mo ago

Their level is set where it best feeds their revenue. Their security plays equally as well into their walled garden.