Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

The dumbest idea ever -so glad that I am an Android user.

I 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 and what is abuse without human intervention? And at that point isn't that a vast invasion of privacy to the perfectly innocent? It's different if it's online because that puts it in the public realm or on devices/servers owned by Apple, etc.

The key item in the article is that if enough content is marked contentious apple will automatically decrypt your phone for you and disable your encryption. So apple's not merely helping law enforcement find contentious content, they are enabling a back door that makes phone encryption essentially swiss cheese.

In 5 years: Apple and Google to scan your phones for politically contentious content and automatically remove it for you/report it to the authorities so you can get the proper help you need to understand what you should believe.

I've loved my apple phones for many years now, but it seems this is the end of my relationship with apple. I will be using an open source phone next.

EDIT: It appears they are using perceptual hashes, which are likely much more prone to collisions. The following math does NOT apply to the tech Apple is using.

>> I mean, who's to say that my hash is actually what they think it is...

Let's do the math. assume they are using a UUID for the hash. "For example, the number of random version-4 UUIDs which need to be generated in order to have a 50% probability of at least one collision is 2.71 quintillion" [1]

"The odds of This number is equivalent to generating 1 billion UUIDs per second for about 85 years." And that's for just 1 collision between two random photos. Considering that the pool of bad hashes is not going to be 2.7 quintillion but a fraction of that, this is more than adequate.

And of course they could use a longer checksum if that's the concern. (Not to take a stance on the parent issue, just to explain that hash's are probably a higher standard of proof than DNA matches)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...

I think they are probably just going to match the hashes to known hashes of "bad" images.