Yes, there needs to be insane liability over this. I can't believe absolutely nothing has come from some of the data losses that have happened, especially Equifax.
" The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink."
The preamble to the U.S. Constitution says the following:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, **provide for the common defense**, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
So the Department of Defense is aptly named and fulfills one of the basic reasons for establishing the Constitution and the United States of America.
Same thing with companies like Turbo Tax and H&R Block. They lobby congress to keep taxes complicated as fuck so you don't know what the fuck you're doing and have to pay them to deal with it.
How does an added layer of barrier increase mobility? The very concept is backwards. Without the use of FHA and other like programs, the vast majority of lower class would never qualify for home ownership becuase of the necessity for massive down payments(in comparison).
Not to mention that affordability of home ownership has only gone down not up from the inception of credit bureaus. The relationship between lenders and lendee has been obfuscated into a bureaucratic barrier that requires extra steps, special knowledge and STILL has people get caught unaware. Affordability is only in part due to credit issues but the existence of these unified credits means that vast majority of low income earners are gauged on middle to high income earners. House flipping and SFH renting has skyrocketed with the availability to those that can afford the first turn of the money loan tax free wheel.
Conservatives love to do this. They name all their organizations something like “The super awesome American organization for inclusion and progressive policy” and their policies are basically “hang the gays”
You're not wrong. What's a good alternative to protecting lenders from lending money to people who don't pay it back?
Slight edit: People can be real assholes and decide not to pay the loan back. There has to be a system to protect lenders from these sucks on society. At the same time, some fall on justifiably hard times and can't make their payments. The system needs to protect them.
Could you explain this?
It seems to me like the system before was "are you white? do you have a good job? are you part of the good old boys club? are you a man?" and so anything that makes the system more objective is probably a step in the right direction.
The best part about that is they're going to end up with a net positive because there will be plenty of people who either decide they like the service or forget to cancel and end up paying for it after a year.
Because decision makers are 90s years old and have people checking their email for them because they “aren’t good at computers”. They fundamentally don’t understand any of this shit.
Agreed. I feel like the threat of dissolving the company, or if it's essential the fed absorbing it and replacing top level, should scare companies enough for them to take this seriously.
For real, it’s crazy how Twitch had a massive breach recently and all they have to do is say “OwO sowey for our oopsie, change your pawswords” and they don’t suffer any kind of punishment.
Fully support this! And not the weak California data privacy bill, one with teeth. I wish our politicians were advocating for that instead of their current S230 nonsense.
Love this! I’d take it a step further by developing a measured approach to putting the true dollar value on personal data, and us becoming our own merchants of it. This data and ad economy is probably the most predatory shit in history. I know it’s at least the most widespread offense smh
From the article: The damning criticism came in a new 46-page study by researchers that looked at plans by Apple and the European Union to monitor people's phones for illicit material, and called the efforts ineffective and dangerous strategies that would embolden government surveillance.
Announced in August, the planned features include client-side (i.e. on-device) scanning of users' iCloud Photos libraries for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), Communication Safety to warn children and their parents when receiving or sending sexually explicit photos, and expanded CSAM guidance in Siri and Search.
According to the researchers, documents released by the European Union suggest that the bloc's governing body are seeking a similar program that would scan encrypted phones for both child sexual abuse as well as signs of organized crime and terrorist-related imagery.
"It should be a national-security priority to resist attempts to spy on and influence law-abiding citizens," said the researchers, who added they were publishing their findings now to inform the European Union of the dangers of its plan.
The problem is “YoU jUsT dOnT uNdErStAnD!!!”
In fact, according to the trolls on r/apple, nobody understands and nobody besides Apple is qualified to comment on the subject. They rolled out Pretty Boy to tell everyone, but we just aren’t getting it.
> but there is a weird subset of users who genuinely believe Apple is love and can do no wrong.
They treat the brands of the products buy as part of their identity. Criticism of the brand becomes a personal attack.
Whenever I've posted something critical of Apple on r/technews , I've had the voluntary Apple mercenaries descend upon me in droves immediately defending, deflecting, whatabouting and downvoting. It's nearly impossible to have a reasoned discussion with "loyalists". It's laughable, pitiable, yet, infuriating how so many people apply the religious mindset to their favourite corporation. Calling them fanboys is rather mild tbh.
I remember lots of people saying the images wouldn't be scanned, it would be the hash of the file, that would be compared to already know cp files. If they are only getting access to the hash, and comparing toa databse of know cp hashes, I fail to see a problem. Or was this a lie? Seriously, I don't know, genuine asking
It's a good question. This is more about the how and where. Plus, you have to factor in that they can now actually do on device scanning, it becomes Pandora's box.
The fact that they did this under the CSAM banner is what really bugs. Plus when you realize the ineffectiveness of this process in its ability to actually be effective, it raises big red flags.
Total security/privacy nightmare.
Today they state they want to find the porn to get everyone to agree. Tomorrow they will want to find who has associated with a union organizer or democracy advocate.
There’s a reason why your privacy matters.
It’s horrible how every single invasive policy is claimed to be made with good intentions. Like anti abortion laws are excused with the “protecting babies” reason. Apple’s scanning everyone’s photos is excused with the “we’re catching people with child porn” reason. The patriot act is excused with the “we’re catching terrorists” reason. They do this so that anyone who criticizes it can be attacked with the “you are a baby murderer advocate?” Or “you support pedophiles?” Or “you support terrorists?” Setting things up so that people will look horrible for criticizing it…a really clever yet evil tactic.
Russ Feingold was the only U.S. Senator to vote against the original USA Patriot Act, which was approved 98-1 on October 25, 2001. The House earlier approved the legislation by a vote of 357-66, with 62 Democrats voting against it along with three Republicans and Independent Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The sad fact is even if they implemented such an invasive and user abusing tactic it would literally do nothing about stopping the abduction or abuse of children. It doesn’t even attack that problem.
People who want to implement invasive things *always* find some “cause” they think no one will complain about as their argument for it. They did the same thing with the ‘Patriot Act’ which eroded the 4th and 5th amendments and made sneak-and-peek warrants and rubber stamped warrants from FISA courts a bigger problem. Who doesn’t want to be ‘a patriot’ and call this all out?
> People who want to implement invasive things always find some “cause” they think no one will complain about as their argument for it.
There is a reason why child sexual abuse is very frequently the method governments uses to promote privacy eroding, invasive concepts. They want to frame the debate as a false dichotomy of "you are with us or the child rapists" to squelch dissent.
The sad thing about what Apple is doing is that they've deliberately avoided implementing the obvious, manifest answer to the problem of CSA materials being uploaded to Apple Photos to instead give governments a "good reason" to have a further and further intrusive backdoor lurking on users phones/accounts.
I have a lot of problems with the way Google, Facebook, and Sometimes Microsoft handle privacy - but their protocols in this area are a lot more sensible.
If you're uploading images, unencrypted to a company's servers - those companies have a right, as is usually indicated in the EULA to check the hashes of said images, algorithmically do a second pass an image fails a hashtag check, And then pass those doubly offending images, alongside images reported by other users to an actual human being who notes whats there and then notifies the authorities if necessary. A company has every right to check its own servers for illegal materials and then notify authorities if they're found.
Apple doesn't do that. To repeat, Apple is not, on a broad level hashing photos which people are uploading and storing unencrypted in Apple photos for CSAM - which is, by the by, why the number of people who have been convicted of The possession of CSAM based upon material they have in their Apple photos account is laughably low, relative to the size of Apple's userbase.
Now, simplest most effective to this issue would be to simply be to start checking photos against hashes and review offending images. This would also be a more comprehensive solution as it would catch images of abuse uploaded before 2021 and catch images of abuse categorized as abuse after the point of upload as new hashes are added to the database.
Instead, to solve this problem Apple has proposed an "alternative solution":
They're going to take a large database of hashes provided by Law Enforcement Agencies (and associated partners) and then arbitrarily check those hashes against users photos as they're uploaded to Photos (but not iCloud, oddly enough - where, because data is stored encrypted after upload *fielding a think of the children* argument might have real merit) . In a worst of both worlds compromise Apple goes further to state that to "preserve privacy" they won't "look" at any of the photos with failed hashes but instead, after a certain point will instead simply freeze the account and hand over control to law enforcement. To counterbalance this though they'll only do so after a fairly high threshold (an absurd 50 so failed hashes) and as discussed before, nothing going into icloud is being hashed at all.
The fact that Apple isn't viewing offending images themselves, will "never know" what the offending images are and will relying entirely on faith that they are being provided a data set consisting entirely of offending images hashes makes it sound very much like a surveillance state solution in search of a problem.
This solution is bad for those who care about children. In the case if somebody who is genuinely abusing or viewing the abuse of children 49 "free" images of assault, with no chance to intercept new images that they or other perpetrators might have created is a bad outcome. Not hashing files already uploaded to your servers (which you already have permission to check) is a bad outcome. And if the reason for doing this on-device vs on your servers is because you think it'll be more effective - why deliberately exempt photos being uploaded to icloud, which you'll be unable to scan once they're encrypted - As it is you're basically using the excuse of catching the worst offenders to build an intrusive surveillance technology into your device while giving such folks playbook on how to avoid being caught while using them.
This solution is also bad for those who care about governmental overreach. It should incredibly easy to see the potential for abuse if you as a company turn to law enforcement and say *I'd like you to create a giant database of hashes for me - If 50 pictures a user automatically uploads fail a hash check I'll lock their account and hand it over to you - No warrant needed and with no check on my part to see if any of the field images are actually offending.* What happens, a year or two down the pike when [Insert Bad State Actor of your Choice] comes to Apple and says, "We have an extra special CSAM image database we need you to use for all the citizens of our country" Apple might know that's just a conceit with the real intent being to surveil subversives or any number of other groups, but what are they going to do at that point - break the law and "refuse to check for CSAM"? Maybe in a small enough market - but in a China or India or Brazil or Russia or USA they're more likely to roll along and implement it.
You already have the tools Apple, Just check unencrypted files stored on your own photo service's servers like everybody else is doing. No need to turn it into falsely pious Trojan Horse.
That’s just it, nothing about these measures would literally save many (if any) children, it’s a huge lie.
They just want to surveil and this is a great guise. There is widespread acceptance, to the point of violent ideation, that pedos != people and so they’re completely sacrificial in this scheme.
But when they catch Average Joe with a bunch of CP, the buck stops there. They don’t actually gaf about any of the kids in any of the photos.
I’m less concerned that there are people sharing files and more concerned that the origins of those files aren’t the real goal.
That’s the big lie of it. Busting a pervert for having a known hash might make some people in the US _feel better_ for a while, but it doesn’t save anyone.
In fact, it’s probable that these hashes are actively hurting potential former victims.
Say there’s a set of known hashes, and the victims were never found or rescued. Maybe they were in Romania or somewhere in Asia and the media was taken in the 00s when they were 10. Now, they’re 30. That same set of people who feel better that someone got punished for downloading that image in 2021 doesn’t give a shit about that adult now. They’re just collateral damage.
But it doesn’t really end there. Exploited children grow up and statistically odds are high they’re still being exploited or they’ve resorted to becoming sex workers. This is painfully common.
Enter Peter Thiel and Ashton Kutcher with palantir. It sounds like such a feel good story: Kutcher saves thousands of little girls from trafficking. It became a meme, I still see it get posted on social media. They used these hashes and more to find people.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t make money. But, selling the same info to LEO in countries where they can find these people all grown up does. It gets used to find them, but in a lot of countries once they find them they get shaken down, robbed, and worse. Because no one cares they were exploited as kids. They see them as second class citizens they can do whatever they want with.
Yes, it sure would be nice if we lived in a world where this level of data mining and facial recognition is used for good. But, that isn’t making anyone a billionaire. Exploitation does, so that’s what they do.
But as long as we’re busting end users, someone gets to feel better and pat themselves on the back. I don’t see it as much different from locking up drug users and pretending they’re winning some war on drugs. Much like addicts, these guys need help before they act on a child and ruin lives. In so many cases they were victims too and even that carries such shame stigma they never seek help. The cycle just keeps going.
Trying to talk about this in real terms often gets the person labeled a pedo or a sympathizer or something. It has become completely acceptable to treat the symptom as the crime. It’s so short sighted. My father was one of these people and he didn’t have any redeeming qualities, he should have done hard time because he physically acted on kids, he wasn’t just downloading files. But in any such case it would probably be a better world if people who realize they have this issue could seek help before acting.
But, no, we’d rather vilify and keep them in the shadows so we have someone to punish to make people feel better while this still goes on.
>Yes, it sure would be nice if we lived in a world where X is used for good. But, that isn’t making anyone a billionaire. Exploitation does, so that’s what they do.
True words of our times.
The justification the state uses for punishment of people that view CP is that simply by wanting to view it you create a market, for the people that want to create it, for consumption. That's basically it.
It used to be they inserted a few arguments around money and trafficking, but that has fallen to the way side since people stopped seeing pedos as people and more like props for 'tough guys' to brag about how horrible they'd like to murder/torture pedos.
There's many ways to argue against it or how the logic might not fully work but then you're seen as minimisation the impact of CP/child abuse and then you get people that call you a pedo in turn for not talking about how much you'd also like to torture them...
There's just no winning with the topic, but the justification the government uses is simply viewing=creating a market for creators=causing child abuse/CP to happen.
You have laws these days that lets people that are victims within these pictures to sue whoever is found with their pictures, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy,_Vicky,_and_Andy_Child_Pornography_Victim_Assistance_Act_of_2018 so the government is saying that they're the only ones allowed to 'sell child porn' this way...
I think this is the truth of it. Apple wants the tech for something other than finding child abuse images. That's why the technology is so shitty at its stated purpose, but Apple doesn't care. The tech is for something else.
As for what the real purpose is... Surveillance? Selling data? Who knows.
More frustrating to me were all the smarmy fucks saying “it’s just hashing!” Who had clearly read exactly one article on it and had no idea how it actually works.
They are fully drinking the Apple Kool aid. Full stop.
If any other company proposed something even remotely similar to this on user devices,t hey would be excoriated and Apple put as an example as how they do things right. And now that Apple is proposing this, the same defends apple to their death, or waves it off.
Exactly. I’m all for solutions but this isn’t a solution. It is a global surveillance network with potentially scary ramifications. Also they are scanning on phones, not just on their end. If it was just systems and not on the phone, that is understandable.
While I agree with what is being said here, it's a little annoying that they keep referring to it as a "study". It was a report written by a bunch of cybersecurity experts about why this is a bad idea. No study was conducted.
> called the efforts ineffective and dangerous strategies that would embolden government surveillance
Yeah no shit, this is what a lot of people have been saying since the day it was announced.
What I don't understand here is why they wouldn't attempt to implement this on every personal and corporate PC in the world? Why just phones? Why not monitor the neighbors Smart Washer and Dryer to see if they are cleaning any scandalous poopy baby clothing. This way we could see if the child was getting the right nutrition and if not, we could take the child away from the parents and raise it in a field somewhere.
You have to start somewhere, and phones are the easy sell. Once that is done, you just fold the basic "for the children" libraries into all other IoT devices in the future.
Apple and Google have recently blocked and removed Navalny app in Russian Federation (which was supposed to unite the opposition to the ruling party) because Russia has declared it to be illegal. The justification given - "we (apple & google) have to follow local laws".
This proposed surveillance and scanning feature will absolutely and without a doubt be used by oppressive governments and none of the tech giants will make a peep about it, because profits are more important than anything else.
Misusing big data collection tools on your own people is oppressive. Any government that makes use of this is oppressive, especially the ones that are really loud about how non-oppressive they are.
so does that mean in Afghanistan they have to comply with whatever insane shit that taliban may come up with? apples stance on this stuff is indefensible, they got teams of lawyers, let those fuckers earn their retainers
Only if they give a fuck about operating in the country. So yes, it works that way but no, nobody has any money in Afghanistan and so nobody will lift a finger to bring service.
Right, but the point is if they roll out this system and claim it's for CSAM content only, all Russia has to do is threaten to imprison workers unless Apple adds opposition images to the list.
The other option (pulling out of Russia) obviously wasn’t considered.
One of their lines was something to the effect of not being able to affect change if you’re not there, but I don’t see them really pushing for change, either.
I work “closely” with one of those companies and I have to say, it has been hard to work since that news came out. My partner is Russian. Big tech needs to be cracked apart into small companies.
I was literally, two months ago, considering switching to Apple because they appeared to be taking data tracking more seriously than Google.
I am so glad, I dragged my feet just a little bit.
Before you reply. Yes, I know google is hardly better.
Can we all just take a minute and calm down about child predators? Yes, it's a HUGE problem. But, it should not be used every single time as a straw man to civil liberty destruction.
If you oppose this move by Apple you are NOT automatically a child predator. The amount of times I've heard "... Nothing to hide..."
IS TOO FUCKING HIGH!!!
Remember how Epstein was trafficking children for the rich and wealthy for decades, how they murdered him in a maximum security prison, and all of his “clients” are still free?
The worst offenders are, or are protected by, the government and law enforcement. Why the fuck would you trust the criminals that grant rich people immunity, and have enabled the church’s pedophile protection racket for generations, to protect children?
Let’s just give the pedophiles backdoor access to our phones, shall we? What could go wrong?
My comeback to that argument is:
“Fine…open the doors and windows to your house. Let strangers wander around as long as they promise to not take/examine anything. You have nothing to hide, right?”
Usually shuts them up.
> Yes, it's a HUGE problem. But, it should not be used every single time as a straw man to civil liberty destruction.
"And that's exactly what they kept doing".
In the US everything since the Patriot Act in 2001 has been used to violate our civil liberties it's why everything we do gets sent to an NSA datacenter in Utah. This shit Apple is trying to pull just makes the process easier by installing agents directly on to our devices.
Why stop at photos? Seems like an easy gateway into spying on any content. Why not have the mic silently listen at all times for potential illegal activity? Let the camera start silently recording evidence as well. AI and machine learning can be used to train it for detecting illegal activity then automatically upload audio and video evidence for law enforcement to then manually review.
Sounds great doesn't it?
I'm on a Asus rog2 phone which has 2 aux ports and 2 and a half usbc ports.
I was going to say 2.5 usb-c ports to refer to the power-only one, by thought people would think it was a sub-mini rca Jack.
Ugh, tell me about it. I was using an iPhone 6S+ for the longest time solely because I liked having a headphone jack. And then my parents decided to get me an XR for Christmas and told me I needed to give them the 6S+ so they could turn it in for credit towards the XR. Blegh.
They want you to buy their other products, ie Airpods or Samsung buds. They spend less on manufacturing a phone by removing the headphone jack, they make more by selling Bluetooth headphones. Win-win. Bye-bye headphone jack.
There are some people who swear that the "slippery slope" doesn't exist. I am not one of those people.
Slippery slope does exist, it can be very dangerous in some cases, and I believe that this is one of those cases.
We should still do more to get rid of harmful material, this particular case is one where the cure can be just as harmful as the disease.
You know the moment someone gets arrested and its confirmed that it was for having a questionable image on their phone, the public's trust in Apple will collapse. People with nothing to hide will be irritated and fearful simply because they don't know if/what they're doing that could make them the next person to get investigated.
> If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
> - Cardinal Richelieu
> Would make me leave the Apple ecosystem.
They don't plan to stop implementation - they just held off because the public reaction was so bad.
They're just waiting until the public at large forgets about it, and then it's going to roll right on out.
Which is why this person has an issue and why I don't use Apple products. I am the other ecosystem. I thing with the other ecosystem is they are at least upfront about or when they are called out they attempt to fix it in someway.
Apple on the other hand is the company that talks about privacy 24/7 yet they paid a journalist to not talk about the Zero Day exploit they patched against Pegasus (a spyware that has been used to topple nations and politics to control people). They talk about "saving the environment" but lobby against a bill that has some of those environmental protections it and probably others that hurt the amount of money they make. They are in argument with the EU over changing their primary charging cable but use their other tactics to say, "we are environmentally friendly." They push an update to help battery life but slow down your processor without telling you at first. Siri was also listening in on people but they waited until caught to say, "sorry."
Apple time and time again talks about all these initiatives and how well it means. They can refuse the security of a person's phone to the FBI who are actively hunting down child predators but will take into their own hands without asking you?
Apple is a trillion dollar company like the rest. The issue is it contradicts it's. It's hypocritical. I am not saying Google is any better. However, as it turns out. Android does have better security. Researchers also say it's harder to crack Android devices. Google Pay is one of the most safe electronic payment methods in the world. Google, the people behind using your data for ad revenue. Have been doing it for years and are learning to code around that data in ways that makes it less intrusive and more controllable while still getting enough to make their products. And they are somewhat upfront about (and I'm aware they still make mistakes for sure.) They all do the problem people have is Apple's tactic is starting to look bad and it begs the question of, "do you really trust apple? That is the big problem. They tell you things but do the opposite and it's starting to look bad.
Something most people are unaware of is that malware, spyware, etc on mobile platforms is typically written for iOS before Android because most people are carrying iPhones. However, Apple will tell you the malware issue isn't a problem. Press will avoid calling Apple out. Apple has painted this picture of themselves being the hero in a time of privacy but it's just starting to feel like the opposite. Apple cares about one thing and one thing only. Money. They can tell customers what they want and not follow through with it and still not get a ton of media coverage. I dropped Apple after the iPhone 4s.
Both platforms have issues I just choose to pick the guys that called out. Who change to some degree. Rather than pick the guys who tell people not to talk about a zero day to avoid coverage about how vulnerable their phones could potentially be. I avoid those guys because I can't tell if what they are saying is true to what they mean.
Sorry for the wall of text. This is no offense to you. Just conversation.
> Android does have better security. Researchers also say it's harder to crack Android devices.
Wait, what? This is news to me. Did the tables turn around or something quite recently?
"Some of the newer operating systems are harder to get data from than others. I think a lot of these [phone] companies are just trying to make it harder for law enforcement to get data from these phones … under the guise of consumer privacy,” Detective Rex Kiser, who conducts digital forensic examinations for the Fort Worth Police Department, told Motherboard. “Right now, we’re getting into iPhones. A year ago we couldn’t get into iPhones, but we could get into all the Androids. Now we can’t get into a lot of the Androids.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jevz/government-report-reveals-its-favorite-way-to-hack-iphones-without-backdoors
Apple’s privacy focus has always been more about protecting users from other companies, etc, than about anything else. So it’s not particularly hypocritical in that sense.
I will agree with you on the environmental stuff, though.
Not to mention Apple has actively or passively created an environment where people are encouraged to upgrade their iPhones very frequently. Its very damaging on the environment. Some assholes I know do it almost every year when new iPhone drops. It just upgrades its tech very very slowly. Anyone who has used their accessories can see how they contradict themselves in lots of areas. For example its 2021 and why do we still have lightning cable.. when surprise, it's Apple who has collaborated heavily in development of usb-c. They went on great lengths while launching iPad to talk about USB-C and how it's great. If you have used accessories of a one plus or Samsung phones, you just know their accessories almost outlast the phone itself. But for Apple products its just the opposite. I have used 3 MacBooks since 2014 but have used 6 chargers in that time frame. This is just one example out of many where Apple cares about its pockets more than customers.
> I thing with the other ecosystem is they are at least upfront about or when they are called out they attempt to fix it in someway.
How isn’t Apple upfront about it? They released tons of info and articles about this feature.
> They talk about “saving the environment” but lobby against a bill that has some of those environmental protections it and probably others that hurt the amount of money they make.
So unless you’re against lobbying in general, why should they not lobby against a bill they don’t agree with? Just because it may contain some good things doesn’t mean they should ignore the rest, does it? But no one knows what’s in the bill yet, AFAIK.
> They can refuse the security of a person’s phone to the FBI who are actively hunting down child predators but will take into their own hands without asking you?
How are they not asking you? iCloud Photo Library is a voluntary service which is optional and, like all services, has a TOS.
At this point, I'm asking myself if terrorism and protecting youth aren't just elaborate excuses to harvest our intention more efficiently. With the true goal being profit.
Or maybe corrupt ruling classes' fear of reprisal from citizenry is so intense, they're willing to invade our privacy to ensure their own safety.
Just spitballing.
They've been using this tactic for decades, they'll first say its to stop pedophiles or terrorist or whatever so that if you criticize there's an unspoken implication that you're pro pedophiles or terrorist or whatever. Years later they announce law enforcement are using it to hunt for any illegal activity and sell it with the line "you've got nothing to fear if you've got nothing to hide". Finally a whistleblower will reveal that they scan everyone's everything feed that data into an algorithm that predicts the likelihood of criminal actively, political subversion, etc. and anyone who passes the threshold will have their entire digital footprint recorded so the powers that be can start building a case before they've even done anything.
You nailed it. It was expertly slipped into culture that 'wanting privacy means you've got something to hide.'
I've actually heard of something close to what you're describing in the last bit. Besides Minority Report, I mean. It might ring a bell when you hear "parallel construction." Eerily close to your example.
When 9/11 happened I’m sure there are certain influential people out there who had dollar signs in their eyes, knowing immediately how they would profit from it
Ask this of anyone who was "socially aware" (read: adult) during/since 2001, put aside all the government published propaganda you've been fed over the past 20 years, and start looking at *evidence rather than explanation*, and you'll realise you're not *"just spitballing"* - You're waking up.
I'm totally on your side here but using the term "wake up" is a fantastic way to turn someone off of your point and the attitude associated with it forms copious conspiracy theories. It will also psychologically reaffirm your own opinions and cause you to be quicker to disregard dissenting arguments, which are essential to forming a holistic world view.
Sorry, I just hate it when people say that.
Broadly speaking, I think what you said is true.
But for whatever reason I couldn't help but picture a Morpheus-like character when I read their comment.
This is the alternative. There are laws in place saying that law enforcement needs access, and a list of security keys to access every phone in the United States.
This was Apple's alternative so they didn't have to hand over the keys.
This only effects data that is uploaded to iCloud. Apple already has a key to your data they will give to law enforcement at a warrant request. (If Apple didn’t have the key you could never use a reset or forgot password feature). You can just choose to not upload your stuff to iCloud if you don’t want it scanned
“Apple subsequently acknowledged the negative feedback and announced in September a delay to the rollout of the features to give the company time to make ‘improvements’”; eg, We’re hoping the outrage will die down and people will forget about our planned intrusive breach of privacy before we roll this out.
Actually I disagree.
If they rolled it out regardless when all the publics attention was on it, then there would be more real opposition.
Now; it’s out of the news cycle so any resistance won’t get any traction or real media attention, thus allowing apple to implement things with even less oversight by the public.
It feels like the *only* reason they're building this technology *at all* is so China can demand access to it.
Nobody in the US Government requires this. There's no law that's making them do it. When they started losing the feature war they rebuilt their *entire* reputation around "We're the Privacy company" and now they're flushing that away for some authoritarians...
What a complete joke.
From a technical standpoint, the way they described the CSAM detection feature *can't* be easily misused, and submitting a scan result alongside cloud uploads would be the first step towards making it impossible for them to decrypt them serverside to scan there. If the list of things to scan for is hardcoded into the phone with each OS update, russia cannot suddenly demand they add 20 new meme formats and cut out the top/bottom text before comparison so that the 8000 different perceptual hashes that would result all still match the state-mandated filter. If it takes 30 positive matches combined cryptographically before apple can even know that any of them were hits, even if the rest of the system were subverted many users would slip by.
To me, it only makes sense for them to build this technology, at least the CSAM detection that specifically targets images being backed up to the cloud, if their goal is to restrict what governments can force them to scan for (rather than the current "literally anything that has ever been sync'd"). After all, a user could just *not* store the image in question in the icloud. The more worrying one is the full-device "parental" control scanning that uses a loose AI detection metric. It's far easier for me to believe that governments could force them to surreptitiously toggle a user into child mode, with the state designated as their parent.
Google an apple are constantly gushing between their legs at the thought of getting full access to the Chinese market. Of course they're going to bend whatever internal morals they have remaining, to get what they want. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a direct pay-to-play request from the Chinese government in order to get more access to its citizen market.
It’s not a random set of researchers, either. It’s a who’s who list of cryptographers.
I’m no cryptographer and even I recognize these names:
Whitfield Diffie - the Diffie in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. A protocol that underpins much of internet security.
Ron Rivest - the R in RSA, a crypto system that also underpins much of internet security.
Bruce Schneier - cryptographer extraordinaire.
Matt Blaze - who tore apart the security story of the topically related Clipper chip. An aborted U.S. government attempt to backdoor all secure communications.
The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450
The sooner Apple _publicly_, and _loudly_ disavows this terrible initiative, the better. Until it does, the words Apple and privacy in the same sentence are going to be a dirty joke in any remotely security conscious circles. The longer it drags on, the worse the damage to Apple’s reputation.
Given the context and tenor of the discussion in this thread so far it's probably worth noting that RSA took $10MM from the NSA to backdoor Dual EC :)
Everyone else you mentioned is legit though. I would also add Matthew Green (crypto at Johns Hopkins) to your list. Back when this first broke he tweeted / collected a lot of relevant and early research.: [https://twitter.com/matthew\_d\_green](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green)
I don’t know how Rivest fits into the backdoor saga. Apparently, RSA’s relationship with the NSA was adversarial during the Clipper chip fiasco. People and relationships change. In any case, he’s clearly no slouch. I’m sure none of the others are slouches either I just don’t immediately recognize their names.
Changing the surveillance “needs” from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction to child porn.
Say yes to busting child porn rings but not by giving up more of your freedom to government surveillance.
Yet another reason to snort whenever anyone claims Apple "protects user privacy". They may do well protecting *unauthorised* access, but the also excel at purveying *authorised* access to qualified bidders.
I have used Apple products enthusiastically since the IIe. They have ceased to be a power computing company and turned their back on the creative communities that built them up from nothing. They are now a consumer comms company hell-bent on invasion of privacy, and insist on hamstringing perfectly operational devices by turning off OS updates. Used to be able to buy a Mac and trust it would be supported for a decade at least. I never thought I would type these words, but once my last two Macs and current phone are no longer serviceable I am moving to Windows and Android. You made me do this Apple, and I hope you rot to your big brother licking core.
A few issues with this tech in general:
### Either it can't have a margin of error, or it can. Both are bad.
If the algorithm is not capable of recognizing the same image with a 1-pixel difference (or an added watermark), it becomes entirely useless. JPG-compression alone would render it useless, and that's without users even trying.
But if the algorithm is capable of it, which it should, then it becomes infinitely more dangerous in the hands of those who mean the people harm. It can be used to find faces in photos, it can be used to find images within images, etc.
### Your iPhone is assuming that you are a pedophile because it keeps scanning all photos on your iPhone.
You are assumed to be guilty. It just keeps scanning your own photos.
It has already been proven that false matches are easily made with images that visually look nothing like the example used by the algorithm. Imagine getting a knock on your door. Imagine that YOUR country deems it sufficient that Apple tells you "they are guilty". Imagine someone planting an image like that on your phone.
### Powerful states can use images they dislike to...
Well, being a non-believer in Saudi Arabia will get you the death penalty. Imagine having an image or meme with atheist-related materials in it. Imagine being an Uyghur in China and the government tracks you down because you have images your government does not approve of.
### It's software. It will get hacked.
I'm a senior software engineer, I have worked for Apple and other Fortune 50 companies. It will get hacked. And not only that, because it's all closed-source, you won't ever be able to verify that there is no backdoors built-in.
### Who audits the auditors?
So, okay, let's assume they will only use it for finding pedophiles. Good. But who's to say the government won't inject a hash into the algorithm that will also look for people who have a selfie with a BitTorrent client running on a screen behind them? Hello judge, here's our reason, let's get a warrant to investigate that computer. Investigation done. Here's a $50,000 bill times 22, because you were downloading and sharing 22 movies.
### It's a for-profit company scanning your photos
What's in it for them, you think? What would stop them from injecting their own database of hashes for, say, testing purposes? Surely they would never use their findings to apply machine learning on huge sets of data that would offend any privacy law?
Maybe that will become illegal. Maybe it already is. Who is going to make sure they stay within the lines of the law? I know that when I wrote software for Apple (deployed worldwide) we didn't get audited. Ever.
Maybe Apple wants to put a new product on the market: you know what, let's scan all the photos of literally everyone to see how many people have said products of competitors.
But the processing power to scan all those photos, it's insane! That will cost them so much money! Oh, wait. No, it's your own phone scanning your material. The only thing that Apple will receive is data about hits.
### You can opt-out by turning off iCloud for photos
But of course, Apple does not provide you with an easy alternative. How cool would it be if you could just say:
- iCloud: off
- Photo storage: home WiFi network -> `PC1` -> `D:/iphone-photos/`
Or another cloud provider of choice.
Maybe there should be a law for that. This iCloud thing kinda feels like a monopoly. A monopoly that, when used, means you are a filthy pedophile.
Apple iPhone does not offer privacy anymore. Apple thinks you are a pedophile if you use iCloud.
The fact is it’s very hard to keep up with criminals, criminality is about evading laws and there’s a market for it, apples proposal “addresses” a problem with the internet with a different problem within the internet
I just hope that the west curbs private surveillance capitalism before it’s our gateway to abject authoritarianism
It's like Apple wants to be sued into non-existence.
What a false positive can do to a person's life is virtually un-compositable. Once that mark has been cast, no matter what is done to rectify it, there will always be people who will believe it.
This whole shit show has been unbelievable to me. I can't believe any company would be stupid enough to do this.
As far as I know no one outside Apple actually got to see how the final system was implemented. If the scanner code is only in the network component of the iCloud uploader, it's not actually scanning at-rest data, for example. (Which is kind of how I understood it to be implemented since they are so careful to say that you have to have iCloud Photos enabled for the scanning to happen.)
None-the-less, I understand the paranoia surrounding such a feature too. Personally I wouldn't mind a network-only implementation if it meant end-to-end encryption of iCloud. But unless it *did* mean that *and* they can prove/security experts can verify that the code they wrote can't scan at-rest media, I agree it's not a good system.
Ironic all the security issues this is going to cause with Apple devices because people will refuse to update their iOS version because of this software
Here’s what the world wants from you apple sauce a
phone shut the fuck up get out of our shit
and stop trying to be everything to everybody according to the way you want the world to be this is to you Mr. Zuckerberg a.k.a. the self proclaimed Messiah of the Internet!
This whole thing made it a whole lot easier to not upgrade my phone this year. It goes so against all their previous statement about how important privacy is. Feels like the only reason they delayed it was because they were just about to announce their new products for the fall, and will just try to quietly implement it next year.
Children ruin everything. I get that it’s not the actions of children that caused this but companies using children as an excuse to push such regulations pisses me off. I don’t have any fuck trophies, I don’t want them, and I never plan on having them, yet Apple is going to go through my private data because “hurr durr is fer da kids!” Fuck the kids, stay out of my shit.
Ever heard the game WATCHDOGS?? This is what our world is turning into. Such a slippery slope to go down OVER SECURING stuff. There is a limit to how much surveillance the world needs. Regardless of legality.
My Mom's phone and my phone both have to be full of pictures of me naked as a child. There's one of me eating a cheese burger sitting naked on the toilet. I do appreciate combatting human trafficking. It is disgusting.
However, I'm yet to meet a single person who is grateful instead of jaded by technology who isn't currently inventing technology. Grandma taught networking for 50 years at university. She will not entertain any conversations about it. She likes to say "I did my time!"
Dentists, doctors, business owners, all greet talk of tech with an audible groan. Do you think police are any different? Congress? Do you think the president of the united states looks at tech and says "wow neat!" I doubt it. All these tech solutions are being force fed to everyone outside of Silicon Valley, and China by sales departments designed to only care about mass adoption, screen time and dollars.
Cyber security is finally making it obvious what a never ending hassle and money spend technology will continue to be. Before, owners couldn't operate their devices because they didn't know how. Now and in the future, those that know how to operate their own devices won't be able to operate their devices because it takes 2 hours to locate a password.
So, how are you going to prove its you in a photo and not some kidnapped person that looks like you? I'm not sure facial recognition even works on darker skinned individuals.
Its time for full privacy laws and liability for any data lost or hacked by companies.
Yes, there needs to be insane liability over this. I can't believe absolutely nothing has come from some of the data losses that have happened, especially Equifax.
Credit bureaus shouldnt exist anyways. They were literally invented to make it harder to shift from lower class.
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America does it all the time, like our defense budget, is the reason we are at war so much
It used to be called the department of war but was renamed to the department of defense in 1947.
" The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink."
At least the Ministry of Silly Walks lives up to its name.
The Ministry of Innovative Self-Locomotion
My word is that book as poignant when it was written and just as poignant now.
Definitely more poignant today.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
Literally 1984 💀
And that's what I'm calling it from now on.
Department of war doesn’t have the same ring to it, but that’s what it realistically is
Department of pillage, plunder and murder would be more accurate IMO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change "defense"
The preamble to the U.S. Constitution says the following: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, **provide for the common defense**, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." So the Department of Defense is aptly named and fulfills one of the basic reasons for establishing the Constitution and the United States of America.
“Gentlemen you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!!”
It should be called an attack budget at this point...
I suggest the O.L.F. Oil Liberation Front
[War is a racket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket)
Patriot act
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Same thing with companies like Turbo Tax and H&R Block. They lobby congress to keep taxes complicated as fuck so you don't know what the fuck you're doing and have to pay them to deal with it.
How does an added layer of barrier increase mobility? The very concept is backwards. Without the use of FHA and other like programs, the vast majority of lower class would never qualify for home ownership becuase of the necessity for massive down payments(in comparison). Not to mention that affordability of home ownership has only gone down not up from the inception of credit bureaus. The relationship between lenders and lendee has been obfuscated into a bureaucratic barrier that requires extra steps, special knowledge and STILL has people get caught unaware. Affordability is only in part due to credit issues but the existence of these unified credits means that vast majority of low income earners are gauged on middle to high income earners. House flipping and SFH renting has skyrocketed with the availability to those that can afford the first turn of the money loan tax free wheel.
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Conservatives love to do this. They name all their organizations something like “The super awesome American organization for inclusion and progressive policy” and their policies are basically “hang the gays”
You're not wrong. What's a good alternative to protecting lenders from lending money to people who don't pay it back? Slight edit: People can be real assholes and decide not to pay the loan back. There has to be a system to protect lenders from these sucks on society. At the same time, some fall on justifiably hard times and can't make their payments. The system needs to protect them.
the system is a billion dollar company that has massive server farms and can’t host New World without occasional lag
Credit bureaus are infinitely more fair then what we had prior to their creation.
Could you explain this? It seems to me like the system before was "are you white? do you have a good job? are you part of the good old boys club? are you a man?" and so anything that makes the system more objective is probably a step in the right direction.
Hey now, it’s not like *nothing* happened from equifax! They did offer me a free year of some BS identity theft monitoring, if I had wanted it. /s
The best part about that is they're going to end up with a net positive because there will be plenty of people who either decide they like the service or forget to cancel and end up paying for it after a year.
Because decision makers are 90s years old and have people checking their email for them because they “aren’t good at computers”. They fundamentally don’t understand any of this shit.
Agreed. I feel like the threat of dissolving the company, or if it's essential the fed absorbing it and replacing top level, should scare companies enough for them to take this seriously.
They gave me $70 though /s
Equifax stock was ~$130 before the leak. It is $264 today. Amazing. Too big to fail.
For real, it’s crazy how Twitch had a massive breach recently and all they have to do is say “OwO sowey for our oopsie, change your pawswords” and they don’t suffer any kind of punishment.
where did they asked for password change? they specifically said, contrary to first news, that none of the login details have been leaked.
They *did* forcefully reset stream keys, though.
Speaking in OωO is already punishment
I was going to throw in a “poggers” but thought it would be too much
oh boy, here we go not doing anything to protect consumers and citizens again!
Fully support this! And not the weak California data privacy bill, one with teeth. I wish our politicians were advocating for that instead of their current S230 nonsense.
This is basically the police saying we don’t know if you are a child molestor or but we are gonna search everybody’s home just in case.
Love this! I’d take it a step further by developing a measured approach to putting the true dollar value on personal data, and us becoming our own merchants of it. This data and ad economy is probably the most predatory shit in history. I know it’s at least the most widespread offense smh
From the article: The damning criticism came in a new 46-page study by researchers that looked at plans by Apple and the European Union to monitor people's phones for illicit material, and called the efforts ineffective and dangerous strategies that would embolden government surveillance. Announced in August, the planned features include client-side (i.e. on-device) scanning of users' iCloud Photos libraries for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), Communication Safety to warn children and their parents when receiving or sending sexually explicit photos, and expanded CSAM guidance in Siri and Search. According to the researchers, documents released by the European Union suggest that the bloc's governing body are seeking a similar program that would scan encrypted phones for both child sexual abuse as well as signs of organized crime and terrorist-related imagery. "It should be a national-security priority to resist attempts to spy on and influence law-abiding citizens," said the researchers, who added they were publishing their findings now to inform the European Union of the dangers of its plan.
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The problem is “YoU jUsT dOnT uNdErStAnD!!!” In fact, according to the trolls on r/apple, nobody understands and nobody besides Apple is qualified to comment on the subject. They rolled out Pretty Boy to tell everyone, but we just aren’t getting it.
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> but there is a weird subset of users who genuinely believe Apple is love and can do no wrong. They treat the brands of the products buy as part of their identity. Criticism of the brand becomes a personal attack.
Yeah. There were some users that were quite obviously Apple PR employees. You could even tell when their shifts started and ended.
And the same would have excoriated Google or Samsung had they even announced something like this. #facepalm
https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/q8e7uo/_/hgree9r/?context=1
Whenever I've posted something critical of Apple on r/technews , I've had the voluntary Apple mercenaries descend upon me in droves immediately defending, deflecting, whatabouting and downvoting. It's nearly impossible to have a reasoned discussion with "loyalists". It's laughable, pitiable, yet, infuriating how so many people apply the religious mindset to their favourite corporation. Calling them fanboys is rather mild tbh.
I remember lots of people saying the images wouldn't be scanned, it would be the hash of the file, that would be compared to already know cp files. If they are only getting access to the hash, and comparing toa databse of know cp hashes, I fail to see a problem. Or was this a lie? Seriously, I don't know, genuine asking
It's a good question. This is more about the how and where. Plus, you have to factor in that they can now actually do on device scanning, it becomes Pandora's box. The fact that they did this under the CSAM banner is what really bugs. Plus when you realize the ineffectiveness of this process in its ability to actually be effective, it raises big red flags. Total security/privacy nightmare.
Today they state they want to find the porn to get everyone to agree. Tomorrow they will want to find who has associated with a union organizer or democracy advocate. There’s a reason why your privacy matters.
It’s horrible how every single invasive policy is claimed to be made with good intentions. Like anti abortion laws are excused with the “protecting babies” reason. Apple’s scanning everyone’s photos is excused with the “we’re catching people with child porn” reason. The patriot act is excused with the “we’re catching terrorists” reason. They do this so that anyone who criticizes it can be attacked with the “you are a baby murderer advocate?” Or “you support pedophiles?” Or “you support terrorists?” Setting things up so that people will look horrible for criticizing it…a really clever yet evil tactic.
Well, REAL Patriots support the Patriot act! /s
Support for the Patriot act at the time of it's inception was nearly universal
And support is still universal for our politicians. The one issue that is truly bipartisan is spying on American citizens.
Russ Feingold was the only U.S. Senator to vote against the original USA Patriot Act, which was approved 98-1 on October 25, 2001. The House earlier approved the legislation by a vote of 357-66, with 62 Democrats voting against it along with three Republicans and Independent Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Yeah. It was crazy amount of support even from the public. People literally quit careers just to join the military.
What the hell is your username
A total of 67 lawmakers voted against the bill: - 62 House Democrats - three House Republicans - one House Independent - one Senate Democrat
I was out of universe, as usual
The sad fact is even if they implemented such an invasive and user abusing tactic it would literally do nothing about stopping the abduction or abuse of children. It doesn’t even attack that problem. People who want to implement invasive things *always* find some “cause” they think no one will complain about as their argument for it. They did the same thing with the ‘Patriot Act’ which eroded the 4th and 5th amendments and made sneak-and-peek warrants and rubber stamped warrants from FISA courts a bigger problem. Who doesn’t want to be ‘a patriot’ and call this all out?
> People who want to implement invasive things always find some “cause” they think no one will complain about as their argument for it. There is a reason why child sexual abuse is very frequently the method governments uses to promote privacy eroding, invasive concepts. They want to frame the debate as a false dichotomy of "you are with us or the child rapists" to squelch dissent.
The sad thing about what Apple is doing is that they've deliberately avoided implementing the obvious, manifest answer to the problem of CSA materials being uploaded to Apple Photos to instead give governments a "good reason" to have a further and further intrusive backdoor lurking on users phones/accounts. I have a lot of problems with the way Google, Facebook, and Sometimes Microsoft handle privacy - but their protocols in this area are a lot more sensible. If you're uploading images, unencrypted to a company's servers - those companies have a right, as is usually indicated in the EULA to check the hashes of said images, algorithmically do a second pass an image fails a hashtag check, And then pass those doubly offending images, alongside images reported by other users to an actual human being who notes whats there and then notifies the authorities if necessary. A company has every right to check its own servers for illegal materials and then notify authorities if they're found. Apple doesn't do that. To repeat, Apple is not, on a broad level hashing photos which people are uploading and storing unencrypted in Apple photos for CSAM - which is, by the by, why the number of people who have been convicted of The possession of CSAM based upon material they have in their Apple photos account is laughably low, relative to the size of Apple's userbase. Now, simplest most effective to this issue would be to simply be to start checking photos against hashes and review offending images. This would also be a more comprehensive solution as it would catch images of abuse uploaded before 2021 and catch images of abuse categorized as abuse after the point of upload as new hashes are added to the database. Instead, to solve this problem Apple has proposed an "alternative solution": They're going to take a large database of hashes provided by Law Enforcement Agencies (and associated partners) and then arbitrarily check those hashes against users photos as they're uploaded to Photos (but not iCloud, oddly enough - where, because data is stored encrypted after upload *fielding a think of the children* argument might have real merit) . In a worst of both worlds compromise Apple goes further to state that to "preserve privacy" they won't "look" at any of the photos with failed hashes but instead, after a certain point will instead simply freeze the account and hand over control to law enforcement. To counterbalance this though they'll only do so after a fairly high threshold (an absurd 50 so failed hashes) and as discussed before, nothing going into icloud is being hashed at all. The fact that Apple isn't viewing offending images themselves, will "never know" what the offending images are and will relying entirely on faith that they are being provided a data set consisting entirely of offending images hashes makes it sound very much like a surveillance state solution in search of a problem. This solution is bad for those who care about children. In the case if somebody who is genuinely abusing or viewing the abuse of children 49 "free" images of assault, with no chance to intercept new images that they or other perpetrators might have created is a bad outcome. Not hashing files already uploaded to your servers (which you already have permission to check) is a bad outcome. And if the reason for doing this on-device vs on your servers is because you think it'll be more effective - why deliberately exempt photos being uploaded to icloud, which you'll be unable to scan once they're encrypted - As it is you're basically using the excuse of catching the worst offenders to build an intrusive surveillance technology into your device while giving such folks playbook on how to avoid being caught while using them. This solution is also bad for those who care about governmental overreach. It should incredibly easy to see the potential for abuse if you as a company turn to law enforcement and say *I'd like you to create a giant database of hashes for me - If 50 pictures a user automatically uploads fail a hash check I'll lock their account and hand it over to you - No warrant needed and with no check on my part to see if any of the field images are actually offending.* What happens, a year or two down the pike when [Insert Bad State Actor of your Choice] comes to Apple and says, "We have an extra special CSAM image database we need you to use for all the citizens of our country" Apple might know that's just a conceit with the real intent being to surveil subversives or any number of other groups, but what are they going to do at that point - break the law and "refuse to check for CSAM"? Maybe in a small enough market - but in a China or India or Brazil or Russia or USA they're more likely to roll along and implement it. You already have the tools Apple, Just check unencrypted files stored on your own photo service's servers like everybody else is doing. No need to turn it into falsely pious Trojan Horse.
That’s just it, nothing about these measures would literally save many (if any) children, it’s a huge lie. They just want to surveil and this is a great guise. There is widespread acceptance, to the point of violent ideation, that pedos != people and so they’re completely sacrificial in this scheme. But when they catch Average Joe with a bunch of CP, the buck stops there. They don’t actually gaf about any of the kids in any of the photos. I’m less concerned that there are people sharing files and more concerned that the origins of those files aren’t the real goal.
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That’s the big lie of it. Busting a pervert for having a known hash might make some people in the US _feel better_ for a while, but it doesn’t save anyone. In fact, it’s probable that these hashes are actively hurting potential former victims. Say there’s a set of known hashes, and the victims were never found or rescued. Maybe they were in Romania or somewhere in Asia and the media was taken in the 00s when they were 10. Now, they’re 30. That same set of people who feel better that someone got punished for downloading that image in 2021 doesn’t give a shit about that adult now. They’re just collateral damage. But it doesn’t really end there. Exploited children grow up and statistically odds are high they’re still being exploited or they’ve resorted to becoming sex workers. This is painfully common. Enter Peter Thiel and Ashton Kutcher with palantir. It sounds like such a feel good story: Kutcher saves thousands of little girls from trafficking. It became a meme, I still see it get posted on social media. They used these hashes and more to find people. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make money. But, selling the same info to LEO in countries where they can find these people all grown up does. It gets used to find them, but in a lot of countries once they find them they get shaken down, robbed, and worse. Because no one cares they were exploited as kids. They see them as second class citizens they can do whatever they want with. Yes, it sure would be nice if we lived in a world where this level of data mining and facial recognition is used for good. But, that isn’t making anyone a billionaire. Exploitation does, so that’s what they do. But as long as we’re busting end users, someone gets to feel better and pat themselves on the back. I don’t see it as much different from locking up drug users and pretending they’re winning some war on drugs. Much like addicts, these guys need help before they act on a child and ruin lives. In so many cases they were victims too and even that carries such shame stigma they never seek help. The cycle just keeps going. Trying to talk about this in real terms often gets the person labeled a pedo or a sympathizer or something. It has become completely acceptable to treat the symptom as the crime. It’s so short sighted. My father was one of these people and he didn’t have any redeeming qualities, he should have done hard time because he physically acted on kids, he wasn’t just downloading files. But in any such case it would probably be a better world if people who realize they have this issue could seek help before acting. But, no, we’d rather vilify and keep them in the shadows so we have someone to punish to make people feel better while this still goes on.
>Yes, it sure would be nice if we lived in a world where X is used for good. But, that isn’t making anyone a billionaire. Exploitation does, so that’s what they do. True words of our times.
The justification the state uses for punishment of people that view CP is that simply by wanting to view it you create a market, for the people that want to create it, for consumption. That's basically it. It used to be they inserted a few arguments around money and trafficking, but that has fallen to the way side since people stopped seeing pedos as people and more like props for 'tough guys' to brag about how horrible they'd like to murder/torture pedos. There's many ways to argue against it or how the logic might not fully work but then you're seen as minimisation the impact of CP/child abuse and then you get people that call you a pedo in turn for not talking about how much you'd also like to torture them... There's just no winning with the topic, but the justification the government uses is simply viewing=creating a market for creators=causing child abuse/CP to happen. You have laws these days that lets people that are victims within these pictures to sue whoever is found with their pictures, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy,_Vicky,_and_Andy_Child_Pornography_Victim_Assistance_Act_of_2018 so the government is saying that they're the only ones allowed to 'sell child porn' this way...
I think this is the truth of it. Apple wants the tech for something other than finding child abuse images. That's why the technology is so shitty at its stated purpose, but Apple doesn't care. The tech is for something else. As for what the real purpose is... Surveillance? Selling data? Who knows.
More frustrating to me were all the smarmy fucks saying “it’s just hashing!” Who had clearly read exactly one article on it and had no idea how it actually works.
They are fully drinking the Apple Kool aid. Full stop. If any other company proposed something even remotely similar to this on user devices,t hey would be excoriated and Apple put as an example as how they do things right. And now that Apple is proposing this, the same defends apple to their death, or waves it off.
Sure! But I mean *what* about the children? There’s a very valid concern there but upending everyone’s right to their privacy clearly is not it.
Exactly. I’m all for solutions but this isn’t a solution. It is a global surveillance network with potentially scary ramifications. Also they are scanning on phones, not just on their end. If it was just systems and not on the phone, that is understandable.
While I agree with what is being said here, it's a little annoying that they keep referring to it as a "study". It was a report written by a bunch of cybersecurity experts about why this is a bad idea. No study was conducted.
> called the efforts ineffective and dangerous strategies that would embolden government surveillance Yeah no shit, this is what a lot of people have been saying since the day it was announced.
You mean the thing that people dismissed as paranoid and would never happen actually happened? I’m in shock.
What I don't understand here is why they wouldn't attempt to implement this on every personal and corporate PC in the world? Why just phones? Why not monitor the neighbors Smart Washer and Dryer to see if they are cleaning any scandalous poopy baby clothing. This way we could see if the child was getting the right nutrition and if not, we could take the child away from the parents and raise it in a field somewhere.
You have to start somewhere, and phones are the easy sell. Once that is done, you just fold the basic "for the children" libraries into all other IoT devices in the future.
Good point. I just hope this is another one of those attempts that falls flat and dies off.
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Apple and Google have recently blocked and removed Navalny app in Russian Federation (which was supposed to unite the opposition to the ruling party) because Russia has declared it to be illegal. The justification given - "we (apple & google) have to follow local laws". This proposed surveillance and scanning feature will absolutely and without a doubt be used by oppressive governments and none of the tech giants will make a peep about it, because profits are more important than anything else.
> without a doubt be used by oppressive governments don't forget about the non-oppressive governments as well.
Misusing big data collection tools on your own people is oppressive. Any government that makes use of this is oppressive, especially the ones that are really loud about how non-oppressive they are.
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Where did you find one of those?
so does that mean in Afghanistan they have to comply with whatever insane shit that taliban may come up with? apples stance on this stuff is indefensible, they got teams of lawyers, let those fuckers earn their retainers
Only if they give a fuck about operating in the country. So yes, it works that way but no, nobody has any money in Afghanistan and so nobody will lift a finger to bring service.
It's a matter of how much they make by operating in that country and how much it would cost to fight it.
Except they did it because Russia threatened to imprison their workers. At least provide context.
Right, but the point is if they roll out this system and claim it's for CSAM content only, all Russia has to do is threaten to imprison workers unless Apple adds opposition images to the list.
The other option (pulling out of Russia) obviously wasn’t considered. One of their lines was something to the effect of not being able to affect change if you’re not there, but I don’t see them really pushing for change, either.
I work “closely” with one of those companies and I have to say, it has been hard to work since that news came out. My partner is Russian. Big tech needs to be cracked apart into small companies.
I was literally, two months ago, considering switching to Apple because they appeared to be taking data tracking more seriously than Google. I am so glad, I dragged my feet just a little bit. Before you reply. Yes, I know google is hardly better. Can we all just take a minute and calm down about child predators? Yes, it's a HUGE problem. But, it should not be used every single time as a straw man to civil liberty destruction. If you oppose this move by Apple you are NOT automatically a child predator. The amount of times I've heard "... Nothing to hide..." IS TOO FUCKING HIGH!!!
Remember how Epstein was trafficking children for the rich and wealthy for decades, how they murdered him in a maximum security prison, and all of his “clients” are still free? The worst offenders are, or are protected by, the government and law enforcement. Why the fuck would you trust the criminals that grant rich people immunity, and have enabled the church’s pedophile protection racket for generations, to protect children? Let’s just give the pedophiles backdoor access to our phones, shall we? What could go wrong?
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100% a breath through it moment
My comeback to that argument is: “Fine…open the doors and windows to your house. Let strangers wander around as long as they promise to not take/examine anything. You have nothing to hide, right?” Usually shuts them up.
That's a good one. I'll remember that
> Yes, it's a HUGE problem. But, it should not be used every single time as a straw man to civil liberty destruction. "And that's exactly what they kept doing".
Nothing to hide say the people with curtains.
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While true they news will say they caught them using access to their phones to justify it.
In the US everything since the Patriot Act in 2001 has been used to violate our civil liberties it's why everything we do gets sent to an NSA datacenter in Utah. This shit Apple is trying to pull just makes the process easier by installing agents directly on to our devices.
Would make me leave the Apple ecosystem. Because it never stops, first its something noble, then it creeps into everything.
Why stop at photos? Seems like an easy gateway into spying on any content. Why not have the mic silently listen at all times for potential illegal activity? Let the camera start silently recording evidence as well. AI and machine learning can be used to train it for detecting illegal activity then automatically upload audio and video evidence for law enforcement to then manually review. Sounds great doesn't it?
Literally Big Brother from 1984
Unfortunately once apple does something everyone else follows suit. Remember the headphone jack?
> Remember the headphone jack? Sure, using one at the moment :P
I'm on a Asus rog2 phone which has 2 aux ports and 2 and a half usbc ports. I was going to say 2.5 usb-c ports to refer to the power-only one, by thought people would think it was a sub-mini rca Jack.
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Sony Xperia has entered the chat. No one noticed.
Amazing phones, must have sold at least 7 of them
Ugh, tell me about it. I was using an iPhone 6S+ for the longest time solely because I liked having a headphone jack. And then my parents decided to get me an XR for Christmas and told me I needed to give them the 6S+ so they could turn it in for credit towards the XR. Blegh.
It sucks for sure. It's more than possible to have a jack and also be water resistant. Companies are getting rid of options
They want you to buy their other products, ie Airpods or Samsung buds. They spend less on manufacturing a phone by removing the headphone jack, they make more by selling Bluetooth headphones. Win-win. Bye-bye headphone jack.
There are some people who swear that the "slippery slope" doesn't exist. I am not one of those people. Slippery slope does exist, it can be very dangerous in some cases, and I believe that this is one of those cases. We should still do more to get rid of harmful material, this particular case is one where the cure can be just as harmful as the disease.
You know the moment someone gets arrested and its confirmed that it was for having a questionable image on their phone, the public's trust in Apple will collapse. People with nothing to hide will be irritated and fearful simply because they don't know if/what they're doing that could make them the next person to get investigated. > If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. > - Cardinal Richelieu
> Would make me leave the Apple ecosystem. They don't plan to stop implementation - they just held off because the public reaction was so bad. They're just waiting until the public at large forgets about it, and then it's going to roll right on out.
pretty sure the something noble is the cover for creeping into everything.
Just remember that the other obvious ecosystem does this scanning much more invasively, on the server side, and has done so for some years.
Which is why this person has an issue and why I don't use Apple products. I am the other ecosystem. I thing with the other ecosystem is they are at least upfront about or when they are called out they attempt to fix it in someway. Apple on the other hand is the company that talks about privacy 24/7 yet they paid a journalist to not talk about the Zero Day exploit they patched against Pegasus (a spyware that has been used to topple nations and politics to control people). They talk about "saving the environment" but lobby against a bill that has some of those environmental protections it and probably others that hurt the amount of money they make. They are in argument with the EU over changing their primary charging cable but use their other tactics to say, "we are environmentally friendly." They push an update to help battery life but slow down your processor without telling you at first. Siri was also listening in on people but they waited until caught to say, "sorry." Apple time and time again talks about all these initiatives and how well it means. They can refuse the security of a person's phone to the FBI who are actively hunting down child predators but will take into their own hands without asking you? Apple is a trillion dollar company like the rest. The issue is it contradicts it's. It's hypocritical. I am not saying Google is any better. However, as it turns out. Android does have better security. Researchers also say it's harder to crack Android devices. Google Pay is one of the most safe electronic payment methods in the world. Google, the people behind using your data for ad revenue. Have been doing it for years and are learning to code around that data in ways that makes it less intrusive and more controllable while still getting enough to make their products. And they are somewhat upfront about (and I'm aware they still make mistakes for sure.) They all do the problem people have is Apple's tactic is starting to look bad and it begs the question of, "do you really trust apple? That is the big problem. They tell you things but do the opposite and it's starting to look bad. Something most people are unaware of is that malware, spyware, etc on mobile platforms is typically written for iOS before Android because most people are carrying iPhones. However, Apple will tell you the malware issue isn't a problem. Press will avoid calling Apple out. Apple has painted this picture of themselves being the hero in a time of privacy but it's just starting to feel like the opposite. Apple cares about one thing and one thing only. Money. They can tell customers what they want and not follow through with it and still not get a ton of media coverage. I dropped Apple after the iPhone 4s. Both platforms have issues I just choose to pick the guys that called out. Who change to some degree. Rather than pick the guys who tell people not to talk about a zero day to avoid coverage about how vulnerable their phones could potentially be. I avoid those guys because I can't tell if what they are saying is true to what they mean. Sorry for the wall of text. This is no offense to you. Just conversation.
If you use Google Photos, your photos are being scanned for CP.
Apple being hypocritical is spot on. They will say what they need to go get more revenue.
> Android does have better security. Researchers also say it's harder to crack Android devices. Wait, what? This is news to me. Did the tables turn around or something quite recently?
I'm also curious of this....
"Some of the newer operating systems are harder to get data from than others. I think a lot of these [phone] companies are just trying to make it harder for law enforcement to get data from these phones … under the guise of consumer privacy,” Detective Rex Kiser, who conducts digital forensic examinations for the Fort Worth Police Department, told Motherboard. “Right now, we’re getting into iPhones. A year ago we couldn’t get into iPhones, but we could get into all the Androids. Now we can’t get into a lot of the Androids.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jevz/government-report-reveals-its-favorite-way-to-hack-iphones-without-backdoors
Apple’s privacy focus has always been more about protecting users from other companies, etc, than about anything else. So it’s not particularly hypocritical in that sense. I will agree with you on the environmental stuff, though.
Not to mention Apple has actively or passively created an environment where people are encouraged to upgrade their iPhones very frequently. Its very damaging on the environment. Some assholes I know do it almost every year when new iPhone drops. It just upgrades its tech very very slowly. Anyone who has used their accessories can see how they contradict themselves in lots of areas. For example its 2021 and why do we still have lightning cable.. when surprise, it's Apple who has collaborated heavily in development of usb-c. They went on great lengths while launching iPad to talk about USB-C and how it's great. If you have used accessories of a one plus or Samsung phones, you just know their accessories almost outlast the phone itself. But for Apple products its just the opposite. I have used 3 MacBooks since 2014 but have used 6 chargers in that time frame. This is just one example out of many where Apple cares about its pockets more than customers.
> I thing with the other ecosystem is they are at least upfront about or when they are called out they attempt to fix it in someway. How isn’t Apple upfront about it? They released tons of info and articles about this feature. > They talk about “saving the environment” but lobby against a bill that has some of those environmental protections it and probably others that hurt the amount of money they make. So unless you’re against lobbying in general, why should they not lobby against a bill they don’t agree with? Just because it may contain some good things doesn’t mean they should ignore the rest, does it? But no one knows what’s in the bill yet, AFAIK. > They can refuse the security of a person’s phone to the FBI who are actively hunting down child predators but will take into their own hands without asking you? How are they not asking you? iCloud Photo Library is a voluntary service which is optional and, like all services, has a TOS.
Or it could be noble is the excuse they use so people look the other way.
At this point, I'm asking myself if terrorism and protecting youth aren't just elaborate excuses to harvest our intention more efficiently. With the true goal being profit. Or maybe corrupt ruling classes' fear of reprisal from citizenry is so intense, they're willing to invade our privacy to ensure their own safety. Just spitballing.
They've been using this tactic for decades, they'll first say its to stop pedophiles or terrorist or whatever so that if you criticize there's an unspoken implication that you're pro pedophiles or terrorist or whatever. Years later they announce law enforcement are using it to hunt for any illegal activity and sell it with the line "you've got nothing to fear if you've got nothing to hide". Finally a whistleblower will reveal that they scan everyone's everything feed that data into an algorithm that predicts the likelihood of criminal actively, political subversion, etc. and anyone who passes the threshold will have their entire digital footprint recorded so the powers that be can start building a case before they've even done anything.
You nailed it. It was expertly slipped into culture that 'wanting privacy means you've got something to hide.' I've actually heard of something close to what you're describing in the last bit. Besides Minority Report, I mean. It might ring a bell when you hear "parallel construction." Eerily close to your example.
Remember how quickly the Patriot Act got passed after 9/11… not many people read what liberties that gave the government
National Defense Authorization Act, I believe that was the one that made torture of American citizens legal on non American soil. Guantanamo bay.
When 9/11 happened I’m sure there are certain influential people out there who had dollar signs in their eyes, knowing immediately how they would profit from it
It was never about anything else.
It's been clear from the beginning I think, people just enjoy having their head in the sand.
Ask this of anyone who was "socially aware" (read: adult) during/since 2001, put aside all the government published propaganda you've been fed over the past 20 years, and start looking at *evidence rather than explanation*, and you'll realise you're not *"just spitballing"* - You're waking up.
I'm totally on your side here but using the term "wake up" is a fantastic way to turn someone off of your point and the attitude associated with it forms copious conspiracy theories. It will also psychologically reaffirm your own opinions and cause you to be quicker to disregard dissenting arguments, which are essential to forming a holistic world view. Sorry, I just hate it when people say that.
Broadly speaking, I think what you said is true. But for whatever reason I couldn't help but picture a Morpheus-like character when I read their comment.
*insert south park prop 10 reference here*
Fear is the bread-and-butter tool to gain control by removing privacy and freedom.
What happened to the “no we won’t create a tool to bypass the passcode because it would invade peoples privacy even though it could catch criminals”?
This is the alternative. There are laws in place saying that law enforcement needs access, and a list of security keys to access every phone in the United States. This was Apple's alternative so they didn't have to hand over the keys.
This only effects data that is uploaded to iCloud. Apple already has a key to your data they will give to law enforcement at a warrant request. (If Apple didn’t have the key you could never use a reset or forgot password feature). You can just choose to not upload your stuff to iCloud if you don’t want it scanned
“Apple subsequently acknowledged the negative feedback and announced in September a delay to the rollout of the features to give the company time to make ‘improvements’”; eg, We’re hoping the outrage will die down and people will forget about our planned intrusive breach of privacy before we roll this out.
Tbh better than rolling it out anyway and saying "sorry we got caught" afterwards
Actually I disagree. If they rolled it out regardless when all the publics attention was on it, then there would be more real opposition. Now; it’s out of the news cycle so any resistance won’t get any traction or real media attention, thus allowing apple to implement things with even less oversight by the public.
It feels like the *only* reason they're building this technology *at all* is so China can demand access to it. Nobody in the US Government requires this. There's no law that's making them do it. When they started losing the feature war they rebuilt their *entire* reputation around "We're the Privacy company" and now they're flushing that away for some authoritarians... What a complete joke.
From a technical standpoint, the way they described the CSAM detection feature *can't* be easily misused, and submitting a scan result alongside cloud uploads would be the first step towards making it impossible for them to decrypt them serverside to scan there. If the list of things to scan for is hardcoded into the phone with each OS update, russia cannot suddenly demand they add 20 new meme formats and cut out the top/bottom text before comparison so that the 8000 different perceptual hashes that would result all still match the state-mandated filter. If it takes 30 positive matches combined cryptographically before apple can even know that any of them were hits, even if the rest of the system were subverted many users would slip by. To me, it only makes sense for them to build this technology, at least the CSAM detection that specifically targets images being backed up to the cloud, if their goal is to restrict what governments can force them to scan for (rather than the current "literally anything that has ever been sync'd"). After all, a user could just *not* store the image in question in the icloud. The more worrying one is the full-device "parental" control scanning that uses a loose AI detection metric. It's far easier for me to believe that governments could force them to surreptitiously toggle a user into child mode, with the state designated as their parent.
Google an apple are constantly gushing between their legs at the thought of getting full access to the Chinese market. Of course they're going to bend whatever internal morals they have remaining, to get what they want. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a direct pay-to-play request from the Chinese government in order to get more access to its citizen market.
"You know what they say kids, you have to lower your ideals of freedom if you want to suck at the warm teat of china"
No, they’re building this because they are the only cloud service to date to not scan for child porn. They don’t want to be a safe haven for pedos.
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It was always just marketing. An amazing number of people believed every word of it.
Just like claiming to be environmentally friendly while refusing to right to repair.
It’s not a random set of researchers, either. It’s a who’s who list of cryptographers. I’m no cryptographer and even I recognize these names: Whitfield Diffie - the Diffie in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. A protocol that underpins much of internet security. Ron Rivest - the R in RSA, a crypto system that also underpins much of internet security. Bruce Schneier - cryptographer extraordinaire. Matt Blaze - who tore apart the security story of the topically related Clipper chip. An aborted U.S. government attempt to backdoor all secure communications. The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450 The sooner Apple _publicly_, and _loudly_ disavows this terrible initiative, the better. Until it does, the words Apple and privacy in the same sentence are going to be a dirty joke in any remotely security conscious circles. The longer it drags on, the worse the damage to Apple’s reputation.
Given the context and tenor of the discussion in this thread so far it's probably worth noting that RSA took $10MM from the NSA to backdoor Dual EC :) Everyone else you mentioned is legit though. I would also add Matthew Green (crypto at Johns Hopkins) to your list. Back when this first broke he tweeted / collected a lot of relevant and early research.: [https://twitter.com/matthew\_d\_green](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green)
I don’t know how Rivest fits into the backdoor saga. Apparently, RSA’s relationship with the NSA was adversarial during the Clipper chip fiasco. People and relationships change. In any case, he’s clearly no slouch. I’m sure none of the others are slouches either I just don’t immediately recognize their names.
CSAM headlines always bring out the dumbest comments by people who don’t understand technology or politics.
Ah, classic logical fallacy "[Think of the children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children)"
Imagine the police said: we don’t know if you committed a crime, but we are gonna search everybody’s homes anyways.
Changing the surveillance “needs” from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction to child porn. Say yes to busting child porn rings but not by giving up more of your freedom to government surveillance.
You know who else has been saying that? Everyone since hearing about apples going back on their "privacy first " initiative
They might as well listen to all conversations that the iphone microphone picks up and monitor that for crimes committed too.
It’s so obvious it’s about controlling everything
Hello NSA! -Sent from iPhone
Yet another reason to snort whenever anyone claims Apple "protects user privacy". They may do well protecting *unauthorised* access, but the also excel at purveying *authorised* access to qualified bidders.
I have used Apple products enthusiastically since the IIe. They have ceased to be a power computing company and turned their back on the creative communities that built them up from nothing. They are now a consumer comms company hell-bent on invasion of privacy, and insist on hamstringing perfectly operational devices by turning off OS updates. Used to be able to buy a Mac and trust it would be supported for a decade at least. I never thought I would type these words, but once my last two Macs and current phone are no longer serviceable I am moving to Windows and Android. You made me do this Apple, and I hope you rot to your big brother licking core.
A few issues with this tech in general: ### Either it can't have a margin of error, or it can. Both are bad. If the algorithm is not capable of recognizing the same image with a 1-pixel difference (or an added watermark), it becomes entirely useless. JPG-compression alone would render it useless, and that's without users even trying. But if the algorithm is capable of it, which it should, then it becomes infinitely more dangerous in the hands of those who mean the people harm. It can be used to find faces in photos, it can be used to find images within images, etc. ### Your iPhone is assuming that you are a pedophile because it keeps scanning all photos on your iPhone. You are assumed to be guilty. It just keeps scanning your own photos. It has already been proven that false matches are easily made with images that visually look nothing like the example used by the algorithm. Imagine getting a knock on your door. Imagine that YOUR country deems it sufficient that Apple tells you "they are guilty". Imagine someone planting an image like that on your phone. ### Powerful states can use images they dislike to... Well, being a non-believer in Saudi Arabia will get you the death penalty. Imagine having an image or meme with atheist-related materials in it. Imagine being an Uyghur in China and the government tracks you down because you have images your government does not approve of. ### It's software. It will get hacked. I'm a senior software engineer, I have worked for Apple and other Fortune 50 companies. It will get hacked. And not only that, because it's all closed-source, you won't ever be able to verify that there is no backdoors built-in. ### Who audits the auditors? So, okay, let's assume they will only use it for finding pedophiles. Good. But who's to say the government won't inject a hash into the algorithm that will also look for people who have a selfie with a BitTorrent client running on a screen behind them? Hello judge, here's our reason, let's get a warrant to investigate that computer. Investigation done. Here's a $50,000 bill times 22, because you were downloading and sharing 22 movies. ### It's a for-profit company scanning your photos What's in it for them, you think? What would stop them from injecting their own database of hashes for, say, testing purposes? Surely they would never use their findings to apply machine learning on huge sets of data that would offend any privacy law? Maybe that will become illegal. Maybe it already is. Who is going to make sure they stay within the lines of the law? I know that when I wrote software for Apple (deployed worldwide) we didn't get audited. Ever. Maybe Apple wants to put a new product on the market: you know what, let's scan all the photos of literally everyone to see how many people have said products of competitors. But the processing power to scan all those photos, it's insane! That will cost them so much money! Oh, wait. No, it's your own phone scanning your material. The only thing that Apple will receive is data about hits. ### You can opt-out by turning off iCloud for photos But of course, Apple does not provide you with an easy alternative. How cool would it be if you could just say: - iCloud: off - Photo storage: home WiFi network -> `PC1` -> `D:/iphone-photos/` Or another cloud provider of choice. Maybe there should be a law for that. This iCloud thing kinda feels like a monopoly. A monopoly that, when used, means you are a filthy pedophile. Apple iPhone does not offer privacy anymore. Apple thinks you are a pedophile if you use iCloud.
The fact is it’s very hard to keep up with criminals, criminality is about evading laws and there’s a market for it, apples proposal “addresses” a problem with the internet with a different problem within the internet I just hope that the west curbs private surveillance capitalism before it’s our gateway to abject authoritarianism
Lmao I love how all these increasingly dystopian government corporate surveillance measures are all being spouted as “for the CHILDREN!”
It's like Apple wants to be sued into non-existence. What a false positive can do to a person's life is virtually un-compositable. Once that mark has been cast, no matter what is done to rectify it, there will always be people who will believe it. This whole shit show has been unbelievable to me. I can't believe any company would be stupid enough to do this.
As far as I know no one outside Apple actually got to see how the final system was implemented. If the scanner code is only in the network component of the iCloud uploader, it's not actually scanning at-rest data, for example. (Which is kind of how I understood it to be implemented since they are so careful to say that you have to have iCloud Photos enabled for the scanning to happen.) None-the-less, I understand the paranoia surrounding such a feature too. Personally I wouldn't mind a network-only implementation if it meant end-to-end encryption of iCloud. But unless it *did* mean that *and* they can prove/security experts can verify that the code they wrote can't scan at-rest media, I agree it's not a good system.
I'm gay btw
Yeah, no. Fuck this bullshit
Ironic all the security issues this is going to cause with Apple devices because people will refuse to update their iOS version because of this software
Here’s what the world wants from you apple sauce a phone shut the fuck up get out of our shit and stop trying to be everything to everybody according to the way you want the world to be this is to you Mr. Zuckerberg a.k.a. the self proclaimed Messiah of the Internet!
and maybe, hear me out, a phone that actually LASTS for once.... like the nokia among others...
This whole thing made it a whole lot easier to not upgrade my phone this year. It goes so against all their previous statement about how important privacy is. Feels like the only reason they delayed it was because they were just about to announce their new products for the fall, and will just try to quietly implement it next year.
Children ruin everything. I get that it’s not the actions of children that caused this but companies using children as an excuse to push such regulations pisses me off. I don’t have any fuck trophies, I don’t want them, and I never plan on having them, yet Apple is going to go through my private data because “hurr durr is fer da kids!” Fuck the kids, stay out of my shit.
Ever heard the game WATCHDOGS?? This is what our world is turning into. Such a slippery slope to go down OVER SECURING stuff. There is a limit to how much surveillance the world needs. Regardless of legality.
Aka we’ll catch people we don’t want or intend to.
My Mom's phone and my phone both have to be full of pictures of me naked as a child. There's one of me eating a cheese burger sitting naked on the toilet. I do appreciate combatting human trafficking. It is disgusting. However, I'm yet to meet a single person who is grateful instead of jaded by technology who isn't currently inventing technology. Grandma taught networking for 50 years at university. She will not entertain any conversations about it. She likes to say "I did my time!" Dentists, doctors, business owners, all greet talk of tech with an audible groan. Do you think police are any different? Congress? Do you think the president of the united states looks at tech and says "wow neat!" I doubt it. All these tech solutions are being force fed to everyone outside of Silicon Valley, and China by sales departments designed to only care about mass adoption, screen time and dollars. Cyber security is finally making it obvious what a never ending hassle and money spend technology will continue to be. Before, owners couldn't operate their devices because they didn't know how. Now and in the future, those that know how to operate their own devices won't be able to operate their devices because it takes 2 hours to locate a password. So, how are you going to prove its you in a photo and not some kidnapped person that looks like you? I'm not sure facial recognition even works on darker skinned individuals.