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Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

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Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

#41

Post by luckylion »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #29

This could backfire in a huge way. I think a lot of people, even EFF/privacy focused people are fine with a private company doing CSAM detection (or anything really) on uploaded user content since it is actually voluntary. Now that CSAM detection is being deployed to user devices including those previously sold without it, there's a motivation to circumvent/block it. Unless Apple is doing CSAM scanning 100% inside a…

> All it takes is one security researcher to publish a tool that creates millions of false-positives for the current dataset/model used by Apple & others to be useless.

And even better: someone could create false-positives and just send them to people, or put them on websites. While you're watching funny kittens tumbling around, your iphone is calling the cops on you because it thinks you're watching child porn.

Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

#42

Post by Rebelgecko »

In a world where all police were incorruptible and all laws were just, maybe I'd be ok with this. But since we live in this world, I feel like it's only a matter of time until the "think of the children" technology is coopted to scan for other "bad" images.

I wonder how long it'll take for China to compel Apple to add winnie_the_pooh.jpg to the set of naughty images for users in China and HK? And like we saw when bing altered the search results for "tank man" even in the countries like the US, at that point we'd be one configuration error away from those hashes leaking into the US dataset.

Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

#44

Post by AnotherGoodName »

temp8964 wrote: post #27
partiallypro wrote: post #14

I really don't see how this is going to end well, there could be perfectly innocent photos on someone's phone of their own children doing perfectly normal things that kids do. Like a kid running butt naked around the house, or a photo of something like a rash that is sent to a nurse friend for advice on what it is etc. I'm all for protecting children from being abused, but how are they going to filter what is normal…

I am sure, presumbly in a sane world, computer scanning is only the early stage of the process, human will be invovled to make final judgements and decisions.

I imagine the biggest catch of this will be teens taking inappropriate photos of themselves because teens often do things like this in their awkward years when sexuality and body consciousness kicks in. With this we'll be seeing warrants for those images and a big fuss made on this most suicidal age group who thought they were doing something completely private. This isn't good.

Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

#45

Post by r00fus »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #42

In a world where all police were incorruptible and all laws were just, maybe I'd be ok with this. But since we live in this world, I feel like it's only a matter of time until the "think of the children" technology is coopted to scan for other "bad" images. I wonder how long it'll take for China to compel Apple to add winnie_the_pooh.jpg to the set of naughty images for users in China and HK? And like we saw when bin…

Forget just the government. Imagine if corporations could abuse regulatory structure to enforce copyright on private images?

Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

#46

Post by throwaway287391 »

> Once a certain number of photos are marked as suspect, Apple will enable all the suspect photos to be decrypted and, if apparently illegal, passed on to the relevant authorities.

Haven't Apple previously claimed that their encryption works such that Apple themselves can't decrypt it no matter what? (IIRC this came up during the San Bernadino attack when the FBI requested that Apple decrypt/unlock a suspect's iPhone and Apple said they couldn't.) Is this not a change? Maybe I'm confusing iCloud encryption vs. iPhone encryption and the former doesn't have any of those guarantees?

Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

#47

Post by runawaybottle »

It’s 2035, a major terrorist attack occurs. Apple scans all phones for location and images near the area over the last 12 months, sends the list over since the government declared Marshall law.

You are now suspicious until proven not suspicious. The real terrorists don’t even use iPhones. But here we are.

Edit:

Can any legal-heads explain how this does not constitute unlawful search? Apple is not the government, but once they hand the information over, isn’t the government indirectly committing unlawful search? Don’t you need a warrant for this? ____________

Second Edit:

Wanted to reply to another comment but being rate limited:

As of June 2016, the Terrorist Watch List [No-Fly-List] is estimated to contain over 2,484,442 records, consisting of 1,877,133 individual identities.

The number of Muslims in America:

A 2017 study estimated that 3.35 million Muslims were living in the United States, about 1.1 percent of the total U.S. population.

Lol. Jesus Christ, you do the math.

Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

#49

Post by dehrmann »

> ...ongoing demands from governments, law enforcement agencies and child safety campaigners for more assistance in criminal investigations, including terrorism and child pornography.

I get why they're making these demands, but this is in the US. This would clearly be an unreasonable search by Fourth Amendment standards if it were done by the government, so I'm not sure why government agencies think they can make demands that they, themelves can't legally execute of a private company. To be clear, it's legal for Apple to do this, and legal for the government to ask them to. The government is just laundering its door-to-door search.

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