Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery | Hacker News Reader

Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery

californianewstimes.com

53 pointsjdmark17 comments

As much as I hate child abuse (and I really do) I don't like the privacy aspects of this. I feel like this could also be troubling in that people who send you unsolicited images / emails / texts with pictures that might be downloaded to your device could trip this up.

I'm already wondering how a hash collision attack could defeat this, although then I can already hear the judge saying "well, you had it there, but you deleted it, so now we'll also charge you with destruction of evidence."

This is going to get very interesting very quick as soon as this is first used in case law.

The headlines are marginally misleading. They won’t see actual images but hashes. They probably have a database including hashes of child abuse imagery which they will compare/try to match to the hashes of the images on your phone. If you take an image of your child’s bathing time to send it to your parents so they can see the little bugger during covid, it most probably won’t be a problem. It’s an important distinction in my opinion and it’s happening on a lot of cloud services already.

The breach of trust and going for the images on my personal device however is not acceptable for me. As a non-US citizen living outside of the US I’d refuse to use any Apple devices anymore. It’s contradicting their own privacy talk as well which, looking at some parts of the world, is evidently “talk” to some degree. Child abuse is probably the worst crime there is, I agree wholeheartedly, but this will create a back door like situation for every government on earth.

And how will they see these hashes? By uploading a hash of every file on your iphone to a database in the cloud. Oh - don't worry - they promise to delete them all after checking for child porn. Scouts honour.

It explicitly says the phone downloads the set of hashes and does the computation on the client side.

That said I agree that this is going to be hideously abused by every government.

>They won’t see actual images but hashes

Oh great, even better. /s

How many billions of images does apple deal with? There's bound to be a heck of a lot of collisions in there.

This has already been considered and addressed via a secret sharing threshold scheme.

furthermore they are perceptual hashes. its not like you can just defeat it by changing a pixel in all your images

Right, as I understand it, they are comparing images to known abuse, not scanning images looking for "new" abuse.

Images retrieved from abusers devices*

At least from my understanding. So there are probably a lot of innocent pictures in the DB.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741 (640 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28075021 (296 comments)

Who could object to a measure to eliminate child pornography? Unless you're a fan of it, right? And so the precedent is set - and before you know it, they will be checking your phone for all sorts of things.

Well I personally am perfectly fine with several types of child pornography:

1. Drawn or digitally rendered

2. Photos of me personally as a child (bath time, whatnot)

I have no problem with photos of me being used by anyone who is unfortunate enough to be born with an attraction to children. Who on this planet can say that I don’t have the right to distribute my own photos of myself?

> Photos of me personally as a child (bath time, whatnot)

This is not CP. Although because there is a human factor to this, I wouldn't be surprised if people got harassed over it.

Nudist families are well aware of how shitty NGOs and GOs deal with nudity.

More and more Government interference that harms company sales.

Why buy an Apple? Get some other one instead.

Nobody will want even the slightest chance of a false-positive ruining their reputation.

This type of system is just ready-to-use for a totalitarian regime with minor configuration modifications.

We traded away privacy for "free" apps and services and now we will also give away privacy to help noble causes.

Ok, I just hope the loss of privacy does not cause any harm.

What could go wrong?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696369

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