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Comment by lovelyviking | Hacker News Reader

The issue here has nothing to do with children, they would always use 'children' as excuse. The issue here is installation of Spyware Engine.

The very fact of existence of such Spyware Engine has effect that each person would behave as 'someone is looking'.

This means zero privacy. This means 'no privacy' feeling. Everyone is more 'careful' when people around. And this has prolonged effect on society's freedom, democracy and rights of individual because independent thinking happens when true privacy is there.

Even a fear of false triggering the system and exposure of one's private thoughts/pictures/events to other people during 'sorting out false alarm' would make people behave differently. Even if they have nothing to do with any children the fear that their private moments can become public just because some AI would decide so would make each person think twice about each step.

This is a huge attack on privacy of individual and should not be taken lightly. The effect will be also huge. Just imagine what they will do next if they get away with this. Just imagine what other companies will do once this is accepted for apple devices.

I think this can/should also be considered as a fraud because when one bought apple device one was never told that spyware would be installed some day later.

Edit: I think it should be illegal/made illegal to install any spyware on any device for any excuse without warant. Spyware is a Search of 'home' without warrant to some degree, isn't it? Done through the hands of some private company under some excuse... What about Fourth Amendment?

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> Just imagine what other companies will do once this is accepted for apple devices.

No need to imagine.

China flat out censors chat programs and discussion sites, and some words will instantly get you put on "the list".

Winnie the Pooh, for example.

Oh, you say that you're just interested in the wonderful literary works of A. A. Milne, but that's what the anti-government types always say! Prove your innocence in this kangaroo court, and you'll be let off with merely a stint in a re-education camp.

I was using Tantan last year, a Chinese dating app. I tried to send a woman I was flirting with a message like “that pic of you is sexy”, and the app warned me against using vulgar language.

I can’t say sexy. In a dating app. With a woman I matched with. What am I supposed to do? Say she’s doing a great job of maximizing her gene pool’s potential for aesthetic presentation in the context of a romantic setting?

> Say she’s doing a great job of maximizing her gene pool’s potential for aesthetic presentation in the context of a romantic setting?

If she goes for that, she's a keeper.

Actually it's a good advice from Tantan. Chinese dating culture is very different. I'm not sure "sexy" is going to be received well, especially if she uses a translator (which is common).

The woman I was flirting with was in Morocco XD

Tinder does the same thing.

s/sexy/beautiful/

Not even remotely interchangeable.

s/sexy/hot

> I can’t say sexy. In a dating app. With a woman I matched with.

Would you go into a Christian church and start preaching about Hindu gods? Some might, but nearly everyone would say it's disrespectful of a different culture.

So it seems to me like it'd be a cultural difference. In Western culture sex is prominent (America, Europe, etc) even if repressed (America). In Chinese culture... well I'm going to assume it's still very much repressed.

Seems like you’re exercising a lot of social control over the couple. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to privately communicate their feelings. Simply chalking up social control to “cultural differences” ignores the fact that these aren’t cultural mores developed independently, but the results of a highly moralizing tyrannical government trying to assert social control for the material benefit of those at the top.

Indeed. After all, the application is supposed to be only a conduit for a private conversation between two people.

Two adults can negotiate their own communications protocol. Just because you met someone in a Catholic church, doesn't mean they aren't interested in Hindu gods or in sexuality. People are not defined by the culture they live in.

A dating app that tells you what you can or cannot say in a 1:1 conversation isn't a conduit for private communication - it's acting like a chaperone on the date. Except normally, chaperones are there to prevent sex, not police thoughts.

Might be useful to other non-natives also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaperone_(social)

> Why shouldn’t they be allowed to privately communicate their feelings.

I agree.

> Simply chalking up social control to “cultural differences” ignores the fact that these aren’t cultural mores developed independently, but the results of a highly moralizing tyrannical government trying to assert social control

I've never been to China. But even from an outsider's point of view your statement strikes me as self-centered. What right do you have to enforce your own morals upon an entire other nation?

> a highly moralizing tyrannical government trying to assert social control for the material benefit of those at the top.

Western countries are arguably the same. How does that make the Chinese government wrong and Western countries right?

> Seems like you’re exercising a lot of social control over the couple.

To circle back to this comment; am I? The control is over the internet. Until they've met in real life you're just a stranger on it. Strangers on the internet can be very dangerous and with very little repercussion. Governments have an obligation to protect their citizens. So you should speak kindly and respectfully. You never know what words might upset the other end.

When you meet in person then you're putting your own person at risk for the words you say instead of just an online pseudonym. When you meet in person the stakes have been raised. What does the government do to prevent the couple from talking sexy after they've met in real life? I'm sure there's a lot but once you've met in real life then either you're physically in their culture or they're physically in your culture and respect boundaries must have changed.

Can that system be abused for the people at the top? Absolutely. Is it abused for the people at the top? Well I live in America and so I see a lot of anti-China propaganda so I'd argue that it probably is. But you'd be blind to think that China's alone in that.

It depends on the context. The fact that it's a dating app means both people expect a certain privacy in their words and a certain "vulgarity" like calling eachother sexy without repurcusions.

Just like a porn website doesn't shield you from porn because it's "on the internet" , a dating website shouldn't shield you from intimate language.

> What right do you have to enforce your own morals upon an entire other nation?

Aren't they suggesting that the individuals involved decide what kind of language is appropriate for their conversation? I can't imagine how you'd call that "enforc[ing] your own morals" upon anyone, let alone an entire nation!

> What right do you have to enforce your own morals upon an entire other nation?

Careful with this argument. What right did the Northern States have to enforce their own morals upon the Southern States (which had ceded, and were therefore their own country)?

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying this is not valid justification.

> What right did the Northern States have to enforce their own morals upon the Southern States (which had ceded, and were therefore their own country)?

That's a very good argument. But let me counter: we fought a war over it. That's what gives us the right to enforce the North's morals over the South's. Do you want to fight a war against China over our differences?

Even disregarding the war itself; that was about slavery and human rights (freedom) with strong undertones of racism. So if you want to make privacy a human rights issue then sure and yes. I'll even agree with you: I think privacy should be a human right! But until privacy is a human right recognized and enforced then again: what right do we have to enforce your own morals upon an entire nation?

UN's UDHR Article 12 [0] is very light about privacy (and what it even means) and (IMO) has a very very poor history of enforcement of human rights. Even more, it states:

> No one shall be subjected ... to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

And I would argue that statement extends to calling someone "sexy" which might be an insult to someone with different morals than yours.

[0]: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

The example you described is not analogous to texting a woman in a dating app.

But the point about cultural differences does stand (not that it should result in a government being able to police how two adults communicate.)

You would think any western nation would make a counter draft for freedom. But just look at these cowards...

The US has its own problems, but who should take something like the EU seriously? For what stands this union of countries? For absolutely nothing. Extremely weak, especially considering the union was advertised as standing for common values.

The common values of the European Union are there, visible for all: graft through subsidies and comfy posts for you and your political allies. Tried and proven, works beautifully, all the politicians love it!

It's always to protect children or protect from terrorists or organized crime.

And it is always pretended that the bad guys can only exist on the client side and not on the supervisor side.

There is a nonzero price to enforce norms and laws.

For instance, let's imagine a technology emerges that can render any wall in a building transparent and penetrable for a short time, without affecting the structural integrity of the building. How much easier would it make the job of the law enforcement! How many crimes would it help prevent or at least detect! Of course it will be a securely guarded technology, so that it won't fall to hands of random strangers, malicious hackers, or burglars; only the law enforcement agencies would use it, and only for legitimate purposes! Honest.

Would you endorse such a technology in your town? Mandate it for your neighborhood? Why? Are you comfortable with the idea that a number of crimes will go undetected or not prevented because this feature is not implemented? Not rhetorical questions all.

There is a complicated legal and political process because there are a lot of things which are criminal that really shouldn't be. Historically, the law has been used to come down hard on people who:

* Say bad things about the king.

* Said good things about the king.

* Are homosexual and attempting to live their life.

* Are black and attempting to live their life.

* Are foreign, regardless of activity.

* Are female and attempting to own property.

* Are local but not the right type of local.

* The actual person is OK but they're trying to help the Jews.

* Own the wrong book.

* Worship the wrong god.

And in hindsight it is generally agreed that those laws were poorly thought out. Giving the police tools to enforce 100% compliance with the law is by no means a sane thing to do. And if that is the plan it would behove us to make sure the law is good first. Which it obviously isn't there are gaping holes in every legal system.

Or as someone on slashdot put it:

> Destroying the privacy of several billion people is not an adequate price to pay for capturing a dozen or even a hundred bad guys.

> Sure it did get them some. So would carpet-bombing New York City. Success alone is a worthless measure without taking cost into account.

-- http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4631081&cid=45871537

Wouldn’t a better analogy be:

I run a shipping company. You want to send a package. It is illegal for me to handle and ship certain things (e.g., nuclear bombs). Further, I don’t want to handle any of those things. Furthermore, if I find those things (e.g., when a package breaks open), I am legally required to alert the authorities.

What assurance can you provide to the me (the shipping company) that there is nothing illegal in your box? Suppose I ask you to attest but then I find out later that a bunch of people have been lying on their attestation forms which means I have been unknowingly, undesirably made party to illegal activities? Every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package and looking. Suppose my shipping company’s clever engineers invent a detector I can give to you that doesn’t require me to look inside the package but can tell me with some certainty that there are no illegal things in the package. What statistical properties would the detector need to have to satisfy you that this was better than forcing every package open?

This isn’t an analogy, it’s just reality, right up to the sentence “every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package”. Every shipping company doesn’t open every package today, and in the real world there are no magical package opening robots, though there are some specialized detectors. So we already know from experiment that imperfect detection is better than forcing every package open.

It is an analogy to what Apple is doing. Analogically you are sending something to Apple to handle for you (either store or ship) and they have legal obligations and business requirements. Every other company manages those by ‘opening your package’ is analogous to server-side image scanning like PhotoDNA.

PhotoDNA is analogous to the detectors. The analog of “opening every package” would be human review of every picture.

We already have real world evidence for “what statistical properties the detector would need to have” to be better than opening every package, because the real delivery companies are literally doing this today. There’s nothing hypothetical about the question.

Perhaps the analogy could have been clearer and the hypothetical more broad. I was trying to press on the difference between the shipper doing a very specific test vs some functionally similar but unknown test being done by the shipping company (the server-side test is unknown, it could be hashes, non-hash based image comparison, or manual review). I wasn’t asking about something like the sensitivity or specificity of those tests, rather, why we would be fine with one and not the other when the difference is not whether but when, where, and what test is applied.

Bomb sniffing dogs are your “magical package opening robots”

That’s a pretty good analogy, but it’s what you do with the detectors answer that’s the problem. If you just say: “The detect says no, we won’t accept your package”. Then there’s no problem.

Apple could do the same, simply letting the user know that this/these images cannot be uploaded to iCloud, and then do nothing else.

The problem is that the results of these scans are pretty useless. They don’t prove anything. While Apple knows that law enforcement and politicians will believe it’s 100% correct, because they don’t even understand that DNA can be wrong, and demand customer names from Apple.

On the subject of rendering walls transparent for the last 10 years or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8914962

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-s...

I love cyberpunk because its predictions are all coming true, so I feel that I've got a fair warning.

This is stuff directly from Deus Ex (1999). Repercussions for posting wrong memes are also mentioned in Deus Ex, and are also coming true. (The epidemic situation is not that dire as depicted there, though. At least not yet.)

Transparent walls - well, walls are transparent to many types of electromagnetic waves, which can be visualized:

https://www.sciencealert.com/wi-fi-signals-can-identify-you-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mit-device-can-detect...

>Of course it will be a securely guarded technology, so that it won't fall to hands of random strangers, malicious hackers, or burglars; only the law enforcement agencies would use it, and only for legitimate purposes! Honest.

Here lies the problem. You can't guarantee that. Law enforcement itself has criminals. In some countries law enforcement is even one of the largest collection of criminals. And then something like Trump happens. Do you really want to give such powers to people like Trump and it's followers, not to mention more malicious ones?

There is no way that this technology is only used for good.

And what comes on top, it doesn't stop crime, just it's modus operandi.

If they can't use their computer to handle certain data, they use hacked ones and hide it there. You know the trick how drug smugglers use the suitcases of tourists to smuggle their drugs?

Of course I would campaign for it to be accessible. It would be a complete revolution in archeology, architecture, engineering, maintenance, rescue and firefighting and geology should it also work on rocks.

Not sure I see the relation to Apple laying Fully Automated AI ThinkPol groundwork though.

I love the different angle you've taken!

Let's assume that it only works with thin walls, so it has limited archaeology use. Firefighting is a very fair point.

Would you, reader, trust the firefighters to not abuse such a power by mistake? Would you trust the chance of it being abused for the chance of being rescued during a serious fire? Not an easy question.

You can put checks and balances in place. Firefighters have vehicles with ladders, but they don't drive up to houses and break-and-enter. If it can be made obvious when they're using it, and there's independent oversight, I think the trade-off is definitely worth it.

I don't mind your downvotes, as long as you honestly think about the transparent wall proposition.

Didn’t downvote, but didn’t understand context of your comment given who you replied to. Maybe that’s why downvotes?

I think the context is suitable: the arguments for increasing efforts of law enforcement, because "think of the children", accompanied with promises that only the good guys will have the new technical means, and the law enforcement won't even make honest mistakes using it, to say nothing of ever abusing it.

> And it is always pretended that the bad guys can only exist on the client side and not on the supervisor side.

This is very much the crux of it.

Back during the immediate post-9/11 era there was a huge push to restrict all kinds of civil liberties (and the birth of today's surveillance state) in the name of preventing the next terror attack, which could be "a mushroom cloud" in the words of George W. Bush.

There's a problem with this reasoning.

Osama bin Laden wasn't some random dude who got radicalized. He was a member of one of the wealthiest families in the world. He was born rich, grew up rich, attended Harvard, and had a family that rubbed shoulders with heads of state and were directly connected to the Saudi royal family.

Osama bin Laden was a member of what I've heard described as the "superclass," those who are beyond just being "merely rich" in that they possess not only vast wealth but internationally diversified wealth and powerful political connections.

He was of the social class that is behind the glass of a surveillance state, and if he wanted to avoid any possibility of surveillance himself he and other members of his class could easily afford expensive security consultants and specialized devices. They could also afford armies of attorneys to get them off any lists and out of any trouble.

If someone detonates an atomic bomb in Washington DC, it will not be some random middle class youth who got radicalized on a 'chan board or a Facebook group. It will not be some random protestor or dissident. It will be someone like Osama bin Laden. It will be someone with the money, expertise, connections, and background to find, recruit, and pay the personnel required to obtain or build a nuclear device. It will be someone with the connections to organize the logistics to smuggle it into the country and put it in position.

It will be a member of the global elite.

People with bin Laden's level of wealth and privilege are the dangerous ones. The lens of scrutiny should be aimed at them. One member of the middle class radicalized with toxic ideology might shoot up a school, but one elite radicalized with the same ideology could blow up a city or engineer a super-plague.

The risk to the existing order comes from outsiders with leadership abilities.

Osama bin Laden's $30MM (per Wikipedia) inheritance from his estranged family no doubt greased some skids, but mission-driven people with charisma come from all socioeconomic backgrounds, and some of them succeed. (FWIW he did not attend Harvard, and AFAIR never set foot in the US.)

The general pattern is that the wealthy are, on average, supportive of the existing order. They are the winners of the current game. Of course there are always rebellious children who are motivated by religion or power or fame etc, but most of them are feckless due to their upbringing. And ultimately, there are so few of them.

Leadership abilities can be found across all economic strata. Most are happy to leverage their talents into moderate economic advantage, but some are driven by "larger" causes.

I would say that the intersection of leadership abilities, belief in a "larger" cause, belief in victimization, and a willingness to harm innocent people (or to blame them for their inaction against your oppressor) ... is what leads to the risk of violence against the existing order.

Looks like you’re right about Harvard. I’ve heard that claim for years but it seems to be a confusion with another member of the (large) family and controversy about Saudi money at Harvard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden

My point is that people with money and power are far more able to execute large scale crimes, and not just terrorism. Meanwhile surveillance is experienced more and more as you move down the socioeconomic pyramid.

Apple is catching flak for this but overall their devices respect privacy more than most cheaper devices. They also cost a lot more. Your average cheapo phone or laptop comes absolutely stuffed to the gills with spyware and runs older OSes with bad security. The poorer you are, the more spyware riddled and insecure your devices probably are.

Bin Laden did take a course at Oxford and palled around with Britain's best and brightest of the young. So there is some connection with the West's elite universities.

Bin Laden certainly has been to Oxford, but I’ve not heard of any connexion with the university.¹ I wouldn’t say that those attending language schools and similar tend to interact much with students of the university. With the exception of a few cramming programmes for admissions, the ‘best and brightest’ (I assume by this you mean those sufficiently academically able to get into Oxbridge as matriculated students—I daresay the average Imperial mathmo is brighter than the average Cambridge land economist) tend not to take courses in Oxford outside the university, since they mostly use the name ‘Oxford’ to entice gullible tourists who don’t realise that these places have nothing to do with the university.

1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1595205.stm

You are forgetting that if the alt-right movement is not itself a product of GamerGate, it got an enormous JATO boost from GamerGate. One of the darkest eras in recent American history -- the Trump administration -- happened in large part because some basement nerds were pissed that a woman wrote a God-damned video game.

Do not discount the effects of chan boards and Facebook groups so foolishly.

I lived through that idiocy and you're not wrong, but I really don't think all those trolls and Pajama Nazis would be particularly dangerous without elite backing.

Some of it may have been organic at first, but things don't stay organic for long these days. The instant there's even a whiff of a popular movement that can be exploited the propagandists are on it... especially if it's a movement that can be exploited so as to win an election or make money. The thing that made that stuff dangerous was elites and their water-carriers like Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopolis, Rupert Murdoch, etc. empowering and steering all those useful idiots.

The Pajama Nazis have a camp of doppelgängers that I've come to call Basement Bolsheviks, but they haven't had much impact since that camp of idiots doesn't seem useful to anyone with money and power (yet?).

Or the fact that someone is in client side make them bad guys.

> I think this can/should also be considered as a fraud because when one bought apple device one was never told that spyware would be installed some day later.

I have an itch that somewhere in the hundreds of pages of EULA no one ever reads there is a "You accept that Apple has the right to modify its software at any time for any reason" kind of thing

In a sensible world there would be a law that allows you to pick and choose which non-essential apps and services can run on the hardware you own.

Sorry, the spyware engine is considered "essential" for regulatory compliance reasons.

You have no idea the inherent power of being the "setter of definitions" in a legal context.

That's why I said sensible.

I'm pointing out that sensibility is determined by multi-person consensus which by definition will tend to exclude a lot of viewpoints.

The presence of legitimate common sense (an actual concordance of principles, life experience, understanding, and the existence of a fungible nominative signpost that will be reliably reproduced within error bars) is surprisingly difficult to hew and maintain. It morphs over time, and is exactly why these multi-national tech companies implementing things like this is so terrifyingly dangerous. If they implement the capability to do a thing, they are now the movers of the political Overton window by realizing the means. They are literally shaping the rhetorical landscape.

Example: Let's say the push for this intrusive client side scanning came from the U.K., and the U.K. marketplace alone accounted for enough business to make it too painful to NOT do (simplifying economic/business assumption for illustrative purposes, and just picking on the U.K for because they are $not_my_jurisdiction). In the U.S. (Third Party Doctrine aside), this feature would be something that would be a U.S. Constitutional violation (4th Amendment) if mandated by the legislature short of an Amendment, yet since it would be done out of expedience in the absence of someone telling them NOT to do it, they'd ship it by default on American phones anyway. The mere existence of the capability greatly increases the willingness of jurisdictions to use it. This means the most privacy eroding jurisdictions are creating a race to the bottom for infecting everyone else barring population Al refusal to say No unambiguously.

I don't know why this jurisdictional backdooring isn't more obvious to people than it is. Or maybe I'm just starting to grasp how politics actually works vs. working in theory, but this really does seem to be completely screwing up how process is supposed to go. This is nothing short of a private entity taking the practical reins of power, and the political edifice coming along behind and post-facto rationalizing what the actual trailblazers are doing.

To be frank, this terrifies me even more than Congress being in charge. Congress's process rounds out most things to some level of effectual benign nature. Tech companies though? If you even start asking the important questions about higher order effects, either out the window you go, or everyone looks at you like a nut.

This is not a good way to go.

It turns out Sensible is also a word that is up for definition.

That definition of Spyware Engine has existed for a while. Every browser checks sites and downloads using Google's Safe Browsing [1]. Firefox constantly phones home to googleusercontent and AWS. Apple sends hashes of every application you run on MacOS to its Akamai hosted service -- try blocking Akamai on your firewall while still connected to the internet and the OS becomes unresponsive. The OS features to scan and report home have been around for a long time.

I think Apple checking photos before they uploaded to its own servers is their way around the Fourth Amendment while using relatively similar methods that they already use for malware.

Devil's advocacy aside, I buy the slippery slope argument and I find these methods reprehensible and open to abuse. I agree with all of it. I think this new addition is a step on the downward slope. I don't use MacOS, nor Windows, nor any cloud services personally. I keep an iPhone 7 around to chat with "iMessage" friends -- and this is the straw that stops me from using for that. I have never used iCloud for photos even when I was using an iPhone regularly.

I used to have an Android phone, which I also never sync'd with Google's cloud/drive. Then after an update, the sync-to-cloud option was automagically turned on again and my photos started to upload. I deleted them from the cloud and swore off ever using an Android phone again.

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

Addendum: That Mozilla support link is also interesting in terms of privacy. It's flagged as a privileged page for me so it loads Google Analytics that would otherwise be blocked by browser extensions.

It seems like the fourth amendment would be more applicable in Apples case, as it's doing the searching within your own home, where searches are explicitly forbidden.

The other issue here is this:

If Spyware Engine is allowed to be installed by some idiot with company in his hands to amplify his idiocy, what prevents another idiot with company in his hands to do the same?

And how about specially crafted 'normal' pictures sent to individual to trigger the system? Special mind would have a perfect tool to get some one down / put into the troubles.

"And how about specially crafted 'normal' pictures sent to individual to trigger the system? Special mind would have a perfect tool to get some one down / put into the troubles."

Exactly this was my first thought. Sad that these days my first thought, if some new "system" to prevent/catch something/one is introduced, is "How could this system be abused to blame somebody?".

Of course, that can be the basis for blackmail but I guess that what's going to happen most frequently will be a parent sending a bathroom or beach picture of a child to his/her spouse or parents, getting flagged and... what? This is going to happen tens of thousands of times pretty soon.

What confuses me is the requirement for this capability. The technology is only used on photos that are being uploaded to iCloud.

Apple can decrypt data on iCloud, so why not just do this offline? Doesn't make much sense.

It makes me think that the technology will be expanded to encompass all offline images at some point.

Is it? The article I read about it said it also includes photos saved on your iphone, even if they aren't uploaded to icloud.

Apple have a fairly detailed page on the approach including independent evaluations. Which states that it’s only for iCloud. But there’s no reason why this couldn’t change in the future.

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

On face value alone that should reassure sceptics that this new scanner will only be used for good purposes.

However there is a very long list of companies not just doing things for good, but also for profit.

And when profit enters the equation, then the original mission statement tends to get distorted into something bad/worse.

Of course Apple is free to decide, but the consumer has the option to either loudly disagree or exit the Apple ecosystem altogether.

The thing is, that it's as always - anyone arguing against this system will be branded as a pedophile sympathiser.

Well, simple minded people will always try to use that rhetoric.

I see the same pattern with pro-vaccine and "anti-vax", either you support vaccines or you are labeled "anti-vax", all is black-and-white without any nuances.

That sort of discussion rarely leads to any productive outcome.

From what I read it works for on your phone so it's off-line but only when iCloud photos is enabled.

The fact that they've decided to move this processing from their servers to the local device means they 100% intend to scan all of your photos and not only those that you upload to iCloud in the future.

I don't think they do. I also don't think they can easily decrypt icloud as you're making it out to be.

However... yeah. This is a massive breach of trust. Having any spyware agent on my device is disgusting. I can't imagine the abuse cases this sort of thing can be used for.

> I also don't think they can easily decrypt icloud as you're making it out to be.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

According to some reports they’ve been doing it server side for a while:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/09/apples-scanning-...

https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2021/01/apple-scraps-end-to-end-e...

> each person would behave as 'someone is looking'.

They (that is, we) should already. We should assume being looked at, unless we can reasonably prove it's not so. In all public places, for certain. Using all public services, for certain.

This decision erodes the trust in personal handheld terminals (quaintly still named "phones"). This is great that the announcement is made publicly. I can easily imagine a similar feature to be deployed tacitly in other countries and other platforms.

A strong belief of mine is: the technology should never betray its owner. Regardless who the owner is, regardless if they are benevolent, regardless of their wishes or background.

> This means zero privacy. This means 'no privacy' feeling. Everyone is more 'careful' when people around. And this has prolonged effect on society's freedom, democracy and rights of individual because independent thinking happens when true privacy is there.

100% agree, this is called a "chilling effect", shutting down discussion and giving more power to the status quo.

I agree with you. But on the other hand Google Drive has been doing this already since forever so I'm not really sure what's changed through this.

The location of the scanning moved from their hardware to consumer hardware.

If your consumer hardware auto-updates, it's "their" hardware where "their" is the set of all software vendors with keys allowing them to auto-update anything on your computer.

> The issue here has nothing to do with children, they would always use 'children' as excuse. The issue here is installation of Spyware Engine.

I’m always surprised when people say things like this.

As if we haven’t been carrying around highly capable “Spyware Engines” this whole time.

Apple doesn’t need the cover of stamping out child porn to spy on you. They can do it just fine, if they want to, without it.

The fourth amendment applies to the government, not apple.

It seems that this is before uploading photos to iCloud or on send to iMessage. You can avoid both and still use an iPhone.

They are doing everything client side so it seems like an apartment complex saying you are not allowed to have fires inside your apartment so they installed a smoke detector in your apartment. Most people would agree that it's a reasonable check because they don't plan on burning down their apartment but yes, if they keep pressing on it can definitely become orwellian.

> The issue here has nothing to do with children, they would always use 'children' as excuse. The issue here is installation of Spyware Engine.

I'm not sure that's entirely true. There is a reason stuff like this is debatable and is being considered by a reputable company. It is not black and white and both sides have some valid arguments. There are absolute atrocious monsters in this world and apple is in a tough spot. They are locking down their devices and it is keeping both bad and good guys out. You may think good riddens, they both shouldn't be able to get in but there are downsides to building a completely impenetrable device (e.g. tor is great for freedom, but also makes it a lot easier for criminals to operate). They are receiving pressure from law enforcement and no doubt people in their company have glimpsed the horror of child abuse and want to do something about it. They wouldn't be able to sleep at night if they did nothing, but they also won't be able to sleep at night because of the incredibly slippery slope they just stepped out on.

We also don't live in a libertarian society and I don't think most people would like the reality of living in one. On the state security and personal liberty spectrum, I think they united states is a lot closer to libertarian than we are to the ccp tho but there is no spot on that spectrum where everyone will be happy. Finding the least bad spot is an incredibly difficult problem for Apple.

> They are doing everything client side

That's what they say. And we should trust them on this because...? More importantly, even if they're doing everything client-side now, why should we trust it won't change in a few years?

Also, they aren't doing everything client-side. For this measure to be useful, it has to send out the hashes, or that there were matches detected, to the company, and ultimately the law enforcement.

> it seems like an apartment complex saying you are not allowed to have fires inside your apartment so they installed a smoke detector in your apartment

This situation is not like a fire. A fire in one apartment threatens the entire building (and everyone in it), and it spreads very quickly like started. This is more like installing chemical sensors in every apartment that will automatically call the police when they sniff out illegal drugs. You have nothing to fear if you're not an illegal drug user... unless the sensor has a false positive against your medication. Or the volatiles from your cooking. Or the cleaning agents. Or a jar with a mix of benign substances that someone sent you to screw with you. Or...

Perhaps people would mind less if they could trust the system will work. But anyone with even little bit of exposure to tech industry already knows that these systems don't work, and data collected is routinely abused.

> And we should trust them on this because...? More importantly, even if they're doing everything client-side now, why should we trust it won't change in a few years?

If you use an Apple phone, you have no choice but to trust them. They produce your phone and control everything on that phone. Did you trust them before? If so, why and why would you not trust them now with this feature? If you didn't trust them before and don't trust them after this feature, you probably shouldn't use one of their phones.

> This situation is not like a fire. A fire in one apartment threatens the entire building (and everyone in it), and it spreads very quickly like started. This is more like installing chemical sensor...

I would consider a sensor that detects drugs in apartments a lot more orwellian and I'm pretty sure that something like that would be a lot more controversial than what apple is doing here. They are not adding a feature to catch people that use drugs, just child predators. There is a massive gap between the two and there are zero people that consider allowing child predators to exist is a good idea. I'm also pretty sure that there are zero people that agree that letting apartments burn down is a good idea.

> Perhaps people would mind less if they could trust the system will work. But anyone with even little bit of exposure to tech industry already knows that these systems don't work, and data collected is routinely abused.

Yep, exactly, this changes nothing really. I hate apple products and I don't use any, but their reputation is the least bad and I trust them more than others.

There are horrible monsters in this world, we don't live in a libertarian society, most people don't want to, and a lot of people will be completely fine with sacrificing client side scanning of their pictures to catch those horrible monsters out there. This issue is not black and white/right versus wrong. There are trade offs and it was a judgement call by apple. Everyone has some line where they would be ok with this feature. If it helps avoid the scarring of 1,000 children per year, maybe you don't think its worth it, but there is some line where everyone concedes. I don't really know what is an acceptable amount of horribly scarred children to trade for not having one's pictures scanned on one's phone but if they keep their word and it doesn't turn into an orwellian nightmare, then I would be incredibly grateful for every scumbag they help take off the streets.

>> has effect that each person would behave as 'someone is looking'

I don’t think that’s true. Compare the difference in how people react to cctv vs how they react to “Surveillance Camera Man”.

This is a cctv system, you can forget it’s there. Until it incorrectly flags you anyway.

But you don't take your clothes off in places with cctv, because you know that you don't want to be recorded doing that.

People are aware where and how they are recorded.

Phones are (well.. were) private, people take nudes, do naked video calls and all the other related stuff, because they trust that there is only one other person watching this, and they usually trust that person.

Now, we're one step away from trump-beats-cnn-gif-meme getting into the hash database to flag all the trump supporters. When the next wikileaks happens, and they can track who had the documents/photos/videos first, possibly even before they got leaked. Someone (4chan,...) can email you photos an videos that are of something random, but crafted in a way to create a false positive (a bit slower form of swatting).

This is basically setting up cctv in your bedroom, saying it's there "to protect the children" and trusting some stupid algorithm to look at you.

Someone stole my Aunt's laptop a while ago, but she managed to hunt the person down and get it back only to find the bloody thing had it's password reset, accounts wiped, etc...

She gave it to me to get back in working order, and I had to ask her if she was interested in pressing charges, because handing it to me may compromise chain of custody of any investigation. She decided not to proceed with filing charges, but just wanted me to investigate and restore the bloody thing.

The person in question sync's their mobile content to that laptop. I had more than enough evidence of phone use while driving, who they were associating with, where they were hanging out, what they were doing, etc.... I didn't even have to try digging.

Do not underestimate the level of mindless information spillage by modern devices, nor the level of exposure guaranteed always on, officially acknowledged hooks into your device sensor or input feeds offers.

We have had to remind (older) family members at times to not send pictures of their young children/relatives if the pictures have any nudity or could possibly be considered suggestive.

Even if not illegal in any way, it’s one of those things where even an accusation can be seriously damaging. The prospect of your phone continually scanning your photos will make that even worse.

> "The very fact of existence of such Spyware Engine has effect that each person would behave as 'someone is looking'. This means zero privacy. This means 'no privacy' feeling. Everyone is more 'careful' when people around."

These are pressures which likely help keep society relatively stable. People's behaviour is guided and influenced by what other people might think of it, and human ancestral environment up until cities(?) was small groups and families and villages where everyone knew everyone else's business. I don't think we should take it as given that changing that is unarguably for the better. Historically there was always the chance that someone would eavesdrop, or see your diary lying around, or open your mail,

> "And this has prolonged effect on society's freedom, democracy and rights of individual because independent thinking happens when true privacy is there"

Citation needed because "Please don't machine-process my photos because I get so anxious I can't think" sounds like a problem you need to deal with, not a problem for everyone else to deal with. So does "The effect will be also huge. Just imagine what they will do next if they get away with this." - always jumping to the worst possible doom scenario is something people see therapists about.

> "The issue here is installation of Spyware Engine."

This is no more than a bank having to make sure you aren't storing stolen diamonds in their bank vaults, and they've now found a way to check only the things people are about to bring into the bank to alert the bank as early as possible.

I'm glad you've nailed the crux of the problem - if this is no more than a bank making sure you aren't storing stolen diamonds in their bank vaults -- then surely the analogy to bank vaults here is 'the phone you purchased from Apple'.

But you are right - as long as they have the right to push code to your device at any time, it isn't really yours. Shame it costs so much to keep the bank's vaults in our pockets at all times.

This system does not stop you keeping whatever you want on the phone you purchased from Apple, it only affects what you try to send to iCloud, so no the analogy to bank vaults is not your phone, it is asking Apple to hold your data on their servers and people trying to send them illegal data to hold.

But it's a single line-of-code change away to change that. If someone amasses troops along your border for 'military exercises', do you just trust them not to walk over if they find no defenses there?

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