And like the article says, they didn’t want to poke the bear anymore. Of course the FBI has congressional friends. It is possible that Apple saw the risk of it backfiring and making things worse as too great.
I think market share is another sign. Does anyone use actual Android Backup, or do they use the unencrypted “backups” in G Photos and elsewhere? For that reason should the FBI care? Maybe I’m wrong but I believe actual Android Backup is much less used than iCloud and confusingly named alternative “backups” within Google apps.
I'd just like to see Apple be more transparent with this one particular issue because it undermines so much of what they're advertising to the consumer.
A transparency label for iCloud backup showing what is and is not E2E before enabling would do. Most people (myself included) would be quite happy with photos being encrypted by an Apple-held key (I'm not worried about the police seeing my boring lunch pics, I just don't want photos of my kids being readily accessible to everyone else).
It should be made clear if they're offering E2E for some features that other settings will render it pointless is all I'm saying.
Despite there been reasonable solutions like bloom filters and client sided hash detection, so that known child abuse material can be detected, without it needing to compromise the privacy of 99.99999% of users?
And that photos present some of the most sensitive materials on your device:
- geo-IP location showing basically everywhere you have taken a photo in, ever since the dawn of time
- people's consensual sex tapes
- photos of passwords, account recovery codes, private keys, seed words
Not saying it's not possible to build an E2E image storage service that also has the protections society tends to demand. Just saying that I haven't seen anyone do it yet, because these problems are subtle.
So a 'malicious client' doesn't need to be part of the threat model here. And also, if you really stretch your argument, that's like saying we need to outlaw Linux and open source software because malicious actors can modify the code.
The whole idea that society demands content providers compromise ETE just because of child pornography isn't something I've heard of being 'accepted as common truth' outside of this post.
Some politicians demand it, but I thought at least amongst tech, there's the recognization that strong, *unbreakable* encryption is important.
There's an implicit obligation to build services and technology that is resistant to abuse, but that isn't an argument to not implement ETE.
FWIW, I wasn't really trying to make a prescriptive statement about how the world ought to be, I was more trying to describe what (I think) the perspective of these corporations has been on the matter.
In the past, I've been an encryption advocate with the knowledge that we (tech) must sacrifice some ability to appease politicians in implementing it. What you're describing sounds like an innovative way to preserve privacy and provide security for at-risk people, which is a perspective I haven't heard before.
This is not a good argument. “Known child abuse material” is the tip of the iceberg. There’s nothing stopping people from creating new “child abuse material”, and the people who are doing that sort of thing are the ones who are more important to catch.
Should we build backdoors in AES because there are terrorists in the world?
That’s not what I’m saying and I can’t possibly imagine how you could infer that in good faith.
I agree with you in terms of photos being some of the most private information we have, but the E2E argument doesn’t ever get won by the tech community without a guarantee of blocking/catching/preventing CP and being able to make that evidence available for prosecution.
To the arguments above: Any processing server side implies no real E2E. Any processing client side is by definition under the control of the client and subject to forgery/hacking/spoofing/tampering.
Facebook is the largest platform for child trafficking, and Google is the world's largest resource for finding out how to commit criminal acts.
Crime always exist. We shouldn't build a techno-totalitarian surveillance state just because crime exists.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".
Chinese Communists employed similar but opposite reasoning during the uprisings in Jiangxi, China in the 1930s: "Better to kill a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person go free".
Geo-IP is the process of taking an IP address and attributing an location to that IP address.
I think you meant GPS location?
Cloud services offered there must store data in the country and be operated by Chinese companies. (Apple is complying with this)
But Chinese companies HAVE TO assist the authorities in obtaining systematic access to private sector data. (This is not possible with E2E for backups and photos)
Are you suggesting that Apple or the government should be able to search your personal photo library stored in the cloud at any time because maybe you might have child porn in there?
I understand that companies need to scan groups and social features that are used for trafficking underage porn. But do we really need to snoop into the private libraries of innocent people just because they might have illegal material?
Having access to millions of peoples photos is such a huge privacy risk that I can't think giving it up is worth while to make it slightly easier to catch a handful of criminals.