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An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

appleprivacyletter.com

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Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#451

Post by silverpepsi »

robertoandred wrote: post #272
digitalsushi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big reason I don't want someone else scanning my phone (and a year later, my laptop) is that last I checked, software is not perfect, and I don't need the FBI getting called on me cause my browser cache smelled funny to some Apple PhD's machine-learning decision. It's the same reason I don't want police having any opportunistic information about me - both of these have an agenda, and so innocent people get pulled…

The chance of you getting enough false positives to reach the flagging threshold is one in a trillion. And then the manual review would catch the error easily. The FBI won’t be called on you.

Manual review. So in other words they're going to go through your private photos unbeknownst to you to decide you're innocent. And you're never even going to know it happened. Wonderful.

What if it really was a very private photo?

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#452

Post by gigel82 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #425
rubyn00bie wrote: post #406

So the M1 has turned me off of Apple products because, quite frankly, I don't want to spend (more) of my time fixing shit a trillion dollar company broke and doesn't care to fix. This though, this will be the nail in the coffin with my 25 year relationship to Apple. I probably wouldn't even have batted an eye at it to be honest, iff, Apple hadn't been selling me on the idea that their platform is "private and secure.…

I have absolutely no comment on Apple that you or anyone else hasn’t made. Except your comments about hash matching, the whole point is it goes to manual confirmation, they don’t just detect an illegal hash and come arrest you. But do you seriously think this isn’t going to be the standard for Android, Windows, ChromeOS, OSX, etc coming at degrees of time or implementation? I know all the Android people are just thin…

I've been trying to get more clarity on this point (`it goes to manual confirmation`) but was unable to. Remember, they're saying this is something that happens on your own device, with your personal photos, not in the cloud.

Is this saying they can randomly choose to upload any personal files (photos) on your device to their servers for a person to look at, because they match a "hash"? Is this not absolutely batshit crazy !?

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#453

Post by croes »

simion314 wrote: post #25
donkeyd wrote: post #4

I recently listened to a Darknet Diaries episode on messaging app Kik. This app is apparently being used by many people to trade child pornography. In this episode, there was some criticism expressed on how Kik doesn't scan all the images on their platform for child pornography. I would really like to hear from people who sign this open letter, how they think about this. Should the internet be a free for all place wi…

My personal opinion is if we could spy on all citizens all the time we could stop all or most of the crimes, do we want this? If you say Yes then stop reading here. Else if you say 100% surveillance is too much then what do you have against people discussing where the line should be drawn? Some person that would sign that letter might be fine with video cameras in say a bank or some company building entrance but he i…

This only finds known pictures of child abuse not new ones and especially it doesn't find the perpetrators or prevent the abuse.

But it creates a infrastructure for all other kind of "criminal" data. I bet sooner or later governments want to include other hashes to find the owners of specific files. Could be bomb creation manuals, could be flyers against a corrupt regime. The sky is the limit and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#454

Post by silverpepsi »

donkeyd wrote: post #68
aidenn0 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't use a service that performs dragnet surveillance on my communication. The US Postal service does not open every single letter to check if it contains illegal material. If I rent a storage unit, the storage company does not open up my boxes to see if I have albums of child pornography. This move by Apple is equivalent. I'm going to turn this around and say that those in favor of Apple's move: "Should the inter…

> The US Postal service does not open every single letter to check if it contains illegal material. You'd be surprised about the amount of packages that gets x-rayed in order to find drugs. But yes, you're 100% right that it's not all of them.

An x-ray is nothing like reading the contents of letters or randomly checking ahipped harddrives and USB sticks for content. I don't know how to clarify legally or conceptually, but I feel confident there is a very clear difference

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#455

Post by teddyh »

toxik wrote: post #64
sandworm101 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. People have been convicted for possession of hand-drawn and computer-generated images. Editing a child's image to make it pornographic is also illegal. So some "deepfake" videos using faces from young celebs are in all likelihood very illegal in many jurisdictions. Images can be illegal if all people are of age, but are portrayed as underage. Many historical dramas take legal advice about this when they have adu…

This topic is really fascinating to me, how we deal with images of bad things. Clearly, murder and assault is fine to reproduce at 100% realism - but even plain consensual sex is forbidden in the US for a wider audience. This reminds me of a classic Swedish movie I watched, I forget its name, it's made in the 70s and contains upskirt panty shots of an actress who is playing a 14-year-old, along with her exploring sex…

The name can probably be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_films_of_the_1...

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#456

Post by zepto »

crocodiletears wrote: post #58
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about this with non-tech people might make the distrust in anything they don’t understand worse. Think vaccines.

Refusing to acknowledge egregious top-down decisions which threaten or violate either one's well-being or some perceived fundamental right has a much worse effect on public trust. "Why didn't you tell me this was going on?" "You're simply too stupid to handle the idea that your betters might occasionally be untrustworthy"

How are you going to argue that it’s bad for parents to be informed when strangers send sexual imagery to their children?

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#457

Post by websites2023 »

whartung wrote: post #366
websites2023 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The obvious conclusion is Apple will start to scan photos kept on device, even where iCloud is not used. Why is this the obvious conclusion?

Partly it falls under the supposition of "if they can, they will". It's also suggested when they tout that they are going to start blurring "naked" pictures, of any kind, sent to children under 14. Which means they need some kind of tech to detect "naked" pictures, locally, across encrypted channels, in order to block them. In theory, this is different tech than CSAM, which is supposed to checking hashes against a gl…

> Partly it falls under the supposition of "if they can, they will".

Hm. But there are many millions of things Apple could do, but haven’t, because it would hurt their business model. So how would what you are proposing they will do help their business model?

> Which means they need some kind of tech to detect "naked" pictures, locally, across encrypted channels, in order to block them.

I know you know this is the case, but to make it clear for anyone reading: Apple is not blocking nude pictures in the kids filter. It’s blurring and giving a message. Again I ask: why would using this technology on non-nude stuff benefit Apple?

Are we worried about Apple or are we worried about the government forcing Apple to do things that this technology enables?

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#458

Post by defaultname »

silverpepsi wrote: post #437
defaultname wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who engaged in such a discussion with a non-technical person is going to defacto seem like an advocate for child pornography, similar to how advocating for encryption can easily be twisted to being pro-crime. Having said that, there is an enormous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering about a pretty tame change. This seems like so much ado about very close to nothing. a) They optionally scan messaged pho…

Why does everyone mention they already did it on cloud like that has any relevance whatsoever? I have never once in my life thought about activating an automatic back up to cloud feature on any phone I have ever owned, for a single second. So yes, it is hella different. This is for all the same reasons I backup personal data only to my NAS and use cloud accounts for generic shit like purchased music backups and nothi…

"Why does everyone mention they already did it on cloud like that has any relevance whatsoever?"

Given that this only applies to photos that are stored to the cloud, it seems like it has total relevance given that for users literally nothing has changed. To argue that there is some fearsome new development requires one to extrapolate into "Well what if..." arguments.

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#459

Post by websites2023 »

echelon wrote: post #351
websites2023 wrote: post #313

It’s astounding how many very smart people are getting this wrong. Perhaps I missed it, but does anywhere on this letter mention that that both of these features are optional? CSAM depends on using iCloud Photos. Don’t rent someone else’s computer if you don’t want them to decide what you can put on it. Content filter for iMessages is for kids accounts only, and can be turned off. Or, even better: skip iMessages for…

Then why do the "CSAM" perceptual hashes live on the device and the checks themselves run on the device? Those hashes could be anything. Your phone is turning into a snitch against you, and the targeted content might be CCP Winnie the Pooh memes or content the people in charge do not like. We are not getting this wrong. Apple is taking an egregious step to satisfy the CCP and FBI. Future US politicians could easily b…

> Future US politicians could easily be blackmailed by the non-illegal content on their phones. This is a jeopardy to our democracy.

US politicians should not be using normie clouds full stop. This is a risk and always has been.

Re: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology

#460

Post by zepto »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #431
zepto wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can see: 1. This is a serious attempt to build a privacy preserving solution to child pornography. 2. The complaints are all slippery slope arguments that governments will force Apple to abuse the mechanism. These are clearly real concerns and even Tim Cook admits that if you build a back door, bad people will use it. However: Child pornography and the related abuse is widely thought of as a massive probl…

Yes. “We must do something , “It’s for the children” , “Even if it saves just one person” . No one has ever used this triple fallacy before. How big do you really think the market is on kiddie porn that there are people storing it plainly on their iPhones and are “safe” because they aren’t uploading it to iCloud? This is bullshit through and through. The best case is this is the step Apple needs to get E2E iCloud sto…

Your position is to simply deny that child porn or predation is a serious problem.

I outlined that this was one of the sides in the debate - I.e. you take position 2, and have no empathy for position 1.

The problem is that this is a political trap. You can’t win position 2 by painting technologists as uncaring or dismissive.

‘Think of the children’ works for a reason.

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