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Man, I remember the controversy when this initiative launched. Can’t please anyone, it seems.
I never supported since it was on device and given this is the US hashes to spot “extremism could be added” given apple doesn’t know what the hashes are.
No you’re wrong.
They are not cryptographic hashes. They are “perceptual” hashes or “fuzzy” hashes. They’re basically just a low resolution copy of the original image. It’s trivial for an attacker to maliciously send innocent seeming images that are a hash collision. This is, by the way, a feature not a bug. Perceptual hashes are not designed to perform a perfect match.
There are plenty of free white-papers on how perceptual hashes work, and Facebook’s implementation is even open source.
Apple said they tested 100 million perfectly legal images and three had collisions with a CSAM perceptual hash. When you consider how many photos Apple was proposing to scan (hundreds of trillions of photos) that means thousands of false positives would have occurred even if nobody maliciously abused the system.
And because of all that - Apple was planning to do human reviews of every photo. They would, therefore, have seen every match (and every false positive). It couldn’t have been hidden from Apple.
What makes you day apple didn’t know what they are? Is this a thing that happened that I’m not aware of?
If they only get the hashes supplied, Apple can’t tell why they’re bad files.
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The consumer is not at fault for believing their personal data on their own hardrive, in the phone they paid for, should not be seen by anyone but themselves if they do not choose it to be.
It’s not the consumers fault for believing this to be the case given this is how computer technology always worked.
Their only fault is for using Apple, when Apple has gone to extreme lengths to blur the line between what is your and what is theres, and effectively makes it impossible to keep things on your phone only on your phone unless you opt out of iCloud entirely. iCloud is so integrated, it’s not clear to the user that everything on the phone is also on the cloud, and therefore not private.
There are two types of people in support of this scanning: technologically illiterate or malicious.
Either way, keep your invasive scanners off of my shit.
I understand why people want privacy and it’s legitimate. As an honest citizen I’d want that too.
But, as a policeman in a country without a dictator, I feel also really frustrated to know that a pedophile or any criminal is able to escape justice because the encryption is good enough.
It’s always difficult to find the right balance. Especially because some governments are corrupts and trying to eliminate political threats.
What about people who keep paper magazines of printed porn? I guess it’s really frustrating how too good a lock and key of an apartment is? We should really outlaw locks and keys that the government can’t open at any moment, with no notice. Search warrants should be unnecessary.
Disregarding whataboutism about much larger problems, specifically here, about something like the church…
And don’t even get me started on how hard it is to have 24x7 cameras installed in every room of every household. It’s so frustrating to not be able to just know what everybody is doing all the time!
I feel also really frustrated to know that a pedophile or any criminal is able to escape justice because the encryption is good enough
How do you know something that’s provably false? Pedophiles who evade justice are not doing careless things that need end to end encryption, like backing up their porn to iCloud. The problem doesn’t start or end with encryption. The policy is entirely about privacy and has nothing to do with protecting children.
I totally agree about privacy, but I can’t agree when some people are thinking every government is trying to do mass surveillance and has evil thoughts.
Online criminality is kind of new and internet can’t just be heaven for criminals.
It’s about finding a right balance between all of these things and remembering that most citizens are honest.
And, despite the fact that some people here just seem to hate the police no matter what, it’s also important to be able to investigate on the web.
One day, these people could be the victim of someone and they would be probably really happy if there was a way to catch these criminals.
That being said I don’t know what the perfect balance is and I’m trying to be open minded about it.
“Some governments.” Government is corruption. How much varies, but if given leeway they all go the same direction.
That’s you, by the way—the hand of corruption. Respectfully.
Nonpaywall version: https://archive.ph/udnOc
Thank you!
Scanning everyone’s photos is a clear invasion of user privacy.
Not scanning everyone’s photos means people retain privacy, and bad actors may then have content that we, as a society, agree they should not have.
These two things are at odds, so any solution is a compromise (or at least, a choice of one thing over another), and either will always be controversial. It’s not just photo scanning that falls into this, but also things like VPN usage – really, virtually anything that lets users retain privacy could also be used for nefarious purposes.
Personally, I don’t want to live in a world where everyone’s photos are scanned, because I am vehemently opposed to that level of surveillance and believe it would lead to profit motives (e.g. better ad targeting). I do hope there is another way to curb CSAM content, but ultimately I don’t see mass surveillance as viable.
