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Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

reuters.com

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Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#471

Post by istingray »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #368
istingray wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the context. I like this take as well, it brings up questions about what "ownership" really means. Where do you land on privacy then, do you go radically open or radically closed, something else?

To me ownership means I have exclusive control over who gets to use something and for what purpose. If I own my data, someone processing this data on my behalf has no right or obligation to scan it for illegal content. The fact that this data sometimes sits on hard drives owned by another party just isn't a relevant factor. Presumably I still own my car when it sits in the garage at the shop. They have no right to us…

"Presumably I still own my car when it sits in the garage at the shop."

Brilliant, and illustrates how far off we are. I'll be scaling my level of surveillance following your lead.

Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#472

Post by jakemauer »

dmix wrote: post #379
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This blog post got a lot of commentary on HN a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28118350 . iMessages are already E2E encrypted, but you are correct, iCloud backups are decryptable with a warrant (and that was reportedly added at the FBI's request). But I agree with Ben Thompson's point in that blog post, that it's OK to not have strong, unbreakable encryption be the default, and that it's still p…

iMessage isnt true E2E encryption. Apple could easily decode messages for a 3rd party if they wanted to. This has been widely discussed on HN previously. All they have to do is insert an additional private key in the two party chat, as the connection is ultimately handled centrally. There's a very good reason Signal (and previously Whatsapp) were recommended over iMessage. Not to mention the inability to swap iMessag…

You can turn off iMessages and force the phone to use SMS, however you can't do it on a per-contact or per-conversation basis.

Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#474

Post by nl »

brandon272 wrote: post #470
emodendroket wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could they though? An authoritarian government could just as easily say "if you do not implement this feature, we will not allow you to operate in this country" and refuse to entertain legal challenges.

Who wants to be the government who shuts down Apple? These are politicians we are talking about.

Who wants to be the government that bans Winnie the Pooh?

Ohh... oops.

Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#475

Post by kragen »

new_realist wrote: post #462
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, strongly. Let's say you're authoritarian government EvilGov. Before this announcement, if you went to Apple and said "we want you to push this spyware to your iPhones", Apple would and could have easily pushed back both in the court of public opinion and the court of law. Now though, Apple is already saying "We'll take this database of illegal image hashes provided by the government and use it to scan you…

Authoritarian governments have never needed preexisting technical gizmos in order to abuse their citizens. Look at what Russia and the Nazis did with no magic tech at all. Privacy stems from valuing human rights, not easily disproven lies about it being difficult to actually implement the spying.

On the contrary, the reason Stalin and Hitler could enact repressive measures unprecedented in human history was precisely new technological developments like the telephone, the battle tank, and IBM cards. Bad people will never value human rights; getting privacy from bad people requires you to make it actually difficult to implement the spying, rather than just lie about it. That's why the slogan says, "cypherpunks write code."

Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#476

Post by hypothesis »

callmeal wrote: post #286
js2 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Apple can’t even keep settings values correctly.

After they introduced AirTags I went and disabled item detection on all my devices. Yesterday I went into settings and guess what, that feature is enabled again. On all my devices! I’m not sure when that happened, but my guess would be that latest iOS update caused that…

My point is, you will only have things working to the extent you have testing for, and test coverage is likely less robust for less popular features or where perception tells developers that “no one is going turn that mega-feature off”.

Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#477

Post by simion314 »

zepto wrote: post #358
zionic wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false information, the scanning system is highly generalized to finding any type of photo via fuzzy matched perceptual hashes. It can target a pride flag just as easily as CP.

No, what you have said is bullshit. The perceptual hashes are not generalized. They do not match ‘child porn’ or ‘pride flag’. They match specific photos from a database. You might argue that that database could contain a specific photo of a pride flag. You would be right, but there are safeguards against that. The system will not trigger with just one match. A set of multiple images must match. So no, the system won…

>A set of multiple images must match.

How many exactly? The threshold is secret, it could be 1 or 2 or maybe it is dynamic and depends on stuff like your identity.

Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#478

Post by zepto »

shuckles wrote: post #107
dpedu wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is to say face scanning is equally insidious as the new feature?

The technical risk to user privacy - if your threat model is a coerced Apple building surveillance features for nation state actors - is exactly the same between CSAM detection and Photos intelligence which sync results through iCloud. In fact, the latter is more generalizable, has no threshold protections, and so is likely worse.

Exactly this. The whole thing is a red herring. If Apple wanted to go evil, they can easily do so, and this very complex CSAM mechanism is the last thing that will help them.

Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#479

Post by anonymouswacker »

If you recently purchased an iPhone with your Credit Card, now is the time to file a dispute. I called my company (the American one), and the person I was connected to was instantly aware when I mentioned my Apple phone was now spying on me. 5 minutes later I have a dispute and some semblance of hope. YMMV of course, but what other choice do we have than to hit them in their pocket book on our way out of their walled garden?

Re: Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources

#480

Post by polishdude20 »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #439

Good. I would be furious if I worked there. After the San Bernardino case, I viewed them as the paragon of privacy and security, to the extent I ignored most criticisms, including their lack of support for right-to-repair and concerns over App Store rejections. All of that is back on the table for me after this decision. It is out-of-step with everything they've been doing up to this point, and it makes me wonder who…

What's fishy to me is the fact that they are letting this be known. Like, if you're trying to capture people who share CSAM or have it on their phone, why would you go around saying that you can now scan for it?

I think this announcement would have been well known to cause a major outrage so why say anything? I'm wondering if this is a cover up for something else. Get people talking about this in the news and getting outraged about it while something else goes unnoticed.

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