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Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

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Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#51

Post by randomhodler84 »

threeseed wrote: post #27
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It scans your photos, for known CSAM images No, it scans photos for arbitray (fancy) hashes, and Apple chooses to limit it to CSAM images. Nothing about the tech prevents it from being expanded to other kinds of images. And from what I understand, nothing prevents it from being expanded to other filetypes either, does it? The only thing that ties this tech to CSAM images is Apples promise (and claim) to keep the sc…

This sort of argument is just bizarre to me. If you think Apple is on a slippery slope and will just expand this feature without any consideration then why have an issue now ? Apple already has your unencrypted photos. They could scan it server-side. Or they scan it on your device and simply not tell you. And they can push OS updates without you knowing to enable all of this. Apple could even push CSAM to your phone…

… yes. And it will take less than 2 years for the world to push new entires, as had happened for the last 10y.

They will be forced to detect rafts of totally unrelated content, ranging from king photos in Thailand to Winnie the Pooh in China. This is going to happen.

You need to put away your “protect the children” pearls and realize wtf game they are playing here. It’s always about protecting the children, and folks fall for it every time.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#52

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

threeseed wrote: post #42
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You already operate under this trust model. Do I? Can you elaborate? Do you notice a difference between a company (potentially) doing this behind closed doors and as quietly as possible and doing this in a public official way? What if I tell you I don't use any of the operating systems you listed? Does your answer change? I have a question: Would you welcome such a move? Do you believe that taking things a bit furt…

If you are not compiling your operating system, every library and every application from scratch then you are blindly trusting third parties. And if you are assuming Apple can't be trusted when they say they won't expand this to non-CSAM use cases then not sure why you would then trust Microsoft, Ubuntu etc.

> If you are not compiling your operating system, every library and every application from scratch then you are blindly trusting third parties.

This implies that trust is always the same and that if you trust one entity (because you did not event limit your answer to corporations) you are supposed to trust everyone and if that is not the case then you have some kind of logical error in your thinking. It also implies that losing the trust in one entity, but not some other, doesn't make sense somehow.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#53

Post by shuckles »

tzs wrote: post #44
shuckles wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 2/3rds of their original letter was spent characterizing the system to warn kids about dick pics with on-device inference as an iMessage backdoor, which literally nobody serious believes.

More astounding was the privacy issue they raised with it, which I've not seen raised by anyone else. Let's review how this feature works. It is only on if parent's explicitly enable it for their child's phone when they set up the child's phone for parental controls. If it is on, images sent to the child's phone are scanned using a ML system to recognize sex images. When such an image is found, the child is given a s…

I have nothing to add except that once a child accepts the risk at each prompt, I believe they get to see the original image and not a blurred version.

When I first read their objection, I thought that the system would transmit the image from the child’s device to the parent’s device. I could see how that could be problematic. Except it doesn’t: the record of the image stays with the child’s device, and the parent is simply told the record has been created. At this point, the most charitable interpretation I could give is that they’re worried the model will have many false positives and ping parents about every photo a child receives. iMessage back door, this is not.

Their “concern” is literally as absurd as you describe.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#54

Post by oliwarner »

carom wrote: post #14

This is effectively a virus scanner. Files are hashed (in a fancy way), compared against known hashes, and matches are reported. Your Windows desktop has Windows Defender. EFF lost a lot of credence to me after the Best Buy case. They made this big fuss about how Geek Squad employees were agents of the state for reporting CSAM on a customers hard drive, while doing a requested file recovery. When searched, the defend…

Because feature-based detection has such a great specificity record? That's where the problems start. At the very least, I suspect their employees are going to see a lot of teenagers' nudes.

No idea how that will translate into Apple One family account holders' lives being torn apart. We'll see.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#55

Post by xunn0026 »

carom wrote: post #31
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It scans your photos, for known CSAM images No, it scans photos for arbitray (fancy) hashes, and Apple chooses to limit it to CSAM images. Nothing about the tech prevents it from being expanded to other kinds of images. And from what I understand, nothing prevents it from being expanded to other filetypes either, does it? The only thing that ties this tech to CSAM images is Apples promise (and claim) to keep the sc…

The only thing that prevents Apple, Microsoft, or Ubuntu from executing arbitrary code on your system is their promise to keep the scope of updates limited. You already operate under this trust model.

Trust but verify. There's enough eyes on the Ubuntu binaries and network traffic that if Canonical would intentionally infect some binaries it would make the news.

Remember that Apple quite recently tried to prevent local firewalls from even seeing the traffic of their own apps on macOS. That doesn't seem trustworthy. Of course, companies and some people have external firewalls too.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#56

Post by randomhodler84 »

threeseed wrote: post #23
Nicksil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is effectively a virus scanner. Files are hashed (in a fancy way), compared against known hashes, and matches are reported. Your Windows desktop has Windows Defender. The analogy isn't great. Anti-virus/malware software provides a benefit to the owner of the device; Apple's software does not.

If you are a parent you very much will appreciate your children not receiving or sending explicit photos. As someone who cares for society I am thrilled that Apple is preventing the dissemination of CSAM.

As someone who cares about free society I am disgraced that we push through de facto censorship regimes to oppress the world through weak child protection arguments.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#57

Post by junon »

bitwize wrote: post #18
bathtub365 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This analogy only works at a superficial, technical level. When a virus scanner finds a virus, it alerts me and I can either quarantine or delete it. It’s up to me to decide if what it’s found is actually a virus, or a false positive. When Apple's tool thinks it’s found the material it’s looking for, the assumption is that I am a pedophile who collects CSAM.

Rather than oppose a measure to protect children because of the fear of a few false positives, why can't you accept the fact that the societal benefit outweighs the potential risk? A few innocent men might be condemned to rot -- or be murdered -- in prison, but Apple has developed a system that mostly protects your privacy and could save the lives of potentially millions of children around the world. The rights of a…

/s doesn't work here, it's not reddit.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#58

Post by wruza »

skinkestek wrote: post #17
88840-8855 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be that guy, but for this job there were lining up 300 more people. Nobody except of a tiny group of nerdy guys (including myself, ofc) is against this apple csam move. Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends if it's "ok" to scan people's phones to find those "bad pedophiles" in order to jail then up for the rest of their life. You will be surprised how much support Apple's initiative has in th…

> Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends if it's "ok" to scan people's phones to find those "bad pedophiles" in order to jail then up for the rest of their life. You will be surprised how much support Apple's initiative has in the broad public. My Dad is an old teacher today and was formerly a farmer. My view is he clearly understands these issues and has done since I was a teenager sometime in the last mille…

some people will add terrorist material (i.e. history and chemistry books), other will add extremist material (religious writings), blasphemous material (Christian or Atheist teachings in Saudi Arabia), and other illegal content

Apple doesn’t seem to do that covertly, what is wrong with blaming them when they actually do above things? This is a genuine question, because rn I see no issue with automated searching CP through their my iphone.

In theory, Apple could silently push above updates without any prior practice. Then why this issue became an issue only now?

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#59

Post by madaxe_again »

wruza wrote: post #58
skinkestek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends if it's "ok" to scan people's phones to find those "bad pedophiles" in order to jail then up for the rest of their life. You will be surprised how much support Apple's initiative has in the broad public. My Dad is an old teacher today and was formerly a farmer. My view is he clearly understands these issues and has done since I was a teenager sometime in the last mille…

some people will add terrorist material (i.e. history and chemistry books), other will add extremist material (religious writings), blasphemous material (Christian or Atheist teachings in Saudi Arabia), and other illegal content Apple doesn’t seem to do that covertly, what is wrong with blaming them when they actually do above things? This is a genuine question, because rn I see no issue with automated searching CP t…

You know how in history, occasionally the good old king would die and his crazy nephew would take over and burn all the peasants? This was possible because the king had absolute power.

Now, you might argue that this absolute power in this case is being used for good - but given the brush the US just had with accidental Nero, it’s worth being wary of how tools and powers might not only be used by current powers, but by future ones too.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#60

Post by alfiedotwtf »

szc wrote: post #38
xyst wrote: post #2

I am beginning to wonder if this was the plan all along. Back in 2013 via the Snowden leaks, it was revealed Apple was associated with the NSA domestic surveillance program, PRISM. It appears they (NSA and Apple, et al) pulled out due to the level of negative PR. After 8 years, the intelligence community and tech companies figured out they could sell their surveillance through a thinly veiled effort to “protect X gro…

Sorry, but I do not believe that is what the leak revealed. There was a slide that indicated that data from Apple and other companies was now part of the PRISM program. I am not trying to deny or refute Snowden's whistleblowing. I think it is highly likely that PRISM exists. What I dispute are the speculations that the companies listed are complicit. The 2012 date is quite suspicious - it is precisely the same year t…

> I wonder where all of the network cables go?

Remember the smiley face in the slide deck?

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