I'm sure I'm not the only person with naked pictures of my wife. Do you really want a false positive to result in your intimate moments getting shared around some outsourced boiler room for laughs?
It is very likely that as a result of this, thousands of innocent people will have their most private of images viewed by unaccountable strangers, will be wrongly suspected or even tried and sentenced. This includes children, teenagers, transsexuals, parents and other groups this is allegedly supposed to protect.
The willful ignorance and even pride by the politicians and managers who directed and voted for these measures to be taken disgusts me to the core. They have no idea what they are doing and if they do they are simply plain evil.
It's a (in my mind entirely unconstitutional) slippery slope that can lead to further telecommunications privacy and human rights abuses and limits freedom of expression by its chilling effect.
Devices should exclusively act in the interest of their owners.
I can believe that a couple of false positives would inevitably occur assuming Apple has good intentions (which is not a given), but I'm not seeing how thousands could be wrongfully prosecuted unless Apple weren't using the system like they state they will. At least in the US, I'm not seeing how a conviction can be made on the basis of a perceptual hash alone without the actual CSAM. The courts would still need the actual evidence to prosecute people. Getting people arrested on a doctored meme that causes a hash collision would at most waste the court's time, and it would only damage the credibility of perceptual hashing systems in future cases. Also, thousands of PhotoDNA false positives being reported in public court cases would only cause Apple's reputation to collapse. They seem to have enough confidence that such an extreme false positive rate is not possible to the point of implementing this change. And I don't see how just moving the hashing workload to the device fundamentally changes the actual hashing mechanism and increases the chance of wrongful conviction over the current status quo of serverside scanning (assuming that it only applies to images uploaded to iCloud, which could change of course). The proper time to be outraged at the wrongful conviction problem was ten years ago, when the major tech companies started to adopt PhotoDNA.
On the other hand, if we're talking about what the CCP might do, I would completely agree.
This is a good point, but it's not just about people getting wrongly convicted, this system even introducing a remote possibility of having strangers view your personal files is disturbing. In the US, it violates the 4th amendment against unreasonable search, a company being the middleman doesn't change that. Privacy is a shield of the individual, here the presumption of innocence is deposed even before the trial. An extremely low false positive rate or the perceived harmlessness of the current government don't matter, the systems' existence is inherently wrong. It's an extension of the warrantless surveillance culture modern nations are already so good at.
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
In a future with brain-computer interfaces, would you like such an algorithm to search your mind for illegal information too?
Is it still your device if it acts against you?
Apple says: "The threshold is set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and ensures less than a one in one trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account."
What evidence do you have against that statement?
Next, flagged accounts are reviewed by humans. So, yes, there is a minuscule chance a human might see a derivative of some wrongly flagged images. But there is no reason to believe that they "will be wrongly suspected or even tried and sentenced".
I'd rather have evidence for that statement first, since these are just funny numbers. I couldn't find false-positive rates for PhotoDNA either. How many people have been legally affected by false positives so far, how many had their images viewed? The thing is, how exactly the system works has to be kept secret, because it can otherwise be circumvented. So these technical numbers will be unverifiable. The outcomes will not, and this might be a nice reason for a FOIA request.
But who knows, it might not matter, since it's a closed source, effectively uncontrollable program running soon on millions of devices against the interest of their owners and no one is really accountable so false positives can be treated as 'collateral damage'.
these people also have no incentive to find you innocent for innocent photos. If they err on the side of false-negative, they might find themselves at the wrong end of a criminal search ("why didn't you catch this"), but if they false-positive they at worse ruin a random person's life.
That isn’t to say CASM scanning or any other type of drag net is OK. But I’m not concerned about a perceptual hash ruining someone’s life, just like I’m not concerned about a botched millimeter wave scan ruining someone’s life for weapons possession.
I don't, not in the slightest. Back in the days when Geek Squad had to report any suspicious images found during routine computer repairs, a guy got reported to the police for having child porn, arrested, fired from his job, named in the local newspaper as a pedophile, all before the prosecutor was actually persuaded by the defense attorney to look at these "disgusting pictures".....which turned out to be his own grand children in a pool. Of course he was immediately released but not before the damage to his life was done.
>>But I’m not concerned about a perceptual hash ruining someone’s life
I'm incredibly concerned about this, I don't see how you can not be.
Do you have a link to sources for this case? I've had a look and can't see anything that matches right now.
I will post a link if I can't find it, but dealing with Google nowadays is beyond frustrating.
I want ZERO computerized algorithms involved in any law enforcement process - especially the "criminal hunting" steps.
I'm not completely convinced that says what you want it to.
>I don't know how to answer that.
>Even I don't know how to answer that.
Hope that helps you with your ESL tests!
I really don't think it can. Looking through examples of people using that construction [1] they are all being used to emphasize the speaker's lack of something, without any implication that if someone were to have one it would be the speaker. Do you see any examples of someone using it your way?
> Good luck with your ESL tests as well.
I don't know if it's apparent to you how condescending that sounds? But, for what it's worth, I'm a native speaker of English and have a degree in linguistics.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22i+don%27t+even+have%22
(It would be helpful if you could link to an example in context, where we can see that the speaker is using it your way)
If I wanted to emphasize, I would write "I don't even know how to answer that".
Three rules to live by:
1) Always pay your taxes
2) Don’t talk to the police
3) Don’t take photographs with your clothes off
Counterargument, why you should not talk to the police (In the US): https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE
Police Officers exist in a career field that is riddled with incidents of Tunnel Vision. The sibling comment posts a video about not talking to police from a law professor. I'd heed that advice.
2b) Don't buy phones that talk to the police.
Somehow I doubt we would ever get such transparency, even though it would be the right thing to do in such a situation.
Unless you prefer to live dangerously, of course.
It looks like you've updated your comment to clarify Linux laptop's encrypted hard drive, and I agree with your line of thinking. Modern Windows and Mac OS are effectively cloud operating systems where more or less anything can be pushed at you at any time.
You can turn off auto-updates on the Synology devices I own at least (1815+, 1817+).
You'd have to have several positive matches against the specific hashes of CSAM from NCMEC before they'd be flagged up for human review, right? Which presumably lowers the threshold of accidental false positives quite a bit?