I think they are probably just going to match the hashes to known hashes of "bad" images.
I am not sure the accuracy of these systems but even if they are pretty accurate there is something off putting about this trend.
This very much feels like a Guilty until proven innocent type of program... "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"...
Neither of those normally work out really well.
But this software doesn’t make arrests? A comparison would be police asking for what cellphones were in an area. There should be a lot of due process that happens before anything comes of this. I imagine police won’t look into one photo, they would want to match more than one.
I agree though, the scary part might be how to clear your name after an overreaction occurs, similar to the effect swatting has on innocents or other kinds of false accusations. But those would happen even without such a system - we’ve heard about such stories before. “Man held for child porn charges, but it turned out they were innocent,” - it doesn’t take this kind of system to have police look over your phone for evidence and find a different crime than expected.
That all said… child porn is really, really terrible and I’m actually in favour of this. As a society, we can decide on what’s acceptable. As long as there’s due process and a presumption of innocence, I’m all in favour of making it harder for criminals to get away with crimes. I do agree though, all these systems might make it harder to catch perpetrators if it pushes them offline. But what other options do we have to stop these sort of crimes when the kids involved can’t or won’t speak up?
I suppose the fundamental problem is that having more evidence doesn’t necessarily lead to justice if it paints a false picture.
This also limits the possible avenues for future exposure - if one has less ways to distribute or get CP or the overall amount of it is reduced, they may never get into it in the first place and the market for it will shrink. Thereby reducing the amount produced over time.
This is a horrible idea, a massive regression in Apple (and therefore the broader industry's) stance on security/privacy, and the fact that you are dutifully swallowing the "child porn" justification is so incredibly concerning to me.
You're also being naive by swallowing the "it's only iCloud" justification. There is a clear intent to progress to scanning all local photos. After all, if photos must be match those of a government child abuse database, and any matches trigger manual review, what would an innocent person possibly have to hide? By that logic it'd be absurd to not scan just because it's only locally. After all, you're only catching bad guys! This is about protecting the children after all! /s
I oppose government-supplied blacklists. Doubly so when we can't even see what's in the database, but I would oppose them either way.
I don’t appreciate you calling me naive. There isn’t clear intent to scanning all local photos. In fact, it seems like the system was deliberately designed to only work with photos that are being uploaded to iCloud.
When someone is trying to rob you, generally the best thing to do is to hand over your wallet. If a law passes you should obey it for your own sake. That's an entirely orthogonal question to whether we as the users should be outraged or not.
Also while obeying an injust law, a company has a responsibility to legally challenge it in court with their resources, if for no other reason than to avoid the profit loss of having to comply with invasive regulations
Furthermore, it's not clear that this is the direct result of some federal law. It reads more like pro-actively appeasing their federal overlords.
It is good advice not to carry around huge amounts of money on your wallet. Someone might want it and have the power to get it.
Same with megacorps constructing and bragging about tools for oppression:
Better not do it.
Otherwise just be prepared that China will demand that you also upload their hashes of extremely bad photos - and one or two guys they want to get hold of.
It is kind of a Manhattan project for digital privacy - it is meant to bring a quick end to a actual real problem we have - but it has the potential to become a shadow over society for decades if not centuries to come.
I doubt they need, or want to match more than one. They'll use the reasoning that it only catches already-known child pornography, and that that person might have a whole cache of novel child pornography. Just look at the drug wars and how many people get arrested for trivial quantities of marijuana. And we hate child pornography way more than drugs.
> As long as there’s due process and a presumption of innocence, I’m all in favour of making it harder for criminals to get away with crimes.
The judicial system has a presumption of innocence. No one else does, or has any requirement to. The court of public opinion will ruin your life regardless of whether it's true or not.
That would be far less concerning if active cases were sealed, and only published if the defendant was ruled guilty.
> That all said… child porn is really, really terrible and I’m actually in favour of this.
I have a slight disagreement with this. The production of child pornography is obviously abhorrent. This system does nothing to stop that though, because it can only flag already-known child pornography.
This system stops the consumption of already produced and documented child pornography. While it's far outside my own interests, I can see some validity to the argument that consumption is of far less concern because it doesn't directly involve any abuse. The abuse has already happened, and no amount of tracking down pedophiles is going to reverse that. There are second order effects, like potentially reducing the demand for novel child pornography, though. Which leads me to this:
> But what other options do we have to stop these sort of crimes when the kids involved can’t or won’t speak up?
I would imagine this is far more likely to affect consumers than producers. In the drug market, stop and frisk is far more likely to net you users than producers or dealers. For one, there are more users than dealers/producers. For two, dealers, but particularly producers, are typically far more cautious than users.
That's a long-winded way of saying again that this doesn't seem likely to do much in the way of stopping people from abusing children.
But to directly answer your question: doing nothing is absolutely a valid option here. We do that for lots of bad things that happen when the costs of the solution are unbearable. It's what we're currently doing for famine in other parts of the world, which almost surely impacts more children than child pornography could even dream of doing. It's what we do for cars, which again, almost certainly impacts more children than child pornography does.
We wait until we can find a method with benefits commensurate to its costs. A 2016 DoJ report said that since 2002, 10,500 victims have been located and identified by law enforcement. That's 750 per year. There are 74 million children under 18 in the US, so that's 0.001% of children per year. 10,500 people is only 200 people higher than died from "accidental suffocation and strangling in bed" over the same period according to the CDC. The scale of the problem is the same, so should we go ahead and let Amazon send pings to the police if your Alexa thinks your suffocating in bed too?
If in the US Do you like the concept behind 4th amendment? being free from unreasonable searches unless probable cause can be articulated that you have committed a crime?
It is very scary how effect the "think of the children" narrative is to get people to willing give up their liberty