311–320 of 860 posts
So, no matter the criticism, Apple won't seriously be pressured to reverse course, and after that the door is open on incremental increases in content monitoring.
(Not to mention the problems that could arise from false positives.)
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Because if (willBeUploaded) { scanPhoto(); } can become if (true) { scanPhoto(); } Obviously, this is stupidly oversimplified, I have no idea how Apple has structured their code. But the fact of the matter is, if the scanning routine is already on the phone, and the photos are on the phone, all anyone has to do is change which photos get scanned by the routine...
Right, but the CSAM scanning routine is absurdly narrow and difficult to use for detecting anything but CSAM, whereas a general purpose hash matching algorithm really is just a few lines of code. This whole ‘now that they have a scanner it’s easier’ reasoning doesn’t make sense. iOS already had numerous better matching algorithms if your goal is to do general spying.
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That is, it seems like Apple really wanted to preserve "end-to-end" encryption,“ … except they still have not mentioned anything about E2E encryption… and they currently don’t encrypt icloud backups. You would think apple would get ahead of this story and mention … or maybe they don’t have any E2E plans at all.
CSAM scanning is probably the easiest thing they could do to satisfy this demand, and if you don't use iCloud Photos, you're not affected by it at all. As far as encrypted backups go, it's an open question whether they want to deal with the legal and support headaches that such a change would bring. If they continued to do nothing, Congress might force their hand by legislatively outlawing stronger encryption - they…
Exactly the same with the phone if you forget your PIN/passcode. So they already do this.
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Exactly. They already analysed photos on your phone for search . They don’t in fact do CSAM detection on the photos on your phone. But why are people only objecting now when they were already doing on-device analysis? CSAM detection is a complete red herring. It is less of a general purpose scanning mechanism than the search function that was already there.
They're doing on device analysis, but there isn't any process by which an image of a hotdog will be sent to someone else without my knowledge.
If a bit can be flipped to make the CSAM detector go evil, surely it can be flipped to make photo search go evil, or spotlight start reporting files that match keywords for that matter.
There is nothing special about this CSAM detector except that it’s narrower and harder to repurpose than most of the rest of the system.
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> But with Apple's CSAM proposal is NOT possible to have an iPhone that Apple isn't continuously scanning. As currently implemented, iOS will only scan photos to be uploaded to iCloud Photos. If iCloud Photos is not enabled, then Apple isn't scanning the phone.
Woops, you're right, thanks for the correction. I think the issue is that, as Ben Thompson pointed out, the only thing preventing them from scanning other stuff now is just policy , not capability , and now that Pandora's box is open it's going to be much more difficult to resist when a government comes to them and says "we want you to scan messages for subversive content".
I could maybe understand the new implementation if Apple had announced they'd also be enabling E2E encryption of everything in iCloud, and explained it as "this is the only way we can prevent CSAM from being stored on our servers."
Regarding smartphones, I wonder if we’ve just lost a grip on what it means to have privacy. Even our expectations for privacy have degraded and eroded over time. We just carry this device with our life encoded in a flash chip with keys to cloud access. Life . Everything from emails to our walking gait, photos, text, history, health records, etc is stored on this one device. Dictators of the past would have a field da…
Why ham radio? That doesn’t make sense. There’s no privacy there by law. It is by nature a completely non anonymous medium. Not only that if a country shuts down its comms the hams are all on a nice list for their shit to be confiscated. Im not a ham because of some romanticised dystopia avoidance. It’s just fun to make things that you can talk to people on :)
> nice list for their shit to be confiscated.
I am not sure if this would go well in the USA.
"The ark of the covenant is open and now all your faces are going to melt" - to paraphrase "The Thick of It". Prior to this when a government tapped Apple on the shoulder asking to scan for what they (the government) deem illicit material, Apple could have feasibly say "we cannot do this, the technology does not exist". Now the box is open, the technology does exist, publicly and on the record - Now we are but a nati…
And not only that, but with a little footnote saying "* Features available in the U.S." - in other words, publicly and on the record: this can be switched on and off on per jurisdiction. If another jurisdiction comes and says "here's my list of hashes of illegal images", how can Apple say "sorry, can't do..."?
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> But with Apple's CSAM proposal is NOT possible to have an iPhone that Apple isn't continuously scanning. As currently implemented, iOS will only scan photos to be uploaded to iCloud Photos. If iCloud Photos is not enabled, then Apple isn't scanning the phone.
>As currently implemented, iOS will only scan photos to be uploaded to iCloud Photos. If iCloud Photos is not enabled, then Apple isn't scanning the phone. Except for the "oops, due to an unexpected bug in our code, every image, document, and message on your device was being continuously scanned" mea culpa we will see a few months after this goes live.
I stopped my Apple Music subscription and downgraded iCloud to free, then donated a year of those fees to the EFF. $13/month is nothing to Apple, and I really regret it since photos in iCloud is really convenient, however it feels unethical to contribute to the Apple services system when it will inevitably be used to hurt people like dissidents and whistle blowers. It is arrogant to blow off security and human rights…
They just lost a few thousands from me alone not upgrading all my iDevices for next model year. Savings go to privacy advocacy organizations.
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> But with Apple's CSAM proposal is NOT possible to have an iPhone that Apple isn't continuously scanning. As currently implemented, iOS will only scan photos to be uploaded to iCloud Photos. If iCloud Photos is not enabled, then Apple isn't scanning the phone.
Woops, you're right, thanks for the correction. I think the issue is that, as Ben Thompson pointed out, the only thing preventing them from scanning other stuff now is just policy , not capability , and now that Pandora's box is open it's going to be much more difficult to resist when a government comes to them and says "we want you to scan messages for subversive content".