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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

#751

Post by e40 »

jmull wrote: post #167

I just do not want Apple scanning my phone for the purpose of finding something they can send to the police. I’m not even talking about any “slippery slope” scenarios and I’ll never have any of the material they are looking for. And right or wrong, I don’t really fear a false identification, so this isn’t about a worry that they will actually turn me in. I just don’t want them scanning my phone for the purpose of tur…

Whether it's likely or not, I'm worried about false identification of images.

Let's also remember that malware would easily drop illegal images as a way to mess with the system and specific people.

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

#752

Post by m12k »

masto wrote: post #698
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…

Apple was never pro-privacy. Apple has always been pro-Apple. They will do whatever benefits them the most at any time. It just so happens that with the failure of their own attempts to start an advertising network, they saw an opportunity to spin themselves as the privacy company and take digs at their competitors. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe it's time for a new spin.

Sure, but even if it was an illusion, they spent a lot of time and energy building it up, just to burst it like this.

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

#753

Post by nextlevelwizard »

goldenkey wrote: post #748
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a good metaphor. You still get the privacy same privacy aspect as you did before. Only your iCloud images are now being scanned for visual matches. If you are already trusting Apple with rest of your private life this hardly is complete 180 degree turn. I don't quite understand why people are so against this. What if some algorithm scans your images? If you are using any cloud service to share y…

> why wouldn't we trust that these image hashes can't be reversed back into images? You should avoid making political or moral arguments when your technical knowledge is 10 feet below your ego. An image is orders of magnitude larger than a password, meaning that many more collisions. Also, because it's a perceptual hash, even more collisions. One does not simply reverse a perceptual hash. Keep your hat on ;-)

>You should avoid making political or moral arguments

I am not being political or moral. Why would you think that? Is this one of those "since you don't immediately agree with me it means you are the enemy and disagree on everything" type things?

>An image is orders of magnitude larger than a password, meaning that many more collisions.

Whole point of hashing algorithms is that they produce unique hashes for different inputs. Wouldn't a larger input value (bits of the image) make it harder to have collisions?

>One does not simply reverse a perceptual hash

So what actually is the privacy concern here? There is no way to get the original image from the hash at best you can get an approximation of it.

>Keep your hat on ;-)

I guess this is suppose to be some kind of dig at me. No need to be an asshole even if you don't agree with someone.

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

#754

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#755

Post by Wohlf »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #728
burkaman wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who wants their printer to scan every document they print, and if it sees something the printer manufacturer thinks is illegal it's reported to the police? FYI most (all?) modern printers will refuse to print anything they think is counterfeit money, and will include a unique code traceable back to you in every printed document. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

Well, looks like I'm never buying a new printer.

>Developed by Xerox and Canon in the mid-1980s

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

#756

Post by gidam »

roody15 wrote: post #229
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

what best way to "to preserve end-to-end encryption" than shipping a technology that can bypass it anytime?

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

#757

Post by Aaargh20318 »

zepto wrote: post #717
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the CSAM mechanism as is is not all that plausible to abuse either technically or socially given how clear Apple’s promises are. That’s the problem: Apples promise means nothing exactly because it’s so easy to abuse. Apple says they will refuse when asked to scan for anything that is not CSAM. That’s one of those nice ‘technically true’ statements lawyers like to include. Apple will not have to refuse anything, bec…

> And when ‘manually’ checking, they aren’t actually looking at potential CSAM, they are checking the ‘visual derivative’ (whatever that means exactly), basically a manual check if the hashes match. The visual derivative is enough to tell the difference between a collection of CSAM and say documents, or pictures of protests. It can’t be abused without Apple’s involvement.

> The visual derivative is enough to tell the difference between a collection of CSAM and say documents, or pictures of protests.

How would you know ? They have never given details on what this 'visual derivative' actually is. If it's detailed enough to recognise it as CSAM, then Apple isn't allowed to look at it.

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

#758

Post by goldenkey »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #753
goldenkey wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why wouldn't we trust that these image hashes can't be reversed back into images? You should avoid making political or moral arguments when your technical knowledge is 10 feet below your ego. An image is orders of magnitude larger than a password, meaning that many more collisions. Also, because it's a perceptual hash, even more collisions. One does not simply reverse a perceptual hash. Keep your hat on ;-)

>You should avoid making political or moral arguments I am not being political or moral. Why would you think that? Is this one of those "since you don't immediately agree with me it means you are the enemy and disagree on everything" type things? >An image is orders of magnitude larger than a password, meaning that many more collisions. Whole point of hashing algorithms is that they produce unique hashes for differen…

> Whole point of hashing algorithms is that they produce unique hashes for different inputs. Wouldn't a larger input value (bits of the image) make it harder to have collisions?

Standard cryptographic hashes should have certain properties like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalanche_effect

However, a perceptual hash desires the opposite. Due to the pigeonhole principle, a larger space mapping to a smaller space, involves more collisions. In fact, all hashes have infinite collisions, one just tries to design hashes that don't have many collisions on smaller length inputs. Ultimately though, there will be at least 2^n collisions for all inputs n bits long if the hash is n bit output. You can easily calculate this by looking at the excess in size between input space size and output space size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle

Perceptual hashes are essentially designed to collide on similar data. The fine details are lost. An ideal perceptual hash algorithm would quantize as many alterable properties of an image as possible. Contrast, brightness, edges, hue, fine details, etc. In the end, you have a bunch of splotches in a certain composition that form the low dimensional eigenbasis of the hash.

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

#759

Post by oarsinsync »

y7 wrote: post #572
prophesi wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 possible to use an iPhone without iCloud and get full E2E. I disagree completely on this. For one, users aren't aware that using iCloud means that Apple has your decryption key and can thereby read and share all of your phone's data. And two, opt-out is a dark pattern.…

I agree. If Apple wants to go this route, they should abstain from pushing the user towards using iCloud as they currently do, and instead just present a clear opt-in choice. "Do you want to enable iCloud photos? Your private photos will be uploaded encrypted to Apple's servers, so that only you can access them. Before uploading, your photos will be locally scanned on your device for any illegal content. Apple will o…

> Your private photos will be uploaded encrypted to Apple's servers, so that only you can access them.

This would be a large change from the way it works today, where Apple can view your iCloud photos. They’ve not made any statements indicating that is going to change.

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

#760

Post by zepto »

somedude895 wrote: post #589
feanaro wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this take, but the slippery slope arguments do make sense, as exemplified by any spying technology ever. Once a capability exists, it's too enticing not to continue expanding the scope.

Exactly. Selling dev consoles on ebay or drugs on the darkweb? We'll take the picture in the listing and find out who took it. Can't find any matches? This is too ineffective. We'll need Apple to store all hashes on all devices for 6 months. The slippery slope argument makes a LOT of sense.

Nope. This would be an illegal search under the 4th Amendment.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/12/a-38-year...

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