Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 323 posts

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#181

Post by swiley »

oarsinsync wrote: post #47
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody except of a tiny group of nerdy guys I think you oversimplify this by a lot. No, Apple reputation won't be severely damaged by this move immediately. But I do believe that those "nerdy guys" did a lot to push the Apple brand, and a big part of that push was due to security and privacy. Until recently Apple was always the "privacy brand" and it was hard to argue against it without going the full FSF route of…

> But I do believe that those "nerdy guys" did a lot to push the Apple brand We sure did. We're also ignoring all the celebrities that helped to push the Apple brand (remember the iPod and it's terrible but iconic white headphones?). Popular culture has a much stronger influence on Apple's standing with non-nerds, than nerds do. We like to think we're important, and that people value our opinions, but increasingly th…

I Was the reason my family switched from Windows and Linux to OSX back when it was popular among hackers. They had seen the ads with celebrities for years and it didn't move them the way I did. I thought we finally had a unix-like OS that we could all standardize on without my mom freaking out at Gnome and for a time that was true.

They remind me every time I bring up stuff like this that I was the one who pushed them to use Apple. In retrospect I wish I had taken FOSS more seriously.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#182

Post by idunnoman »

samrolken wrote: post #134
idunnoman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main issue is just that Pandora's box is now open. Once you make this move, you can't go backwards. If you'll indulge me, would you bet $1000 that this style of scanning isn't expanded in the next 3 years to include non-CSAM content?

I will take you up on that bet. Feel free to contact me and we can set it up.

Would you take the 10 year version of that bet?

I'm less interested in the actual bet. I'm more interested in trying to understand if we both think this system will eventually be abused.

If you WOULD take the 10 year version, would you take an open ended "some point in the future, this will be abused" bet?

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#183

Post by cageface »

nicce wrote: post #164
cageface wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the evidence for this?

In iOS 15 beta, there is option to recover backup with some authentication key. There is no use for that without E2EE.

If that was the plan why wouldn't Apple announce that alongside this to avoid the massive PR hit?

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#184

Post by GeekyBear »

larschdk wrote: post #136
gabrielblack wrote: post #96

My opinion about: 1. Every pedophile know about the existence of this system, so I don't think it will be useful to fight those monster, maybe only marginally; 2. Anyway, is that legal ? Even if some crazy store material on his Apple hardware isn't that illegal search non usable in law courts ? 3. Child abuse is often used as Trojan horse to introduce questionable practice. What if: - the system is used to looking fo…

5. The system can easily be abused by governments or malicious actors to frame innocent people. People merely suspected of keeping such images are de-facto punished and stripped of rights even without standing before a judge or getting a conviction.

Google has been scanning your entire account for kiddie porn for the past decade.

>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account

https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...

Their system can easily be abused by governments or malicious actors to frame innocent people.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#185

Post by alexvoda »

xvector wrote: post #154
gefhfff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No nerdy guy pushes apple for security and privacy. It is all closed source with data leaking by default - partially not possible to turn off. They rather push devices like librem 5, Pine phone, Fairphone with /e/os, but not Apple...

You can't seriously be recommending a Librem 5 for mom and grandpa? That's absurd. The thing barely functions. As the parent commenter noted, Apple was really one of the only reasonable recommendations from privacy-oriented nerdy guys to their friends and family, if they didn't want to go the out-of-touch-with-reality route by recommending the phones you listed.

As I mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, when talking about privacy and security you need to talk about threat models. Privacy-oriented is not a single direction. Those recommending iPhones to parrents have a different threat model than those choosing FLOSS devices.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#186

Post by GeekyBear »

daenz wrote: post #6

An Apple recruiter recently reached out to me. I am in a fortunate position to turn down opportunities, so I made sure to explain that I am not interested in working for a company that is at the forefront of enabling further infringement on people's privacy. If you are able to push back, do it in any small way that you can.

> I am not interested in working for a company that is at the forefront of enabling further infringement on people's privacy

Conducting scans on device instead of on server is your idea of infringement of privacy?

Apple's system keeps everything off their servers until there is an instance where many images on device match known examples of child porn and a human review is triggered.

Google's system scans everything on server, so a single false positive is open to misuse by anyone who can get a subpoena.

We've seen Google data misused to persecute the innocent before.

>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#187

Post by samrolken »

idunnoman wrote: post #182
samrolken wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will take you up on that bet. Feel free to contact me and we can set it up.

Would you take the 10 year version of that bet? I'm less interested in the actual bet. I'm more interested in trying to understand if we both think this system will eventually be abused. If you WOULD take the 10 year version, would you take an open ended "some point in the future, this will be abused" bet?

I would probably take a 10 year version of that bet.

I would probably also take a more broad version of that bet, if we agreed upon a good definition of "abuse".

10 years is tricky though, because this topic has a political angle about it.

I look at this stuff as a political move by Apple as much as anything else. There's a lot of political pressure around encryption, and the "think of the children" angle is very compelling for a lot of people. This CSAM voucher system is cleverly designed to handle that concern without compromising privacy or security for anyone who isn't uploading multiple previously-known CSAM images to their iCloud Photo Library.

How this political situation will unfold over the next 10 years is hard to say. I hope for the best. But it's important for threats to privacy and security to be challenged.

I have wished for more legitimate and valid criticism of this system. Almost every criticism that I've seen is based on plain misunderstandings of how the system works, which isn't helpful.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#188

Post by LatteLazy »

simonh wrote: post #123
gabrielblack wrote: post #96

My opinion about: 1. Every pedophile know about the existence of this system, so I don't think it will be useful to fight those monster, maybe only marginally; 2. Anyway, is that legal ? Even if some crazy store material on his Apple hardware isn't that illegal search non usable in law courts ? 3. Child abuse is often used as Trojan horse to introduce questionable practice. What if: - the system is used to looking fo…

Of course it would be possible to implement content search, profiling and reporting mechanisms for such content, but this seems to be a singularly bad platform for that sort of search. The image profiles are part of the OS so there's no mechanism to deliver image profiles separately for different countries. Also when the threshold number of matching images is reached, the matches are reported to a manual reviewer at…

>The image profiles are part of the OS so there's no mechanism to deliver image profiles separately for different countries

Haven't Apple already said it WILL be country specific?

>Apple’s new feature for detection of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) content in iCloud Photos will launch first in the United States, as 9to5Mac reported yesterday. Apple confirmed today, however, that any expansion outside of the United States will occur on a country-by-country basis depending on local laws and regulations.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/06/apple-says-any-expansion-of-c...

I think they'd need to be country-aware at least, otherwise the FBI or whoever will get reports for all people on earth when they presumably don't need them for anyone outside the US?

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#189

Post by hnrodey »

GeekyBear wrote: post #186
daenz wrote: post #6

An Apple recruiter recently reached out to me. I am in a fortunate position to turn down opportunities, so I made sure to explain that I am not interested in working for a company that is at the forefront of enabling further infringement on people's privacy. If you are able to push back, do it in any small way that you can.

> I am not interested in working for a company that is at the forefront of enabling further infringement on people's privacy Conducting scans on device instead of on server is your idea of infringement of privacy? Apple's system keeps everything off their servers until there is an instance where many images on device match known examples of child porn and a human review is triggered. Google's system scans everything…

>Conducting scans on device instead of on server is your idea of infringement of privacy?

It's an infringement on my right to freedom of speech. Client-side scanning merely opens the door for my device to censor me from sending any message of my choosing and impacts my ability to freely communicate. What is today child abuse, tomorrow is health information and further descends to political and religious memes, or whatever other content is deemed problematic.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#190

Post by salawat »

GeekyBear wrote: post #186
daenz wrote: post #6

An Apple recruiter recently reached out to me. I am in a fortunate position to turn down opportunities, so I made sure to explain that I am not interested in working for a company that is at the forefront of enabling further infringement on people's privacy. If you are able to push back, do it in any small way that you can.

> I am not interested in working for a company that is at the forefront of enabling further infringement on people's privacy Conducting scans on device instead of on server is your idea of infringement of privacy? Apple's system keeps everything off their servers until there is an instance where many images on device match known examples of child porn and a human review is triggered. Google's system scans everything…

>Conducting scans on device instead of on server is your idea of infringement of privacy?

Why are you asking if the poster still beats their wife?

(More specifically, you're pre-supposing scanning must happen, which by itself is a highly debatable assertion)

Your point with Google is absolutely sound, but you seem to stop short of actually accepting that actual privacy (no peeking damnit) is dead on arrival. This is a case of rhetorical stealth goalpost moving whether you intended that or not.

Post reply on HN