151–160 of 595 posts
On iOS the camera can be accessed before unlocking the phone, and wouldn’t this effectively put illegal image(s) in the targets possession without their knowledge?
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They have a podcast together called Dithering which is pretty good (but not free) - they're friends. I think John's article is better than Ben's, but they're both worth reading. Ben takes the view that unencrypted cloud is the better tradeoff - I'm not sure I agree. I'd rather have my stuff e2ee in the cloud. If the legal requirements around CSAM are the blocker then Apple's approach may be a way to thread the needle…
Friends can disagree. Everyone has their own biases - good and bad. I think it’s always good to keep people’s biases in mind when reading their work.
I like that they disagree - the issue doesn't have an obviously correct answer.
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It's worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I've seen on this topic: https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia... There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.
The EFF wrote a really shitty hit piece deliberately confused the parental management function with the matching against hashes of illegal images. Two different things. From there, a bazillion hot takes followed.
So, three different things.
I don't know how much you know about them, but this is what the EFF's role is. Privacy can't be curtailed uncritically or unchecked. We don't have a way to guarantee that Apple won't change how this works in the future, that it will never be compromised domestically or internationally, or that children and families won't be harmed by it.
It's an unauditable black box that places one of the highest, most damaging penalties in the US legal system against a bet that it's a perfect system. Working backwards from that, it's easy to see how anything that assumes its own perfection is an impossible barrier for individuals, akin to YouTube's incontestable automated bans. Best case, maybe you lose access to all of your Apple services for life. Worst case, what, your life?
When you take a picture of your penis to send to your doctor and it accidentally syncs to iCloud and trips the CSAM alarms, will you get a warning before police appear? Will there be a whitelist to allow certain people to "opt-out for (national) security reasons" that regular people won't have access to or be able to confirm? How can we know this won't be used against journalists and opponents of those in power, like every other invasive system that purports to provide "authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime[1]".
Someone's being dumb here, and it's probably the ones who believe that fruit can only be good for them.
in "Photos" app, in the bottom right corner there is a "search" icon. When I click it, and entering "beach", I can see photos I've made on the beach (or in the sea, near the beach). What does it mean? My (and your) photos are scanned and analyzed. I've heard literally zero noise about this feature - nobody was complaining (at least not loud enough to let me notice it). So, why the hell all of that fuzz is being raise…
It turns out people liked it when their phone scanned their photos for 'selfie' or 'beach' for them. Apparently tagging 'child porn' on your photos for searching isnt the killer feature someone thought it might be.
> The hypothesis that I have is that Apple wishes to distance itself from checking users’ data. This is best explanation of the whole situation I have read.
Surely they know this will be abused to check user data before it is uploaded to iCloud. All it takes is a willing government.
I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?
No. The CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) scanning is comparing hashes of photos about to be uploaded to iCloud against a specific set of images at NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) which are specific to missing and exploited children. It is not machine learning models looking for nudes or similar. It is not a generalized screening. If enough matched images are found, the images are flagged…
Can you imagine the chaos of a successful collision matching some explicit material being sent as a prank or targeted attack?
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In this TechCrunch interview, Apple believes it is less invasive since no one can be individually targeted. The hashes are hard coded into each iOS release which is the same for all iOS devices. The database is not vulnerable to server side changes. Additionally, FWIW, they do not want to start analyzing entire iCloud photo libraries so this system only analyzes new uploads. https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/intervie…
>The hashes are hard coded into each iOS release Do you have a source on that? Since it is illegal to share those hashes in any way or form. Even people working with photo forensic and big photo sharing sites cannot get access to them. I very much doubt Apple can incorporate them into the iOS release without breaking multiple laws. The hashes themselves can easily be reversed to (bad quality) pictures so having the h…
Source? (The link you provide does not claim that, as far as I could see.)
I really don't see why the scanning would ever be done on the phone instead of on iCloud if it only affects iCloud images. But I do have guesses why.
In-device scanning is used for the feature that warns teens (and if = Biggest mistake Apple has ever done was to roll out three different features at once and announce at the same time. This is creating all sorts of confusion.