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An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

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Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#361

Post by salawat »

kktkti9 wrote: post #356
45ure wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure what to do about it For starters, please give up the defeatist attitude. They deserve the frontlash; even if it serves no purpose, as you describe it. Apple have placed 'Privacy' at the core of their messaging, in order to sell their high-end products. In comparison to the already excessive pearl clutching based on moral panic within the ecosystem e.g. sanitising and censoring language and apps. This is…

They’ll scan content if you have it set to goto iCloud so as to avoid being an accomplice. Turn off sync to iCloud, make local backups only. Who is to say politicians who started threatening tech companies publicly haven’t made threats behind closed doors about Apple maybe being on the hook as an accomplice for distribution? My company only exists because our CEO had input on an executive order years ago. We hardly “…

What we should really be hammering on I think is the vendor lock-in, walled garden, and monopolistic aspects.

To me this CP scanning nonsense is Apple waving a carrot in front of the Establishment to get the Anti-Trust heat off, while selling everyone else on further degrading privacy through a slam dunk deliverable to satisfy the short-game players, but that's just me.

Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#363

Post by nbzso »

parasubvert wrote: post #299
nbzso wrote: post #144

Apple is forgetting the network effect of professionals that made them billionaires. I personally evangelized my clients in the past for years to switch to Apple ecosystem. In my view this is weaponization of personal devices on a mass scale with clear intent of normalization of surveillance state on a global level. The fact that this comes after NSO spyware investigation speaks volumes. They don't care about privacy…

As a fellow professional, I think this is kind of nonsense. Apple (and all these companies) also operate in a world with a populace that WANTS surveillance for these areas, does not agree that it is a slippery slope, and has voted in governments where that eventually will force Apple to install an even worse back door. The Linux and FOSS movement have never been up to the end user device challenge, and they too opera…

Sorry. I am biased on "political" solutions. In the country where I live politicians are just mercenaries for hire.

Most of them are direct successors of communist apparatus or political project of inner circles with economical power.

Looking at the EU legislators, they will like Apple idea a lot, so my options are limited to technical evangelism for people that care.

Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#364

Post by kktkti9 »

salawat wrote: post #361
kktkti9 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll scan content if you have it set to goto iCloud so as to avoid being an accomplice. Turn off sync to iCloud, make local backups only. Who is to say politicians who started threatening tech companies publicly haven’t made threats behind closed doors about Apple maybe being on the hook as an accomplice for distribution? My company only exists because our CEO had input on an executive order years ago. We hardly “…

What we should really be hammering on I think is the vendor lock-in, walled garden, and monopolistic aspects. To me this CP scanning nonsense is Apple waving a carrot in front of the Establishment to get the Anti-Trust heat off, while selling everyone else on further degrading privacy through a slam dunk deliverable to satisfy the short-game players, but that's just me.

If the public isn’t going to push back against establishment politics looking like they did 100 years ago, good luck.

Like waves and particles; it starts with individuals changing their behavior.

But we’d all rather sit around debating ephemeral abstraction (a lot like religion), reconfirming math and the physical universe still work as discovered years ago, as we’re all still “rich enough” the bottom falling out hasn’t gotten to us yet, political problems are for the poor.

Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#365

Post by dcow »

cinquemb wrote: post #137
dcow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be if y’all slapped the AGPLv3 on your code instead of Apache/MIT/BSD. If we were to perform a cyber analog of what the founding fathers did for the USA 250 years ago, it would be something along the lines of declaring all software free from the tyranny of corporate control and state oppression. Free in perpetuity so that our digital projections onto hardware shall reside comfortably each in their own pursui…

> If we were to perform a cyber analog of what the founding fathers did for the USA 250 years ago, it would be something along the lines of declaring all software free from the tyranny of corporate control and state oppression. … and then proceed to conduct asymmetric warfare against state and corporate cyber systems alike.

If we use servers in China and Russia it’s essentially legal, right?

Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#366

Post by Ceiling »

fragileone wrote: post #281
bottled_poe wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Vote with your feet - Put your money in the pockets of the people aligned to your values. This is impossible. Just like modern democratic voting, you don’t get to vote on an individual policy. You vote on a bundle and that bundle almost certainly includes policies (or in this case “features”) that you don’t agree with.

So? If a corporation (or political party) does a shockingly egregious thing that doesn't align with your values then you absolutely should switch to an alternative that supports your values.

He’s saying that every option is not an ideal option. So there’s nothing to “switch” to.

Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#367

Post by Jenda_ »

the8472 wrote: post #279
Jenda_ wrote: post #269

Notice, for example, that Thunderbird is sending file names and SHA-256 hashes when you open most (e.g. .pdf) attachments, in the clear, to Google. This seems worse to me (in the Apple case, the information is revealed only if enough files from one device match against a predefined hash list) and nobody really cares... I have just tested with a fresh profile with a freshly downloaded thunderbird-78.12.0.tar.bz2 (x64…

At least mozilla lets you disable that, does apple?

Yes, however, there is little practical advantage in this, if nobody knows about it and so nobody turns it off.

Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#368

Post by parasubvert »

nbzso wrote: post #363
parasubvert wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow professional, I think this is kind of nonsense. Apple (and all these companies) also operate in a world with a populace that WANTS surveillance for these areas, does not agree that it is a slippery slope, and has voted in governments where that eventually will force Apple to install an even worse back door. The Linux and FOSS movement have never been up to the end user device challenge, and they too opera…

Sorry. I am biased on "political" solutions. In the country where I live politicians are just mercenaries for hire. Most of them are direct successors of communist apparatus or political project of inner circles with economical power. Looking at the EU legislators, they will like Apple idea a lot, so my options are limited to technical evangelism for people that care.

Fair, in those situations I think FOSS / darknet solutions increasingly will be the only way to have true privacy.

Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#369

Post by seanp2k2 »

bArray wrote: post #41

Honestly I'm glad to see a non-insignificant amount of people in tech take this seriously, especially when the goal Apple announces appears to be for the greater good. It can be hard to stand on the side that doesn't immediately appear to be correct. We have already lost so many freedoms for 'national security' and other such blanket terminology. Just be warned, there will be those that unfairly try to cast this as h…

The thing that gets me about #1 is that if I prefer iOS to Android, there is nothing that can replace iCloud. Google Photos and other apps cannot upload seamlessly in the background as iCloud can. I cannot “restore my iPhone” from a Google Drive backup. Apple uses private APIs for their own software to enable this, so now I must either use iCloud and accept these terms, or make iTunes backups regularly + deal with the inconvenient workarounds required to let things like Google Photos sync everything.

Given that there are two realistic choices in mobile OS these days, both bound to hardware (and update schedules to a combination of mfg + carrier whim), it’s not a great position to be in as a consumer. And yet, what is the alternative? PinePhone?

Re: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning

#370

Post by seanp2k2 »

mirkules wrote: post #342
roenxi wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like it or not, we aren't in control. The typical Apple customer is forking over thousands of dollars. They have substantial control. This isn't like a government where you need a plurality of voters to agree before anything starts to happen. Apple is running software on their phone that will either (a) do nothing or (b) call the police on them. The situation is questionable even for a normal consumer, let alone a…

My question is, who has funded this feature all the way from PoC to product ? How did Apple calculate the ROI on this feature? It’s not like end users are tripping over themselves to have all their photos scanned. Does Apple just have gobs of money to burn on things like this that will not increase its bottom line by even one penny? There is probably funded from somewhere, and I’d like to know who is paying for it.

Probably, as other commenters have said, a mix of behind-the-scenes political pressure to give feds access to phone data for people they’re interested in and an effort to get them to back down on anti-trust and other things that governments are realizing they can milk tech companies for more money on.
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