Earlier quoted context omitted.
And any mistakes would be caught by the manual review.
So now Apple gets to paw through your images without a warrant or consent?
You consent in the terms of service for iCloud Photos.
One Bad Apple
211–220 of 557 posts
Re: One Bad Apple
#212I appreciate just about everything about this post, but this part keeps getting lost in everything I see written about it: >As noted, Apple says that they will scan your Apple device for CSAM material. If they find something that they think matches, then they will send it to Apple. The problem is that you don't know which pictures will be sent to Apple. It's iCloud Photos. Apple has explicitly said it's iCloud photos…
The entire technical infrastructure to scan your entire device for arbitrary content is being built and deployed. The only change necessary to scan other files is changing a path and that's configuration that could even be silently done per-device.
>The entire technical infrastructure to scan your entire device for arbitrary content is being built and deployed.
It's a proprietary OS. This literally could exist already and you would have zero clue.
Re: One Bad Apple
#213> Apple's license agreement says that they own the operating system, but that doesn't give them permission to search whenever they want or to take content.
If this is true, how has this gotten past Apple's legal team? Are they not aware it would be a flagrant violation of the law?
Re: One Bad Apple
#214I'm honestly shocked that Apple is buying into this because it's one of those well-intentioned ideas that is just incredibly bad. It also goes to show you can justify pretty much anything by saying it fights terrorism or child exploitation. We went through this 20+ years ago when US companies then couldn't export "strong" encryption (being stronger than 40 bits if you can believe that). Even at the time that was ridi…
> Will Apple's system identify such photos and lead to people getting prosecuted for their own photos?
No, no, no. As has been said a billion times by now, this system matches copies of specific CSAM photographs in the NCMEC’s database.
Re: One Bad Apple
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was parents arrested over bath time and playing in the yard sprinklers, photos being processed at photo mats, will the same thing happen by apple mistakenly reporting parents? No, because they’re not identifying content, they’re matching it against a set of already-known CSAM that NCMEC maintains. As you go on to say, telecoms and other companies already do this. Apple just advanced the state of the art when…
A set of unverified hashes that you hope only came from NCMEC. Telecoms do this on their own devices - not yours. Apple just opened the door for constant searches of your digital devices. If you think it will stop at CSAM you have never read a history book - the single biggest user of UKs camera system originally intended for serious crimes are housing councils checking to see who didn't clean up after their dog.
> A set of unverified hashes that you hope only came from NCMEC. Telecoms do this on their own devices - not yours.
Yes, those are the main things we’re concerned about.
> Apple just opened the door for constant searches of your digital devices.
Specifically, it opens the door to them scanning content which is then end-to-end encrypted, which is the main problem.
I think the jury is out on whether this capability will be abused. Apple has said they will reject requests to use it for other purposes, but who really knows whether they will end up being forced to add hashes that aren’t CSAM?
I agree that both of these are potential problems.
Re: One Bad Apple
#216> To reiterate: scanning your device is not a privacy risk, but copying files from your device without any notice is definitely a privacy issue. I think the article is wrong about this. Or, right-but-situationally-irrelevant. As far as I can tell from Apple's statements, they're doing this only to photos which are being uploaded to iCloud Photos. So, any photo this is happening to is one that you've already asked App…
So.. how well does "human review" work with copyright on youtube? This is basically fearmongering, and saying "if you're not a pedo, you have nothing to fear", installing the tech on all phones, and then using that tech to find the next wikileaks leaker (who was the first person with this photo), trump supporters (just add the trump-beats-cnn-gif to the hashes), anti-china protesters (winnie the pooh photos), etc. Th…
> just add the trump-beats-cnn-gif to the hashes
They could literally do this right now server-side and nobody would ever know.
Re: One Bad Apple
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
A set of unverified hashes that you hope only came from NCMEC. Telecoms do this on their own devices - not yours. Apple just opened the door for constant searches of your digital devices. If you think it will stop at CSAM you have never read a history book - the single biggest user of UKs camera system originally intended for serious crimes are housing councils checking to see who didn't clean up after their dog.
> A set of unverified hashes that you hope only came from NCMEC. Telecoms do this on their own devices - not yours. Yes, those are the main things we’re concerned about. > Apple just opened the door for constant searches of your digital devices. Specifically, it opens the door to them scanning content which is then end-to-end encrypted, which is the main problem. I think the jury is out on whether this capability wil…
Apple gave up in the face of China. Why not the US too?
Re: One Bad Apple
#218I appreciate just about everything about this post, but this part keeps getting lost in everything I see written about it: >As noted, Apple says that they will scan your Apple device for CSAM material. If they find something that they think matches, then they will send it to Apple. The problem is that you don't know which pictures will be sent to Apple. It's iCloud Photos. Apple has explicitly said it's iCloud photos…
The use of the detection algorithm is for iCloud only today . Now that the technology is on-board the device, how many lines of codes do you think it will take to scan the full photo-roll? Do you think that this ability will not tempt LEA, law makers, governments, to push for that ever-so-small change to the code, either for blanket monitoring (see if China is not tempted, using their own database of "illegal" conten…
>The use of the detection algorithm is for iCloud only today.
Yes, which is what I was saying in my comment. If or when it comes to Apple changing this then I would agree it's a battle worth fighting, but that is not what is happening here and that is not what I was correcting in this article itself.
>The main issue is that the wall has been breached:
The wall was breached when we opted to run proprietary OS systems. You have zero clue what is going on in that OS and whether it's reporting; you have to trust the vendor on some level and Apple is being fairly transparent here. I would be far more worried if they did this without saying anything at all.
Re: One Bad Apple
#219NCMEC has essentially shows that they have zero regard for privacy and called all privacy activists "screeching voices of the minority". At the same time, they're at the center point of a highly opaque, entrenched (often legally mandated) censorhip infrastructure that can and will get accounts shut down irrecoverably and possibly people's homes raided, on questionable data: In one of the previous discussions, I've se…
> I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper. I'm the author. I've worked with different parts of NCMEC for years. (I built the initial FotoForensics service in a few days. Before I wrote the first line of code, I was in phone calls with NCMEC about my reporting requirements.) Over time, this relationship grew. Some years, I was in face-to-f…
> someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact.
What you are saying here kind of sidetracks the actual problem those critics have though, doesn't it? The problem is not the acknowledgement of how bad child abuse is. The problem is whether we can trust the people who claim that everything they do, they do it for the children. The problem is damaged trust.
And I think your last paragraph illustrates why child abuse is such an effective excuse, if someone criticizes your plan, just avoid and go into how bad child abuse really is.
I'm not accusing you of anything here by the way, I like the article and your insight. I just see a huge danger in the critics and those who actually want to help with this problem being pitted against each other by people who see the topic of child abuse as nothing but a convenient carrier for their goals, the ones that have actually heavily damaged a lot of trust.