Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes even less sense, given that they are currently doing this with your iCloud photos. Now they have this tool that can match to a database of photos, how do we know they wouldn't use this to identify non-sexual photos? Maybe Tim Cook wouldn't, what about the next CEO? And the one after that?
What makes you think that Apple has a database of actual child sex abuse images? Does that feel like a thing you'd be OK with? "Oh, this is Jim, he's the guy who keeps our archive of sex abuse photographs here at One Infinite Loop" ? If you feel OK with that at Apple, how about at Facebook? Tencent? What about the new ten-person SV start-up would-be Facebook killer whose main founder had a felony conviction in 1996 f…
The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
261–270 of 440 posts
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#262The other issue with these hashes is non-robustness to adversarial attacks. Simply rotating the image by a few degrees, or slightly translating/shearing it will move the hash well outside the threshold. The only way to combat this would be to use a face bounding box algorithm to somehow manually realign the image.
In my admittedly limited experience in image hashing, typically you extract some basic feature and transform the image before hashing (eg darkest corner in the upper left or look for verticals/horizontals and align). You also take multiple hashes of the images to handle various crops, black and white vs color. This increases robustness a bit but overall yea you can always transform the image in such a way to come up…
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs... > Similar patterns abound nationwide, suggesting that Karma's career was not unusual. Lex, a drug detection dog in Illinois, alerted for narcotics 93 percent of the time during roadside sniffs, but was wrong in more than 40 percent of cases. Sella, a drug detection dog in Florida, gave false alerts 53 percent of the time. Bono, a drug detection dog in Vi…
Out of how many dogs? We’re these outliers or the regular thing?
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#264Also, Apple could ignore images from the device camera - since those will never match.
This is also in stark contrast to the task faced by photo copyright hunters. They don’t have the luxury of only focusing on those who handle tens of thousands of copyrighted photos. They need to find individual violations because that’s what they are paid to do.
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what do you think the content moderation teams employed by Facebook, YouTube, et al. do all day?
There's a big difference in the expectation of privacy between what someone posts on "Facebook, Youtube, et al" and what someone takes a picture of but doesn't share.
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not nearly as happy to hear that as you might think. California is currently the heart of power of the US tech industry, which means they hold outsized power over the rest of the US and the world. That means illiberal values growing there are going to have similarly outsized effects
I think you mean liberal values. The paradox of the left includes censorship, gun control, etc..
Liberal values are liberty/freedom, consent of the governed, and equality before the law. All other liberal values build off of these three as a base. This implies that Non-liberal (or illiberal) values are the opposition of liberal values through censorship, gun control, etc like you mentioned.
Liberals in the modern US political sense refers to Neo-liberals. Neo-liberal and liberal are two very different things which is why the term liberal value doesn't necessarily correspond to neo-liberal beliefs.
Additionally, "the left" by and large does not support neo-liberalism. "The left" is violently against the aforementioned censorship, gun control, etc. Reading any socialist or communist literature will make this abundantly clear.
Examples:
- George Orwell on the Right to bear Arms: "The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do, they cannot give the factory worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see it stays there."
- George Orwell on Freedom of Speech: "Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen."
- Karl Marx on the Right to bear Arms: "Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary"
- Karl Marx on Freedom of Speech: "The absence of freedom of the press makes all other freedoms illusory. One form of freedom governs another just as one limb of the body does another. Whenever a particular freedom is put in question, freedom in general is put in question"
- Karl Marx on Freedom of Speech: "Censorship has outlived its time; where it still exists, it will be regarded as a hateful constraint which prohibits what is openly said from being written"
- Karl Marx on Freedom of Speech: "You cannot enjoy the advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconveniences. You cannot pluck the rose without its thorns!"
If you want I can dig up more quotes but those are the ones that were easy to fetch and any more risks turning this into even more of a wall of text.
My point being, your issues with "the left" are misdirected and are better focused towards Neo-liberalism and/or Neo-conservatism. "The left" does and has always been one of the primary guardians of liberal ideology. Hell "the left" is where a significant portion of the liberal ideology that the United States is founded on originated from.
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gigs of software updates and podcast episodes are regularly downloaded to phones without being noticed. How frequently do most people look at their camera roll? I'd be surprised if it's more than a few times a week on average. Does an attacker even need access to the phone? If iCloud is syncing your photos, your phone will eventually see all your pictures. Unless I've misunderstood how this works, the attacker only n…
> I'd be surprised if it's more than a few times a week on average. For me it's probably 5-7 times per day , but I also take a lot of photos. I think a few times a week is probably low-balling it, even for an average.
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cryptography is most likely done at a higher level than the perception comparison and is quite likely done to protect the CSAM hashes than your privacy. My interpretation of this is that they still use some sort of a perception based matching algorithm they just encrypt the hashes and then use some “zero knowledge proof” when comparing the locally generated hashes against the list, the result of which would be ju…
> the result of which would be just that X hashes marched but not which X That means you can't prove an incriminating file was not deleted even if you're the victim of a false positive. So they will suspect you and put you through the whole police investigation routine.
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#269I've also implemented perceptual hashing algorithms for use in the real world. Article is correct, there really is no way to eliminate false positives while still catching minor changes (say, resizing, cropping, or watermarking). I'm sure I'm not the only person with naked pictures of my wife. Do you really want a false positive to result in your intimate moments getting shared around some outsourced boiler room for…
Somehow I doubt we would ever get such transparency, even though it would be the right thing to do in such a situation.
Re: The Problem with Perceptual Hashes
#270Given all the zero day exploits on iOS I wonder if it's now going to be viable to hack someone's phone and upload child porn to their account. Apple with happily flag the photos and then, likely, get those people arrested. Now they have to, in practice, prove they were hacked which might be impossible. Will either ruin their reputation or put them in jail for a long time. Given past witch hunts it could be decades be…
This is already possible using other services (Google Drive, gmail, Instagram, etc.) that already scan for CP.