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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

#331

Post by pas »

dopamean wrote: post #308
xdennis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still bad. I used to scrape pictures from many legal pornography sites. I still have hundreds of thousands of pictures. Since many are user uploaded, I imagine a small number could be real CP. Thank God, I don't use Apple. (I should probably delete them, since I've basically never used them... although they could be useful for one of those end-of-world Raspberry Pi builds: https://back7.co/home/raspberry-pi-quic…

If you think there's a reasonable chance that you have CP on your computer why wouldn't you delete all the stuff? This is not complicated.

cat /dev/urandom and it also has CP, oh noes! quick delete everything.

Hoarding porn is kind of useless nowadays, especially without any kind of selection and categorization, but maybe someone does it because it's their hobby (or obsession), who knows.

Also if a lot of people has a bunch of porn images scraped from forums it's quite possible that eventually some of that might become illegal as the laws change here or there around the world. Should they proactively delete everything? Sure, they could. To be safe.

But this kind of safety is absolutely the bad kind on the long term. (Though of course it's possible to advocate for reform while not storing content with uncertain legality.)

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

#332

Post by ASalazarMX »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #229
Retric wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero AI classification involved, it’s a lookup vs hashes of known child porn images. You would need a hash collision, misidentified photo in the dataset, or legitimate use case to end up with a false positive.

The article says that Apple calls this system neuralMatch. I'm not sure why that name gives you confidence that there is zero AI involved?

I hope it's hash-based and not AI. Training that NN would be one of the worst jobs I could imagine, you're adding commercial value to child porn and all the misery it entailed.

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

#333

Post by Spooky23 »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #299
Spooky23 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is, Costco is taking many pictures of you, including possibly correlating with events or actions.

We accept Costco taking pictures of you as a condition of entering the store and securing a membership. The same does not go for random creeps wanting to take close up pictures of a child.

In this specific example, sure. You have no expectation of privacy in public and you are photographed, repeatedly.

The creep behavior is the problem. The photograph is a symptom of it.

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

#334

Post by ASalazarMX »

heavyset_go wrote: post #237
Retric wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero AI classification involved, it’s a lookup vs hashes of known child porn images. You would need a hash collision, misidentified photo in the dataset, or legitimate use case to end up with a false positive.

If they're using perceptual hashes, which they almost certainly are at least some of the time, then there's a huge space for false positives for each perceptual hash.

Don't worry, some poor traumatized souls will be tasked with reviewing visually all those positives. I hope they have good mental care.

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

#335

Post by alfalfasprout »

bastawhiz wrote: post #38

> Apple’s neuralMatch algorithm will continuously scan photos that are stored on a US user’s iPhone and have also been uploaded to its iCloud back-up system. Users’ photos, converted into a string of numbers through a process known as “hashing”, will be compared with those on a database of known images of child sexual abuse. It's weird and invasive that they'd search users devices, but this makes it sound like they'r…

The name is certainly concerning. It's one thing to check for specific hashes. It's another entirely to do approximate hashing. Locality sensitive hashing even in its best implementations has tons of false positives.

It's also worrying that eg; someone could stealthily airdrop or iMessage a suspect photo to frame someone.

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

#336

Post by pseudalopex »

Retric wrote: post #280
sandworm101 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Hashed-based image rec. Where are the hashes? Is the comparison done in my phone against a downloaded database, or is a hash of every image on my phone uploaded for comparison on a server? Could this program then be expanded to other classes of images? Animal abuse imagery? Terrorism? Hashes of known bomb-making instructions? How about people sharing illegal pdfs and text files? Will the MPAA be allowed to submit…

It’s done on Apple’s servers using your iCloud backups. For good or ill this lets people opt out by disabling iCloud. I would hope most privacy conscious people disable iCloud, but that’s another story.

Most of the process is done on customer's devices.[1]

[1] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

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

#337

Post by GeekyBear »

partiallypro wrote: post #289
GeekyBear wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft implemented this a decade ago. >The system that scans cloud drives for illegal images was created by Microsoft and Dartmouth College and donated to NCMEC. The organization creates signatures of the worst known images of child pornography, approximately 16,000 files at present. These file signatures are given to service providers who then try to match them to user files in order to prevent further distributi…

Again, that is not the same as scanning a local machine for it. That is all things that are on Microsoft's own servers or in their search results. Microsoft, Google, Cloudflare all have features like this. It's not the same as scanning local machines.

Again, the Windows 10 TOS extended that to scanning the local machine as well.

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

#338

Post by colinmhayes »

curryst wrote: post #304
colinmhayes wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if your lawyer is any good.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-... Nope, federal law states they can hold you for 18 months. So long as they can claim to already know what's on the device (which they will, because Apple pinged them about it), they can hold you for 18 months.

Alright, after further investigation it looks like the Supreme Court has so far declined to rule on this issue so it depends on the state. It sounds like most states supreme courts have ruled that you can't be forced to unlock a device, but some, like pennsylvania say that if the state can prove you know the password they can force you to unlock the device.

Definitely a pretty thorny situation.

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

#339

Post by [deleted] »

runjake wrote: post #326
Retric wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero AI classification involved, it’s a lookup vs hashes of known child porn images. You would need a hash collision, misidentified photo in the dataset, or legitimate use case to end up with a false positive.

You are wrong. It's AI. Citation: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

[deleted]

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

#340

Post by pseudalopex »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #332
diebeforei485 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says that Apple calls this system neuralMatch. I'm not sure why that name gives you confidence that there is zero AI involved?

I hope it's hash-based and not AI. Training that NN would be one of the worst jobs I could imagine, you're adding commercial value to child porn and all the misery it entailed.

They trained a neural net to perturb images. Not classify them.[1]

They did add a classifier to iMessage. But it's designed to prevent children seeing any sexually explicit images.[2] There wouldn't be a reason to train it on images of children specifically.

[1] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-diff...

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