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Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

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

#191

Post by nicce »

cageface wrote: post #183
nicce wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This whole Child Safety feature was not planned to be announced yet. They tried to fix some missleading leaks. My guess is that they are now preparing well to announce everything in September.

I don’t want to be mean, but sometimes leaks do more harm than good, espcially when they don’t match what is actually coming. Many people are angry here, the most of them have not read actual technical details.

Respected people should be more responsible about what they spread.

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

#192

Post by skinkestek »

WA wrote: post #75
erhk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because apple has to change terms of service to permit this But also this is a terrible argument. As a frog i will not wait until i am boiled to raise complaints.

> Because apple has to change terms of service to permit this Apple's ToS change with every iOS release. You have to accept to continue. Do you ever read them?

I used to read the terms when I was younger and even more stupid than today.

I fully expect someone else does it now and I even think there exist GitHub repos or some SaaS or something (some tldr for eulas?)

(Today I more or less consequently don't read thenm because 1. as a European they aren't valid if they go beyond what European law allows 2. nobody can be expected to read those anyway and if I admit to reading them I just make my life harder.)

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

#193

Post by cageface »

nicce wrote: post #191
cageface wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This whole Child Safety feature was not planned to be announced yet. They tried to fix some missleading leaks. My guess is that they are now preparing well to announce everything in September. I don’t want to be mean, but sometimes leaks do more harm than good, espcially when they don’t match what is actually coming. Many people are angry here, the most of them have not read actual technical details. Respected people…

What is your source for this information?

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

#194

Post by dognotdog »

alexvoda wrote: post #176
threatofrain wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many ways Apple is also the world leader on consumer privacy, pushing for changes when the rest of the industry is walking in the opposite direction. Paying with Apple Pay makes you safer because it gives out minimal payment information; the Target fiasco would've been avoided. Sign in with Apple allows users to provide minimal information in signing up for accounts; the idea that casual users should know how to s…

As always when talking about security and privacy, you need to understand the threat model. Apple protects users from some threats while also becoming itself the biggest threat to users. And this is exactly what Apple wants. This is how you use Stockholm syndrome to entrench a feudal system. The relationship is not 3-way as Apple wants users to believe (Apple the defender, users the victim, third-parties the aggresso…

Framing relationships in this "triangle" is not new. As parent says, reality is a lot more complex, and this kind of frame-of-mind can be very detrimental:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle

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

#195

Post by salawat »

wruza wrote: post #97
skinkestek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If you don't want weapons of mass destruction to exist, don't create them and definitely don't tell anyone (too late). If you don't want tools of mass oppression to exist, don't create them. (We are here now.) The fight against Japan in 1945 was important, as is the fight agains child abuse today. But we will have to live with the choises we make, in the short run like I wrote about above and also in the lon…

We are here now As a sibling commenter noted, we are long past that. I see points of all of you in this subthread and I agree, but this doesn’t answer my last question. Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use. And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be d…

If you've never seen a slippery slope in action, ask someone else if they have. It always starts with something everyone can agree on. It's the inevitable slippage over time as the population replaces itself with people who arrn't intrinsically cognizant of the "before" state and the implicit normalization of deviance that represents. We may only live for about 100 years, but I challenge you to look at the size of the United States Code and what has been specifically carved out as illegal or aberrancies normalized just in 200 years.

It all adds up.

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

#196

Post by simonh »

LatteLazy wrote: post #188
simonh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Unite…

Reporting is country specific and US only yes, but the profiles are delivered baked into the OS. I suspect this is so that pedophiles can't buy a phone mail order from Canada and bypass the system.

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

#197

Post by skinkestek »

wruza wrote: post #97
skinkestek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If you don't want weapons of mass destruction to exist, don't create them and definitely don't tell anyone (too late). If you don't want tools of mass oppression to exist, don't create them. (We are here now.) The fight against Japan in 1945 was important, as is the fight agains child abuse today. But we will have to live with the choises we make, in the short run like I wrote about above and also in the lon…

We are here now As a sibling commenter noted, we are long past that. I see points of all of you in this subthread and I agree, but this doesn’t answer my last question. Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use. And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be d…

> Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use.

You are forgiven if you have missed it but in the wake of Snowden Google and others have hardened their systems massively.

Signal, Matrix and others are actually making it hard to do dragnet surveillance.

> And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.

Because boundaries have been overstepped again. This is a constant battle that we software people have with authorities :-)

There has been an informal truce that they leave our devices alone and we accept that they scan the cloud.

Now things are about to change and we'll respond. We've won before and I think we can do it again.

PS: There are always good reasons.

PPS: We won the last big one: Cryptography software was "munitions" and couldn't be exported until someone took it on them to make a book out of it, ship it to Europe and let cryptography people here scan it.

So according to the argument up front terrorists won, and I guess we should have a lot of problems now, but we don't have.

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

#198

Post by nicce »

cageface wrote: post #193
nicce wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole Child Safety feature was not planned to be announced yet. They tried to fix some missleading leaks. My guess is that they are now preparing well to announce everything in September. I don’t want to be mean, but sometimes leaks do more harm than good, espcially when they don’t match what is actually coming. Many people are angry here, the most of them have not read actual technical details. Respected people…

What is your source for this information?

I don't want to call names, but here is something:

1. On-device scanning is leaked by some well-known people

2. It gets massive attention

3. Not long after, Apple releases their announcement in very odd time

4. If you read all of their material, there are typos and some are clearly in WIP level

5. It does not make sense to announce, since there is reserved event for all of this in the very close future

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

#199

Post by snarf21 »

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…

I think this is a bad move by Apple even if the point is to set up E2EE later. However, one thing that everyone seems to forget is that all these pictures were already being sent un-encrypted to iCloud. ALL of the same issues already completely exist today and were already being scanned and we have heard no outcry. ALL of the same loopholes and unreasonable warrants can be used against you today with all of the un-encrypted data they have on their server right now.

The one thing that occurred to me is that this is almost seems like this is a cya, Section 230 protection in disguise. There has been more discussions about Big Tech and 230, and this is one way to say "Look, we are compliant on our platform. Don't remove our protections or break us up, we are your friend!" It also shouldn't be too surprising given how Apple has behaved in China. They will only push back against the government up until the point it starts to affect profits.

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

#200

Post by cageface »

nicce wrote: post #198
cageface wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your source for this information?

I don't want to call names, but here is something: 1. On-device scanning is leaked by some well-known people 2. It gets massive attention 3. Not long after, Apple releases their announcement in very odd time 4. If you read all of their material, there are typos and some are clearly in WIP level 5. It does not make sense to announce, since there is reserved event for all of this in the very close future

Interesting. It does seem hard to explain why Apple would otherwise do this. Thanks for your arguments.
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