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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

#661

Post by 7sidedmarble »

busymom0 wrote: post #166
akiselev wrote: post #158

> It's a complete change of narrative and there's no easy way to explain it and still defend Apple's Privacy narrative, wihout doing extreme mental gymnastics. Everyone who took Apple at their word was already doing extreme mental gymnastics because Apple's privacy stance was a farce on borrowed time to begin with. Now it's just blatantly obvious to everyone.

While I knew that the "privacy" stance from Apple in prior years was always a marketing facade to sell more devices, I still continued to believe that they would keep sticking up for privacy as much as possible. It's kind of funny how I am very suspicious of governments and politicians but when it comes to a trillion dollar corporation, I was giving them more of benefit of doubt. I was wrong.

Have you ever considered that the profit motive might be responsible for leading all companies to act unethically? In the future, it's a good reason never to trust them.

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

#662

Post by ink404 »

EpicEng wrote: post #224
kilroy123 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. That's what happens when the country is ran by a bunch of old lawyers.

>old lawyers Meanwhile, it's predominantly young people who freely hand their information to mega-corps to be disseminated and distributed. Outside your (our) bubble young people don't give two craps about privacy.

Outside this bubble most people young or not don't give two craps about privacy

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

#663

Post by randallsquared »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #223
whoisjuan wrote: post #132

This CSAM Prevention initiative by Apple is a 180 degress change of their general message around privacy. Imagine investing hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-privacy programs, privacy features, privacy marketing, etc... just to pull this reverse card. Of course this is going to spark concern within their own ranks. It's like working for a food company that claims to use organic, non-processed, fair-trade ingredi…

I actually think something else happened, and to be honest I think many at Apple behind this decision are likely pretty surprised by the blowback. That is, it seems like Apple really wanted to preserve "end-to-end" encryption, but they needed to do something to address the CSAM issue lest governments come down on them hard. Thus, my guess is, at least at the beginning, they saw this as a strong win for privacy. As th…

> I think many at Apple behind this decision are likely pretty surprised by the blowback.

Maybe they would have been surprised where it ended up, but someone in charge there is definitely on board with a reversal on the previous privacy stance, given the doubling-down with an email signal-boosting the NCMEC calling privacy concerns the "screeching of the minority".

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

#664

Post by flixic »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #356
BikiniPrince wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The children trope is a really big red herring. Anything to get the foot in the door.

The 4 horsemen of the Privacy Apocalypse: csam, terrorists, piracy and drugs!

I'd say swap piracy and drugs, and you have the escalation order.

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

#665

Post by shbooms »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #255
roody15 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, it seems like Apple really wanted to preserve "end-to-end" encryption,“ … except they still have not mentioned anything about E2E encryption… and they currently don’t encrypt icloud backups. You would think apple would get ahead of this story and mention … or maybe they don’t have any E2E plans at all.

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…

>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).

Not to be nit-picky but IIRC, this isn't exactly how it went down. icloud backups have always been decryptable and Apple had announced they were planning on changing this and making them fully encrypted but when pressured by the FBI, they scraped those plans and left them the way they are.

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

#666

Post by throw2345678 »

whoisjuan wrote: post #132

This CSAM Prevention initiative by Apple is a 180 degress change of their general message around privacy. Imagine investing hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-privacy programs, privacy features, privacy marketing, etc... just to pull this reverse card. Of course this is going to spark concern within their own ranks. It's like working for a food company that claims to use organic, non-processed, fair-trade ingredi…

That is not an accurate analogy at all. Apple DID design this with privacy in mind. What would work to fit your inaccurate analogy is if Apple suddenly started reading everything of yours in the plain, directly violating your privacy.

As it stands, the system is designed so that the phone snitches you out if you have CSAM on it matching some perceptual hashes (and plenty of it), but if you do not have CSAM above threshold amounts then your phone never even phones home about it. It is in fact a privacy-preserving mechanism in the sense that Apple never sees your photos.

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

#667

Post by jjgreen »

ElFitz wrote: post #553
cheschire wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, when I read the choices in iTunes about backups, I didn’t feel particularly manipulated. It seemed straight forward. Trade offs were clear to me. I guess some people just see dark patterns where I don’t.

The least of the biases at play, here, is the change aversion bias. Making things "opt-out", without even making it hard, dramatically increases the number of people who opt-in. It can be used for many reasons. For example, the UK switched it’s organ donation laws from opt-in to opt-out. Another example, my government has decided that them selling their citizen's personal information to garages, insurance companies,…

For example, the UK switched its organ donation laws from opt-in to opt-out.

We have, yet oddly, it's still called "organ donation".

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

#668

Post by pritambaral »

zepto wrote: post #314
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're doing on device analysis, but there isn't any process by which an image of a hotdog will be sent to someone else without my knowledge.

Right, but neither is the CSAM code being used to detect anything but CSAM. If a bit can be flipped to make the CSAM detector go evil, surely it can be flipped to make photo search go evil, or spotlight start reporting files that match keywords for that matter. There is nothing special about this CSAM detector except that it’s narrower and harder to repurpose than most of the rest of the system.

> ... to make photo search go evil, or spotlight start reporting files that match keywords for that matter.

As your immediate parent has already said: there isn't any process by which an image of a hotdog will be sent to someone else without my knowledge.

Neither "photo search" nor "spotlight" report anything to third parties currently.

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

#669

Post by vimacs2 »

Grustaf wrote: post #535
kragen wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, they could enact repressive measures because they had almost absolute power. The form that oppression took would obviously rely on the then current technology, but the fundamental enabler of oppression was power, not technology.

Power which was extended through the use of said technology. I'm fine with focusing on regressive hierarchical systems as the fundamental root of oppression but pretending like the information and mechanical technology introduced in the late 19th century to early 20th century did not massively increase the reach of the state is just being ridiculous.

Prior to motorised vehicles and the telegraph for example, borders were almost impossible to enforce on the general population without significant leakage.

Ironically in spite of powered flight, freedom of movement is in a sense significantly less than even 200 years ago when it comes to movement between countries that do not already have diplomatic ties to one another allowing for state authorized travel.

Incidentally, this is part of why many punishments in the medieval age were so extreme - the actual ability of the state to enforce the law was so pathetically limited by today's standards that they needed a strong element of fear to attempt to control the population.

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

#670

Post by fidesomnes »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #223
whoisjuan wrote: post #132

This CSAM Prevention initiative by Apple is a 180 degress change of their general message around privacy. Imagine investing hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-privacy programs, privacy features, privacy marketing, etc... just to pull this reverse card. Of course this is going to spark concern within their own ranks. It's like working for a food company that claims to use organic, non-processed, fair-trade ingredi…

I actually think something else happened, and to be honest I think many at Apple behind this decision are likely pretty surprised by the blowback. That is, it seems like Apple really wanted to preserve "end-to-end" encryption, but they needed to do something to address the CSAM issue lest governments come down on them hard. Thus, my guess is, at least at the beginning, they saw this as a strong win for privacy. As th…

The Apple employee throwaway justifying how much they suck.
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