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Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

blog.ericgoldman.org

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Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#91

Post by yason »

slashdave wrote: post #60
JSR_FDED wrote: post #7

The judge called the outcome disturbing, as it leaves victimized children as "collateral damage" of privacy protections. As sad as this is, end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning. As an alternative Apple previously tried to do scanning on the phones locally but caught hell for that too. This is one of those unfortunate tradeoffs but I see no alternative to privacy taking priority.

> end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning Not true. There is the option of scanning on the device.

Owning your device (instead of the manufacturer, a set of unlisted governments, big software corporations, etc.) means no scanning.

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#92

Post by Dylan16807 »

busterarm wrote: post #87
arcticbull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in the sense that you have a legal doctor-patient privilege that binds what they can share with whom. There's not really an Apple cloud user privilege. No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc.

> No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc. And therapists are legally mandated to report you if you told them you viewed or possessed CSAM.

No matter how or why? That seems like a terrible mandate.

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#93

Post by junon »

economistbob wrote: post #69

Seems like the kids miss their chance at justice because of section 230 allowing platforms the freedom to remove whatever they want but not be responsible for what they keep or amplify. That is the problem with 230. Censorship is permitted and punishing the censor isn't. Twitter and Tiktok are literally microblog platforms that get away with removing good stuff and leaving evil because they "are not a publisher" whil…

You're conflating "what's illegal" with "what a private entity doesn't want". I don't like it any more than you do, but the first is very clear, the second is a bit harder to "solve".

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#94

Post by layer8 »

al_borland wrote: post #89
layer8 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I’m decidedly pro-encryption, I don’t like this argument. If something is the right thing, it would still be the right thing when promoted for the wrong reasons, and if it’s the wrong thing, it’s still the wrong thing even when at present nobody has ulterior motives. When arguing against surveillance, the arguments should be on its merits, not on whether the current proponents happen to have ulterior motives.

Calling out the ulterior motives can help clear the deck to focus on what is right or wrong, without as much emotional manipulation in the picture.

One problem with that is that it’s difficult to prove motives. So you’re on shaky and disputable ground. It’s much better to point out how the proposed mechanisms are prone to be misused, which is independent of current motives. Get rid of the shaky ground. Saying “these are disingenuous people proposing this” is exactly an attempt at emotional manipulation, in the sense of an ad hominem fallacy.

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#95

Post by izacus »

polski-g wrote: post #39
stronglikedan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a shade of gray to me. If I offered some homegrown cloud storage to my friends, and one of them uploaded CSAM to it, you can bet your ass that I would be arrested for it.

Does Sundar get arrested if someone uploaded CSAM to GDrive?

No, because Google will report it to the law enforcement.

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#96

Post by Manuel_D »

voxic11 wrote: post #81
ux266478 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one can be convicted of CSAM-related crimes related to paintings/drawings/created_art of fictional people. This isn't necessarily the case in the US, though I believe only for drawings. AI-generated CSAM probably wouldn't fly in a court of law. Regardless, it's a naive conception of a system of law to think of it as a utilitarian system of restitution in contexts of "this individual harmed this individual". In fact…

For drawings it has to additionally be "obscene" (since obscenity isn't protected by the first amendment). And there is also a specific law that criminalizes even non-obscene realistic computer generated imagery.

Not quite. There can be more restrictions on the distribution or promotion of obscene material, but mere possession of obscene material is protected by the first Amendment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_v._Georgia

The reason why the Supreme Court upheld bans on possessing CSAM is not because it's obscene, but because it incentivizes abuse of children to produce it.

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#97

Post by philipkglass »

trollbridge wrote: post #56
Aurornis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proposed CSAM scanning used perceptual hashing to try to identify CSAM material known to law enforcement. It was not a tool to identify private images as being underage. That’s an impossible task.

I'd say modern AI tools could probably do this pretty effectively. They're very effective at describing anything else about an image. I have a workflow that churns through large amounts of images, describes them, and then looks for things I specifically want (in my case, auction listings that are not described accurately on the auction website).

I need to process a modest amount of imagery (about 25 million images, and growing) for NSFW content and general captioning/description. About 5% of it contains nudity or partial nudity, and about 10% of that 5% contains sexual activity.

In theory, modern vision language models could classify human nudity and sexual activity very thoroughly. But every model I have tried is reluctant to clearly describe what is notable about sexualized/nude images. The models are deliberately under-exposed to nude and sexualized content during training and further RLHF'd away from generating straightforward descriptions of such images.

Models also occasionally hallucinate WTF captions for ordinary adult sexual activity. I recently ran a baseline test with frames extracted from adult videos and about 1/3000 frames was mis-captioned as involving a child according to Gemma 4 12b.

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#98

Post by projektfu »

timcambrant wrote: post #78
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can also distribute heinous things through snail mail, but we are not yet at the point where the government reads all letters looking for wrongthink. Just because we technically can make a privacy destroying drag net does not mean we should. Had phones existed 250 years ago, I have no doubt the founders would have thought it obvious that a cellphone’s contents were your personal papers which could not be freel…

But that's mostly because it's impractical. They do use dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives, so if CSAM smelled or was visible through X-ray then it would probably be a different story. And let's not forget snail mail is by far a more uncommon way to spread that material than the Internet is. The Internet came into broad use just ~15 years after commercial CSAM was openly being sold by mail order in Europe. Person…

If East Germany can, why can't we? /s

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#99

Post by busterarm »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #92
busterarm wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc. And therapists are legally mandated to report you if you told them you viewed or possessed CSAM.

No matter how or why? That seems like a terrible mandate.

> No matter how or why? That seems like a terrible mandate.

Honestly shocked that anyone would even say this, but even giving you the benefit of the doubt here -- the one case where I could imagine this might not happen would be if you're a police officer investigating such cases. But they also have their own therapists dedicated/trained in police-specific issues.

Re: Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

#100

Post by [deleted] »

junon wrote: post #93
economistbob wrote: post #69

Seems like the kids miss their chance at justice because of section 230 allowing platforms the freedom to remove whatever they want but not be responsible for what they keep or amplify. That is the problem with 230. Censorship is permitted and punishing the censor isn't. Twitter and Tiktok are literally microblog platforms that get away with removing good stuff and leaving evil because they "are not a publisher" whil…

You're conflating "what's illegal" with "what a private entity doesn't want". I don't like it any more than you do, but the first is very clear, the second is a bit harder to "solve".

[deleted]
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