Are they going to compensate the owners for the CPU time, electricity and bandwidth this will cost?
Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
51–60 of 390 posts
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#52If it matches, am I guilty until found innocent?
I have no illicit images, but false positives are always going to be a problem and even at sub-1% rates if you're scanning literally every image stored on an iOS devices that could still be thousands of wrong matches. If I lose the false-positive lottery, am I going to have the police calling and have my mugshot in the evening news for "CP on their device" in particular in my state's months long backlog for digital forensics. Law enforcement aren't exactly known for their understanding of technical evidence like hash-matching.
I'm very sympathetic/supportive of anti-CP initiatives in general, but this still seems problematic.
PS - And before someone replies with "they aren't contacting the police," don't forget the "yet." Once this is in place they'll immediately get pressured by politicians and well-intentioned people alike to flag any positive detections to authorities who will overreact (as law enforcement has a history of doing, particularly around this topic).
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they are probably just going to match the hashes to known hashes of "bad" images.
Plain file hashing for this kind of thing has not been used for years (or even decades), Microsoft came out with Photo DNA along time ago, and I am sure now days they have something ML powered to do it. I am not sure the accuracy of these systems but even if they are pretty accurate there is something off putting about this trend. This very much feels like a Guilty until proven innocent type of program... "if you hav…
> Guilty until proven innocent type of program
But this software doesn’t make arrests? A comparison would be police asking for what cellphones were in an area. There should be a lot of due process that happens before anything comes of this. I imagine police won’t look into one photo, they would want to match more than one.
I agree though, the scary part might be how to clear your name after an overreaction occurs, similar to the effect swatting has on innocents or other kinds of false accusations. But those would happen even without such a system - we’ve heard about such stories before. “Man held for child porn charges, but it turned out they were innocent,” - it doesn’t take this kind of system to have police look over your phone for evidence and find a different crime than expected.
That all said… child porn is really, really terrible and I’m actually in favour of this. As a society, we can decide on what’s acceptable. As long as there’s due process and a presumption of innocence, I’m all in favour of making it harder for criminals to get away with crimes. I do agree though, all these systems might make it harder to catch perpetrators if it pushes them offline. But what other options do we have to stop these sort of crimes when the kids involved can’t or won’t speak up?
I suppose the fundamental problem is that having more evidence doesn’t necessarily lead to justice if it paints a false picture.
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#54This 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.
Like swatting, but worse.
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#55I bet Apple understands this is a bad idea (dilutes their "privacy" brand image) I wonder what forces have pushed Apple to this point.
Privacy was only a talking point to get them some advantage over the Eye of Sauron (Google). I have no doubt that they were ready to jettison their privacy protection marketing angle at a moment's notice. You can't have access to people's data in the cloud and on their phones, and not use it in certain ways. To do so would be to leave money, and the good will of the government, on the table.
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#56I 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…
> perfectly innocent photos on someone's phone of their own children They are using a library of human verified images to compare the hashes. Probably similar to PhotoDNA[0]. There can be false positives, but AFAIK the algorithms are not trying to identify naked children, but comparing 2 similar image hashes. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA
> They are using a library of human verified images to compare the hashes
I didn't get that from the article, could you point to a source on this?
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#57This just means child molesters will seek out PinePhones, Purism Librems, etc. And those phones will acquire reputations as "pedophones", and anyone buying or using one will be immediately considered sus. People with nothing to hide won't mind an OS with surveillance features.
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#58When it comes to Apple and privacy, it's important to differentiate two different types of privacy: (1) privacy against snooping by the state, and (2) privacy against snooping by all others. As we had seen with Apple and China, it's only the second type of privacy that Apple cares about. Sharing your information with the state is not out of character for Apple. In fact, had they done the opposite, it would have been out of character.
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#59Apple should perhaps dogfood their system on their own employees first: https://www.losaltosonline.com/news/hills-man-arrested-on-ch...
Not employees but all of their board and all of their investors.
Re: Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery
#60I 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…
> Like a kid running butt naked around the house...
Thought it was buck naked — but that works too. :-)