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An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

appleprivacyletter.com

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Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#81

Post by [deleted] »

defaultname wrote: post #66
toxik wrote: post #3

Please talk to non-tech people around you about this. This overreach simply cannot stand, and from a company that sees success from touting itself as a privacy-centric alternative? These really are some dark times. I imagine that if the world had Stasi fresher in its mind, this would never have happened.

Anyone who engaged in such a discussion with a non-technical person is going to defacto seem like an advocate for child pornography, similar to how advocating for encryption can easily be twisted to being pro-crime. Having said that, there is an enormous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering about a pretty tame change. This seems like so much ado about very close to nothing. a) They optionally scan messaged pho…

[deleted]

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#82

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I'm waiting for orthodox authorities to do stuff like reporting pictures of people (not just girls) without head coverings. or dressed in bikinis, thongs, or underwear (like a significant number of "influencers" do, every day).

There are already places in this world, where a couple can be arrested for kissing in public. I suspect that the folks enforcing those laws, would have some real interest in this capability.

Not to mention nations (many in Africa, but there are also Eurasian nations), where homosexuality is banned (or even considered for death penalties). If your phone has a picture of two men (or women) embracing, it could cause nightmares.

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#83

Post by hnthrowaway9721 »

It won’t matter. Most of the public will applaud the move, many will call for it to be rolled out across every platform, including desktops. As this gathers momentum, it will eventually become illegal not to have pervasive scanning apps running on your device. Naturally, the technology will almost immediately be expanded to other kinds of content, and will be used as a wide open backdoor into everything in everyone’s life.

While this is not inevitable, I see a strong, perhaps overwhelming public response as being the only thing that will prevent it, and I do not see that response happening.

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#85

Post by game_the0ry »

Disappointing.

While moderating CP distribution and storage is obviously the right thing to do, I do not think this approach will be a worthwhile endeavor for apple and governments.

Let me explain: imagine you are bad guy with bad stuff on your iphone, and you hear apple will be scanning your phone. What is the next logical thing you would do? Migrate your stuff to something else, obviously. Encrypting a usb stick does not require a high degree of technical skill [1]; neither does running tor browser.

So I am thinking 3 things:

1. This is not about CP or doing the right thing, but rather apple bowing to government/s pressure to create a half-ass backdoor to monitor and squash dissidents.

2. Apple and government/s are incompetent and do not realize that criminals are always one step ahead.

3. Most likely, some combination of the above - government/s have demonstrated they are willing to go hard on dissidents on the personal electronics front [2], not realizing that they will only mitigate, not exterminate, the dissent they fear so much.

For the average joe, I would say this - your privacy is effectively gone when you use an electronic device that comes with closed-source code pre-installed.

For the benevolent dissidents - there are many tools at your disposal [3, 4].

Likely next iteration - governments / courts / cops compel suspects to hand over passwords and encryption keys over to prosecutors. It looks like it already started [5, 6], so act accordingly.

[1] https://www.veracrypt.fr/code/VeraCrypt/

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

[3] https://files.gendo.ch/Books/InfoSec_for_Journalists_V1.1.pd...

[4] https://www.privacytools.io/

[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-11479831

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#87

Post by roenxi »

defaultname wrote: post #66
toxik wrote: post #3

Please talk to non-tech people around you about this. This overreach simply cannot stand, and from a company that sees success from touting itself as a privacy-centric alternative? These really are some dark times. I imagine that if the world had Stasi fresher in its mind, this would never have happened.

Anyone who engaged in such a discussion with a non-technical person is going to defacto seem like an advocate for child pornography, similar to how advocating for encryption can easily be twisted to being pro-crime. Having said that, there is an enormous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering about a pretty tame change. This seems like so much ado about very close to nothing. a) They optionally scan messaged pho…

"They're going to scan your phone and probably have someone review any photos with a lot of human flesh in them" would be enough to get a lot of non-technical users to take notice.

That would get a lot of people nervous. Let alone anyone smart who thinks through the implications here of how far the line is being pushed on how public your phone is.

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#88

Post by ElFitz »

toxik wrote: post #43
ElFitz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Catching CP hoarders does little to help the children being exploited in the first place If there is no market for it, there might be less incentive to produce any more of it. Not that I believe we should all be continuously spied by people who merely pinky sweared to do it right and not abuse it.

I don't think market forces are what drive the production of CSAM. Rather, it's some weird fetish of child abusers to share their conquests. I'm sure you're aware, but when CP collectors are busted, they often have terabytes upon terabytes of CP. But that's, I think, tangential - I don't understand pedophilia well enough to say something meaningful here.

Quite funny: looking for some figures, it seems I wasn’t the first one to do so, and that finding anything even remotely reliable isn't easy at all. See

- https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114485422875624000

- https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/260...

- http://www.radosh.net/archive/001481.html

> I'm sure you're aware, but when CP collectors are busted, they often have terabytes upon terabytes of CP.

Always appalled me that there is so much of it out there. FFS.

For some reason, it reminds me of when the French government decided to spy on BitTorrent networks for copyright infringement (HADOPI).

Defense & Interior asked them not to, saying that it would only make their work harder.

That some geeks would create and democratise new tools not to be caught downloading some random blockbuster, or even just out of principle, and both child pornographers & terrorists would gladly adopt them in a heartbeat, because while they weren’t necessarily the type capable of creating such tools, they had historically been shown to be proficient enough to use them.

Quite hilarious, when you think of it. Some kind of reverse "Think of the Children".

We still got HADOPI however, and now any moron has access to and knows how to get a VPN.

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#90

Post by xyst »

Croftengea wrote: post #75

Now I wonder how long will it take for this tech to reach macOS.

Later this year in the Monterey update.

“ These features are coming later this year in updates to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.*”

— https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

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