Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

Can I just say that I'm fascinated that this is happening under Tim Apple - an openly gay man in his 60s?

I mean this is someone who would know what being on the wrong side of law means - not only federally, but probably quite intimately since Alabama was not exactly known for its acceptance of homosexual people.

Now just imagine if the US still had anti-homosexuality laws (like the majority of the world still does) and your phone is constantly scanning your photos to check for signs of homosexual behaviour. Forgetfully take a selfie with your boyfriend, it gets flagged, sent to the Ministry of Morality, and next thing you know you're being dragged into a van. Best case scenario you're being jail. Worst you're being thrown off a building, stoned, or brutally beaten to death.

That's the future Apple is signing us up for. There is zero chance this stops at CSAM, especially with the Democrats convinced that half the country are the absolute worst people on the planet and not being shy about completely ignoring the rule of law and Constitution to extend the reach of the state to levels that would make a totalitarian blush. This will end terribly.

Your last paragraph ruined an otherwise great comment.

His name is Tim Cook. Good points though

> …your phone is constantly scanning your photos to check for signs of homosexual behaviour. Forgetfully take a selfie with your boyfriend, it gets flagged…

Except that’s not what this is doing.

For all intents and purposes, “scanning” is just hashing content before it’s uploaded and comparing that hash to a known database. So, unless your picture had been hashed and flagged before (And if you just took it how could it have been?) then there’s nothing for it to match.

Don’t just conjure FUD from a contrived worst-case scenario.

The hash matching part of this is a red herring. The real issue is that if a hash matches, there's now a mechanism to upload the image in question from your phone, unencrypted, without your consent. What assurance is there that the hidden upload mechanism can't be used to upload other files on demand? If a mechanism is built into the OS that can exfiltrate files on demand, what's to say there even has to be a hash match? Or that iCloud has to be active? What's to stop any government from going to Apple and saying "we know you have this ability, give us all this user's files." Nothing.

The exfiltration mechanism is the problem. If this were saying a hash match could be used to obtain a search warrant, that would be bad, but it would be far less egregious a breach of security and privacy than Apple adding a backdoor to just grab anything it likes.

It’s not a “hidden upload mechanism”. It’s a hash-and-flag system on top of the extant “upload to iCloud” function.

Apple will already have the data. You’re already consenting to that when you enable iCloud Photo Library (the only place this is being implemented).

But all uploads to iCloud are [edit: will be] encrypted. This system includes another, separate mechanism to upload a file unencrypted, not to iCloud, but to some other system where humans can review it. So it's not using the same functionality as a normal upload. The file doesn't have to have been uploaded to iCloud yet, or ever, to be copied off the phone using some other method. The whole point is that they don't want unencrypted copies being uploaded to iCloud, so they can't review what was uploaded via the iCloud route. Therefore they want some other method of checking your files locally - which means they need a backdoor to copy them without your permission.

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