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

When we arrest people for "consuming" known old CSAM, we often find new CSAM produced by themselves; the big part of busting online CSAM sharing rings is not the prevention of CSAM sharing but the fact that you do get a lot of actual abusers that way.

> Okay, sure.

> When you ask me to try and justify why I think you hold your position,

At this point it’s hard to read you as honest because of the frequency with which you misrepresent me. I have to assume you are unaware of this.

I am talking about why you won’t identify which words of mine lead to your misunderstandings of my position.

Why would you represent that as asking you to ‘justify’ your interpretation? That isn’t what I’m doing, and more importantly it’s not something I said. I’m just asking you to tell me what you are interpreting so I can see if what I said was ambiguous and if so how.

> I interpret that as a distraction (hopefully a good faith one).

A distraction from what? Are you not seeking to understand? Later in this comment you claim to want to know what my views are. If you ignore clarifying questions as a ‘distraction’, it seems likely that misunderstandings will keep arising.

> I don't want to argue on a meta-level about why I got confused about your comments,

Who is asking you to ‘argue on a meta-level’? I am asking you to simply say what words you are referring to when a misunderstanding becomes apparent.

> I want to know what you believe.

I recommend trying to get to the bottom of misunderstandings then.

> I'm frustrated that you keep trying to dig into "why are you confused"

You misrepresent me again. Can you not see that I haven’t asked ‘why are you confused’?

I have asked what you are referring to when you attribute a view to me that I don’t think is contained in what I wrote.

> instead of just clarifying your position.

I could clarify my position if you were willing to tell me what I said that lead to your interpretations of my views.

If whoever controls that database wants to prohibit say a meme making fun of a politician, they need only to add the picture to the DB.

Again, not an honest interpretation of anything I have said. What I said was extremely clear.

I think it’s reasonable to conclude that you are deliberately misrepresenting me, and have been all along.

My conclusion is that you aren’t actually an honest person. I’m sorry.

My point is your original point - where is the data to support these criticisms, the the facts, the statistics? Merely saying "I can imagine some hypothetical future where this could be terrible and misused" should not be enough to conclude that it is, in fact, terrible, and will more likely than not be misused.

We've had years of leaks showing that three letter agencies and governments simply don't need to misuse things like this. The USA didn't slide down a slope of banning Asbestos for health reasons and end up "oops" banning recreational marijuana. The USA didn't slide down a slippery slope into the Transportation Security Authority after 9/11 it appeared almost overnight, and then didn't slide down a slippery slope into checking for other things, it stayed much the same ever since.

The fact that one can imagine a bad future is not the same as the bad future being inevitable; the fact that one can imagine a system being put to different uses doesn't mean it either will be, or that those uses will necessarily be worse, or that they will certainly be maximum-bad. It's your comment about "fear based reasoning" turned to this system instead of to encryption.

You ask "are you really implying that government surveillance doesn't count as a real slippery slope because sometimes activists reverse the trend?" and I'm saying the position "because slippery slopes exist, this system will slide down it and that's the same as being at the bottom of it" and then expecting the reader to accept that without any data, facts, evidence, stats, etc. is low quality unconvincing commenting, but is what makes up most of the comments in this thread.

> "Where? Here's the second paragraph:"

The paragraph which implies it happens to all photos (not just iCloud ones), and immediately alerts the authorities with no review and no appeal process. There are people in this thread saying "I don't need the FBI getting called on me cause my browser cache smelled funny to some Apple PhD's machine-learning decision" for a system which does not look at browser cacdhe, does not call the FBI, has a review process, does have an appeal process.

> "Holy crud, I would hope this is the bare minimum."

Why would you hope "the bare minimum" the letter could ask for is something the letter is clearly not asking for? Or that the bare minimum from a company known for its secrecy is openness and transparency? It would be nice if it was, yes. I expect it won't be, because we would all have very different legal systems and companies if laws and company policies were created with metrics to track their effectiveness and specified expiry dates and by default only get renewed if they are proving effective.

> "What else are people criticizing?"

My main complaint is that people are asking us to accept criticism such as "Iraq will use this to murder homosexuals" unquestioningly. But still, to quote from people in this thread: "Apple can (and likely will) say they won't do it and then do it anyway." - despite Apple announcing this in public they're going to lie about it, and you should just believe me without me supporting this position in any way. "This will lead to black mailing of future presidents in the U.S." - and you should believe that because reasons. "Made for China" - and you should agree because China is the boogeyman. (Maybe it is, if so justify why the reader should agree). "It's not Apple. It's the government" - because government bad. "Scan phones for porn, then sell it for profit and use it for blackmail. Epstein on steroids" - because QAnon or something, who even knows???. "the obvious conclusion is Apple will start to scan photos kept on device, even where iCloud is not used." - because they said 'obviously' you have to agree or you're clueless, I guess. "I never thought I'd see 'privacy' Apple come out and say we're going to [..] scan you imessages, etc." - and they didn't say that; unless the commentor is a minor which is against the HN guidelines.

It's very largely unreasoned, unjustified, unsupported, panicky worst-case fearmongering even when the concerns could be serious - if justified.

> "Nobody who's willing to bring out "think of the children" as a debate killer has ever dropped the argument because they got a concession."

That is probably true, but probably self-supporting. Someone who honestly uses "think of the children" likely thinks the children's safety is not being thought of enough, and is self-selectedly less likely to immediately turn around and agree the opposite.

> "It means very little to me that the EU says they care about privacy."

Well, the witch is being drowned despite her protests.

> "What real, tangible measures did they include to make sure that in practice encryption would not be weakened?"

Well they didn't /ban/ it for a start; which they could have done as exemplified by Saudi Arabia and Facetime discussed in this thread, and they didn't explicitly weaken it like the USA did with its strong encryption export regulations of the 1990s. Those should count for something in defense of their stated position?