Live data from Hacker News

Apple urged to drop plans to scan iMessages, images for sex abuse

aljazeera.com

1–10 of 129 posts

Re: Apple urged to drop plans to scan iMessages, images for sex abuse

#3
Siri a few years into the future: Dave I noticed that when you sent your last tex message my AI determined with a 99% probability that you were driving. I’ll be notifying the local authorities and you will be receiving a citation for that. Please note that after the citation has been paid and you have been through rehabilitation they send me an unlock code so I can reenable your sms account.

Or:

Hi Dave i’ve been noticing that you have been discussing Covid vaccines with your friends. Apple thinks your position on this causes public harm so we will be adding additional information to each of your messages that discuss this subject. Thank you for being part of our team.

Re: Apple urged to drop plans to scan iMessages, images for sex abuse

#7
post #5

Well-intentioned program, but ultimately unforeseeable bad consequences in other areas. Good for Apple for stopping, and good for society to pressure them to stop. Seems like a win-win all around.

Apple is not stopping.

Re: Apple urged to drop plans to scan iMessages, images for sex abuse

#8
post #5

Well-intentioned program, but ultimately unforeseeable bad consequences in other areas. Good for Apple for stopping, and good for society to pressure them to stop. Seems like a win-win all around.

>Good for Apple for stopping

Is there some big news that I missed? Do you have a link to that info?

Re: Apple urged to drop plans to scan iMessages, images for sex abuse

#9
After seeing all these posts here and not hearing much about it outside of this space I’m starting to think that the cost benefit analysis that Apple did was that the profit from very likely convincing parents to spend a little more to get their children an iPhone as their first phone (and probably lock those children into their ecosystem) because of these features was greater than the amount of users who would switch to something else and that any blowback would be diminished because “what about the children”

Re: Apple urged to drop plans to scan iMessages, images for sex abuse

#10
I want to ignore most of this article to complain about an inaccuracy that keeps coming up.

> More broadly, they said the change will break end-to-end encryption for iMessage, which Apple has staunchly defended in other contexts.

But... it wouldn't. The iMessage feature doesn't expose the contents of your message to anyone else under any circumstance.

If you're a child under 13 and your parents have opted in to this feature, you get a choice of seeing naked-pictures sent to you and having your parents be notified that you chose to, and bypassing it with no notifications of anything. (But once you're 13+, no notifications would occur.)

There are potential issues with this, mostly relating to abusive families being controlling. They'd have to do weird things like forcing their teenaged children to keep making new under-13 accounts to actually take advantage of it like that, though. And none of these issues impact the e2e status of iMessage in any way.

Apple really screwed up PR by launching the iMessage feature alongside the scanning-and-reporting iCloud Photos feature. There's so much confusion out there about this.

(The breaking-e2e aspect does exist with the iCloud Photos scanning... not that it's currently e2e, of course.)

Post reply on HN