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US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

swissinfo.ch

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Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#21

Post by mosselman »

aaomidi wrote: post #16
LilBytes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except I'm not comfortable with my families photographs being screened by a third party that I don't know or have met, and this occurring explicitly without my knowledge. So to stop child pornography an all-seeing third party vets my families photographs even when shared privately via WhatsApp or similar? That's fucked.

Stop using Facebook. Like.....what do you expect? I'm not trying to blame you here but since you're on this website I assume you're more generally knowledgable about stuff happening. We've known about variations of this for so long.

There is a difference between knowing that Facebook posts are screened and thinking that private, "end-to-end encrypted" messages are being screened (if true).

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#22

Post by stevenicr »

mturilin wrote: post #19

I wonder if Apple and Google employees review my photos stored in my cloud accounts?

I had thought I'd seen some articles long ago that Microsoft was doing this with everyone's one-drive cloud thing that is auto installed with windows 10(?) and added to windows 8 if you install office (still?) -

that Microsoft's onedrive system auto-detects pics with X% of skin showing, and when it does, all of your nudie (and semi-nudie) pics were sent to humans to look at automatically - and those humans could forward your pics to other people and agencies..

So I have always assumed that google would be doing the same, as I recall some articles about them leading the way in detecting and censoring pics, and providing detectives with things like bed sheet matches for hotels, and tracking phone numbers and pics of hookers that changes cities (that one was a google employee on 6 month leave or something?)

I have not seen anything about Apple getting into these things, would be quite interesting if they do the same - it would mean all of the fappening celeb victims had already been peeped on before hackers release them to the public right?

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#23

Post by mosselman »

stevenicr wrote: post #22
mturilin wrote: post #19

I wonder if Apple and Google employees review my photos stored in my cloud accounts?

I had thought I'd seen some articles long ago that Microsoft was doing this with everyone's one-drive cloud thing that is auto installed with windows 10(?) and added to windows 8 if you install office (still?) - that Microsoft's onedrive system auto-detects pics with X% of skin showing, and when it does, all of your nudie (and semi-nudie) pics were sent to humans to look at automatically - and those humans could forw…

> all of your nudie (and semi-nudie) pics were sent to humans to look at automatically

That is insane and, if true, reason enough to never use Microsoft software.

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#24

Post by sunstone »

cantrevealname wrote: post #17

> The algorithm detects the content whether it’s posted online or shared via a messaging app like WhatsApp. That statement contradicts Whatsapp official statement that all content is end-to-end encrypted: “WhatsApp ... we built end-to-end encryption into our app. When end-to-end encrypted, your messages, photos, videos, voice messages, documents, and calls are secured from falling into the wrong hands. Only you and t…

My guess is that even if a photo is secure within Whatsapp once that photo is displayed on the screen of your phone then it's available to Android to scan. Yes, that's a creepy thought and not only that but presumably such a function would be using quite a bit of the phone's battery to be doing this continuously.

It's not clear though why all this stuff would be going to Switzerland particularly.

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#25

Post by londons_explore »

mosselman wrote: post #23
stevenicr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had thought I'd seen some articles long ago that Microsoft was doing this with everyone's one-drive cloud thing that is auto installed with windows 10(?) and added to windows 8 if you install office (still?) - that Microsoft's onedrive system auto-detects pics with X% of skin showing, and when it does, all of your nudie (and semi-nudie) pics were sent to humans to look at automatically - and those humans could forw…

> all of your nudie (and semi-nudie) pics were sent to humans to look at automatically That is insane and, if true, reason enough to never use Microsoft software.

It's not all, but a sample, yes.

They typically use hashes of files and only check files which have been shared between users though.

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#26

Post by borumpilot »

You might as well flag this since there is no way to access the referred to data sources (and I am pretty sure there is quite a lot of actual information lost in translation).

Source: I'm Swiss, read everything I could find, nothing even comes close to "apps like Whatsapp send pictures to the Swiss police". More in the direction of: pictures get sent by US LE to Swiss LE and the volume is growing over the last couple of years.

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#27

Post by stallmanite »

aaomidi wrote: post #18
jMyles wrote: post #3

> In an effort to combat child pornography, providers like Facebook and Google automatically screen all photos for the presence of children and bare skin. The presumption that childhood nudity needs to be screened in such a way is, itself, cringey and creepy and perhaps not without a hint of pedophilia. > The algorithm detects the content whether it’s posted online or shared via a messaging app like WhatsApp. OK, so…

As someone who was raised a nudist this is actually hilarious and if I was a kid now my parents would've probably got a visit from the police. Ugh.

The land of the free.

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#28

Post by aaomidi »

mosselman wrote: post #21
aaomidi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using Facebook. Like.....what do you expect? I'm not trying to blame you here but since you're on this website I assume you're more generally knowledgable about stuff happening. We've known about variations of this for so long.

There is a difference between knowing that Facebook posts are screened and thinking that private, "end-to-end encrypted" messages are being screened (if true).

They've basically provided no proof it's end to end encrypted properly.

Heck even Facebook has a private message system they claim it's e2ee.

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#29

Post by nomel »

mosselman wrote: post #21
aaomidi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop using Facebook. Like.....what do you expect? I'm not trying to blame you here but since you're on this website I assume you're more generally knowledgable about stuff happening. We've known about variations of this for so long.

There is a difference between knowing that Facebook posts are screened and thinking that private, "end-to-end encrypted" messages are being screened (if true).

My naive assumption is that there are no peer-to-peer, or hosted, apps in the stores that aren’t screened/intercepted by someone.

Re: US apps send thousands of private photos to Swiss police

#30

Post by jMyles »

pjkundert wrote: post #5
jMyles wrote: post #3

> In an effort to combat child pornography, providers like Facebook and Google automatically screen all photos for the presence of children and bare skin. The presumption that childhood nudity needs to be screened in such a way is, itself, cringey and creepy and perhaps not without a hint of pedophilia. > The algorithm detects the content whether it’s posted online or shared via a messaging app like WhatsApp. OK, so…

Our daughter had serious skin issues for years, and my wife and I shared numerous photographs of her. The idea of a pack of ... auditing my personal messages and photos to my wife is abhorrent. What we need is actual police doing actual police work, and actually judges putting actual pedophiles away for life. Not stalking normal people. But, I guess cowardice is alive and well - normals don’t shoot cops and judges in…

> The idea of a pack of ... auditing my personal messages

What fills in the blank left by your ellipsis is one of the real points to be made in light of this story.

We have to ask: who is fighting to have this job? In fact, who is this job tailor-made for in the first place?

It seems to me that there is no (or, at most, very little) legitimate security interest being served by this process. But the opportunity created for someone who enjoys looking at these sorts of pictures - and doing it under cover of law - is absolutely obvious.

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