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

I haven't touched any of my comments since they first received a reply. I often touch my comments within a couple minutes of posting in order to correct typos or clarify my intentions, usually by appending a paragraph. But I don't do so without remark once they've become canonical in a thread.

Your replies to my comments are as they were written.

zepto “As far as I can see: 1. This is a serious attempt to build a privacy preserving solution to child pornography.”

“ > The more sophisticated child molesters out there will find out about what Apple is doing and quickly avoid it. I think this is exactly what Apple wants to he the result of their their iMessage scanning. They are not in this to make arrests. They just want parents to feel safe letting children use their products. Driving predators to use different tools is fine with them.”

So according to your very own words, this ISN’T a serious attempt to build a privacy supporting solution to child pornography. First, it isn’t a solution because as you stated, it won’t actually catch anyone. Second, it isn’t serious because it was never intended to catch anyone.

“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.”

So according to your words these are not slippery slope arguments (the invalid argument sense) since, as you state, if you build a back door, bad people will use it. Don’t subtly use negative connotations to try to advance your argument.

Next you disingenuously frame the problem as a conflict between privacy and child pornography. That is an unsupported dichotomy.

“ However: Child pornography and the related abuse is widely thought of as a massive problem, that is facilitated by encrypted communication and digital photography. People do care about this issue. ‘Think of the children’ is a great pretext for increasing surveillance, because it isn’t an irrational fear.”

Lastly you call for better solutions for a “solution” that actually isn’t a solution.

“So: where are the proposals for a better solution?”

“ Apple’s solution is the best on offer. ”

Another unsupported dichotomy and a false assignment of responsibility.

If this solution is bad, then toss it out. You don’t need another proposal in its place. You don’t need to deploy this backdoor in the meantime.

It is NOT our responsibility to do the FBI’s job. It is THEIR responsibility to come up with better proposals.

If you do actually want a solution, my recommendation is to concentrate on real harm like child molestation and child trafficking. Trace how children have been trafficked historically. See how you can shut that down.

I feel dirty analyzing all the dirty tricks that you employed. Are you a politician or do you work for one? Work on policy?

We disagree here, indeed. My view is not that there are ‘semi-rational’ people. My view is that there are hard to quantify risks that it is rational to have some fear about and see as problems to be solved. I think this describes most of us, most of the time.

The idea that there is a clear distinction between ‘rationally’ understanding a complex social problem through science, and being ‘irrational and unconvincable’ seems inaccurate to me. Both of these positions seem equally extreme, and neither qualify as reasonable in my view, nor are they how most people act.

I think there are a lot of people who are reasonably afraid of things they don’t fully understand and which nobody fully understands. These people reasonably want solutions, but don’t expect them to be perfect or to assuage everyone’s fear.

These are the people who can easily be persuaded to sacrifice a little privacy if it means making children safer from horrific crimes.

They are also people who would prefer a solution that didn’t sacrifice so much if it was an option.

My argument is that the best way to make things better is to make better options available. Irrationally paranoid parents, and irrationally paranoid governments exist, but are the minority.

Most people just want reasonable solutions and aren’t going to be persuaded by either extreme. If you make an argument about creeping authoritarianism they’ll say ‘child porn is a real problem, and that risk is distant’.

If you offer them a more privacy preserving solution to choose as well as a less privacy preserving option, they’ll likely choose the more privacy preserving option.

Apple is offering a much more privacy preserving option than just disabling encryption. People will accept it because it seems like a reasonable trade-off in the absence of anything better.

If we think it’s a bad trade-off that is taking us in the direction of worse and worse privacy compromises, we aren’t likely to be able to persuade people to ignore the real trade-offs, but we stand a chance of getting them to accept a better solution to the same problem.

If we don’t offer an alternative solution we aren’t offering them anything at all.

> I see no political value in trying to come up with alternative solutions to assuage people's fears.

Why do you mention this again? Nobody is arguing for a solution designed to assuage people’s fears.

> I do not see any strong evidence for a group of people who can't be educated about encryption/abuse, but who can be convinced to support alternative strategies to reduce child abuse.

Why do you assume education about encryption/abuse is relevant? Even people who deeply understand the issue still have to choose between the options that are available and practical.

> If that group does exist, it does a very good job of hiding,

It’s not a meaningful group definition.

> and a very bad job of intervening during policy debates.

Almost nobody intervenes during policy debates unless there have a strong position. Most people just choose the best solution from what is available and get on with their lives which are not centered on these issues.

> maybe you could come up with an alternative solution that reduced CSAM without violating human rights to privacy and communication. If so, I would happily support it, I have no reason to oppose a solution that reduces CSAM if it doesn't have negative effects for the Internet and free culture overall, a solution like that would be great.

Indeed. Isn’t that what we really want here? The only reason people are engaged in all this ideological battle is that they assume there isn’t a technical solution.

> However, I very much doubt that you can come up with a solution like that.

You could have just said you are someone who doesn’t believe a technical solution is possible.

> I personally think you would be very disappointed by how few people arguing for weakening encryption right now are actually interested in any of the alternative solutions you can come up with.

Why would you think I would be disappointed? We have already discussed how I don’t expect those people to change their minds.

Fortunately that is irrelevant to whether a solution would help, since it is not aimed at them.