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The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

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Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#81

Post by still_grokking »

rootusrootus wrote: post #52
still_grokking wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On... > The laws related to CSAM are very explicit. 18 U.S. Code § 2252 states that knowingly transferring CSAM material is a felony. (The only exception, in 2258A, is when it is reported to NCMEC.) In this case, Apple has a very strong reason to believe they are transferring CSAM material, and they are sending it to Apple -- not NCMEC. > It does not matt…

Apple isn't looking at the actual image, but a derivative. Presumably their lawyers think this will be sufficient to shield them from accusations of possessing child porn.

"But look, I've re-compressed it with JPEG 80%. It's not THAT picture!".

It would be interesting to hear what a court has to say if a child porn consumer would try to defend him/her with this "argument".

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#82

Post by merpnderp »

Spooky23 wrote: post #29
gonehome wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I've seen on this topic: https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia... There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.

The EFF wrote a really shitty hit piece deliberately confused the parental management function with the matching against hashes of illegal images. Two different things. From there, a bazillion hot takes followed.

Can you quote what you found confusing, because I didn't see anything that didn't agree with the Apple announcement they linked in the piece.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#84

Post by mdoms »

gonehome wrote: post #6
querez wrote: post #2

I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?

It's worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I've seen on this topic: https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia... There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.

You must be joking. It would be hard to find anyone more biased in favour of Apple than Gruber.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#85

Post by merpnderp »

lawkwok wrote: post #57
ursugardaddy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a non-zero chance it triggers a no-knock raid by the police that kills your family or pets. it happens all the time

Non-zero being technically true because of the subject matter, but I don’t see how Apple’s system increases the risk of authorities killing family or pets more than server-side scanning.

Their neural hashing is new, and they claim has a one in a trillion collision rate. There are 1.5 trillion images created in the US and something like 100 million photos in the compared database. That's a heck of a lot of collisions. And that's just a single year, Apple will be comparing everyone's back catalog.

A lot of innocent people are going to get caught up in this.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#86

Post by joe_the_user »

gonehome wrote: post #6
querez wrote: post #2

I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?

It's worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I've seen on this topic: https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia... There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.

99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.

And how is that?

It seems like the Gruber article follows a common formula for justifying controversial approaches. First, "most of what you hear is junk", then "here's a bunch of technical points everyone gets wrong"(but where the wrongness might not change the basic situation), then go over the non-controversial and then finally go to the controversial parts and give the standard "think of the children" explanation. But if you've cleared away all other discussion of the situation, you might make these apologistics sound like new insight.

Is Apple "scanning people's photos"? Basically yes? They're doing it with signatures but that's how any mass surveillance would work. They promise to do this only with CSAM but they previously promised to not scan your phone's data at all.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#88

Post by s5300 »

querez wrote: post #2

I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?

So... this is the way I understand it, which the general public will never have the attention span to understand, so it doesn't fucking matter one bit.

LEO's/FBI/every other institution/group that deals with child pornography and abuse have teams that go through a near infinite amount of pictures and videos of CP/etc.

These are then marked by said people as either - yes, CP/Abuse/etc - or marked false positive.

Once marked as what they're after, they're uploaded to a shared database between all groups involved.

Only what is in these worldwide national databases is what's going to be checked against. Your new pictures of your children will have obviously never made their way to any of these groups as they've never been shared/distributed in any areas of the internet/etc these people work in to track down trafficking rings (well, I'd hope you're not selling pictures of your children to them).

This is the way I understand it. I admit I haven't looked into it that much. If it's anything different than what I've said, then yeah, it's probably fucked. I don't get what people don't understand about checking against a database though. No, your new pictures of whatever are not in this pre-existing database

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#89

Post by madeofpalk »

joe_the_user wrote: post #86
gonehome wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I've seen on this topic: https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia... There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.

99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk. And how is that? It seems like the Gruber article follows a common formula for justifying controversial approaches. First, "most of what you hear is junk", then "here's a bunch of technical points everyone gets wrong"(but where the wrongness might not change the basic situation), then go over the non-controversial and then finally go to the controversial parts and giv…

But some of those technical points are important. Parent comment was concerned that photos of their own kids will get them in trouble - it appears the system was designed to explicitly to prevent that.

Re: The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”

#90

Post by tpush »

mortenjorck wrote: post #35
spoonjim wrote: post #19

Any idea why Apple didn’t just implement server side scanning like everyone else?

As covered in other articles, that is exactly what they were doing previously.

No, they did not. That was erroneous reporting by the Telegraph that a lot of outlets copied [0].

The correction:

> This story originally said Apple screens photos when they are uploaded to iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage service. Ms Horvath and Apple’s disclaimer did not mention iCloud, and the company has not specified how it screens material, saying this information could help criminals.

And from the interview with TechCrunch:

> This is an area we’ve been looking at for some time, including current state of the art techniques which mostly involves scanning through entire contents of users’ libraries on cloud services that — as you point out — isn’t something that we’ve ever done; to look through users’ iCloud Photos.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/01/08/apple-scan...

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