The judge called the outcome disturbing, as it leaves victimized children as "collateral damage" of privacy protections. As sad as this is, end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning. As an alternative Apple previously tried to do scanning on the phones locally but caught hell for that too. This is one of those unfortunate tradeoffs but I see no alternative to privacy taking priority.
People can also distribute heinous things through snail mail, but we are not yet at the point where the government reads all letters looking for wrongthink. Just because we technically can make a privacy destroying drag net does not mean we should. Had phones existed 250 years ago, I have no doubt the founders would have thought it obvious that a cellphone’s contents were your personal papers which could not be freel…
Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
191–200 of 597 posts
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you have pictures of someones baptism and the kid was nude. Is it CSAM? I think the program would have to say use but morally I'd say no. The issue with client scanning is it has to assume the worst, or they are than liable. If its the person has 20+ different baptism of nude babys well huh that actually might be CSAM because the context of how that concentrated photos implies but even than its hard what if t…
The proposed mechanism was hash matching against known CSAM images, so the baptism photos would not trip the filter because they wouldn’t be hash matches.
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
People can also distribute heinous things through snail mail, but we are not yet at the point where the government reads all letters looking for wrongthink. Just because we technically can make a privacy destroying drag net does not mean we should. Had phones existed 250 years ago, I have no doubt the founders would have thought it obvious that a cellphone’s contents were your personal papers which could not be freel…
Police can absolutely open snail mail with an appropriate warrant when investigating traffickers.
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an image that he did not send off of his device to anyone except his doctor's office, yet Google reached into his private data and scanned it anyway. Google reported him to the police based on a single false positive. To add insult to injury, even after the police contacted Google to tell them that they had cleared him of wrongdoing, Google refused to restore access to his account.
Stop making stuff up man, the image was uploaded to Google Photos servers. > The father uploaded photos of his son’s genitals, which were also backed up on his Google cloud, to the health care provider’s messaging system as requested.
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of banks in UK and EU simply dont offer web access at all.
But you can switch to one that does.
I also need to maintain my own nextcloud, photo sync infrastructure and backups.
Its inconvinient. This is exactly what I talking about.
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. In short, in US law, CSAM is a visual depiction of a real-world act of child sexual abuse. Visual depictions like you're describing are covered under a different law, and I'm not aware of it having a short name. There's a good expert thread on this with links to the relevant federal laws here: https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3lbt7zkvlq...
Currently it is explicitly against the law[0]: (a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that— (1) (A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and (B)is obscene; or ... (b)... (c)Nonrequired Element of…
People have infantilization fetishes - where they wear diapers and shit. You can certainly imagine someone making a cartoon of that in a sexual way.
Adults often don't look their ages. John Mulaney famously had a set about resembling a child when he was 29.
What if someone generated an image that looked like a teenager, but there was a driver's license in the frame that said the person was an adult?
Real people have ages. Imaginary people are imaginary.
What about art from the antiquity when what we would call a teenager would have been treated as an adult? Surely someone painted people having sex before "the age of consent" was a well-defined term. Is it illegal to own that painting?
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of banks in UK and EU simply dont offer web access at all.
But you can switch to one that does.
Some banks limit functionality on web apps, which is annoying.
More importantly, many refuse to provide a decent 2FA other than push notifications inside the app or SMS, which is insecure and EU has mandated its phaseout.
The thing that works for me is to pretend to be clueless and get an old hardware OTP generator, but those are susceptible to impersonation attacks on the bank side.
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#198For CSAM, there's all sorts of monitoring, scanning, identify capturing, etc. But it's all after abuse has taken place, and it seems that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA. This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures. As an aside, if that gets extended to political speech or other non-CSAM materials that are determined to be undesirable, that's a big concern. I can imagine that a conservative state could pass a law banning all porn because they claim it could encourage illegal activities such as prostitution, rape, or CSA.
On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM). There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. Ironically, the groups doing the most to educate and implement protective strategies are the ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc). Even then, a lot of it is just getting clearances, which doesnt prevent people who where not caught or were first timers. Offenders get put on a list/map. This is sort of a half approach. If they are still a threat, they shouldn't be released. Yet if you comb the list and see some of the results, they don't all seem to fit with CSA. I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.
It seems like these laws are more about peddling to the publicist and lawmakers fantasy of incrementally extreme punishment rather than taking a appropriate, data driven, and level-headed approach that actually protects kids. Otherwise they will just keep pushing ham-fisted low-hanging "fixes" like required scanning and IDs to access the internet.
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an image that he did not send off of his device to anyone except his doctor's office, yet Google reached into his private data and scanned it anyway. Google reported him to the police based on a single false positive. To add insult to injury, even after the police contacted Google to tell them that they had cleared him of wrongdoing, Google refused to restore access to his account.
Stop making stuff up man, the image was uploaded to Google Photos servers. > The father uploaded photos of his son’s genitals, which were also backed up on his Google cloud, to the health care provider’s messaging system as requested.
Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in the US, fictional content is legal even if it depicts minors sexually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit... There have been a handful of convictions based on fictional content, but usually the defendants also possessed real CSAM so there wasn't much point in contesting the charges over fictional images.
Clicking on a page linked in your article, the PROTECT Act of 2003[1] (passed a year later), I see: > The PROTECT Act includes prohibitions against obscene illustrations depicting child pornography, including computer-generated illustrations, also known as virtual child pornography. Previous provisions outlawing virtual child pornography... had been ruled unconstitutional... The PROTECT ACT attached an obscenity requ…
> However, the court did not reverse its holding in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition as to virtual child pornography which is not obscene under the Miller standard