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Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

Pictures is just a pretense. Step #2 will be URLs of pictures that users send each other using the phone's keyboard. Step #3 will quietly expand the definition of a URL to any keyboard input. At that point, Apple will have a god's eye view into all communications of their users, be it over WhatsApp, Signal, SMS or an online forum. Imagine having a dashboard that shows in realtime with gps coordinates how many text messages contain the word "enough"! The same scanner module can detect certain words in phone calls. What dictator wouldn't want that?

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If there ever is a showcase of the slippery slope fallacy this comment would be on it.

Step back for a second and think about why perhaps falling for the ‘but the children’ trap tells you Apple wants to go in the absurd direction you are pointing. Think about if it makes any sense at all they would want to go that way, think about why they would even let you know and think about how plausible it is for these steps to lead to each other.

It's not fallacy. There's huge demand for such monitoring and few countries are as competent as China to do it themselves. Apple already works closely with CCP, so it won't face any moral dilemmas. The only obstacle is damage to reputation in the US and Apple is assessing the scope of this damage right now.

If Apple wanted to do all that they can, they don’t really need a special feature for that and tell te world.

Apple cares about reputation and that's why they test the waters first with these announcements.

Do you really think that "Apple is capable of doing this" is a meaningful rebuttal to "Apple will actually do this"?

I started writing an explanation of how you're mistaken, and then I realised just how quickly you went from Apple using a very common method for identifying CSAM (which Facebook already uses, yet I've not really heard much in the way of complaints about that) to Apple wanting to listen for keywords in phone calls, and just how unlikely it is you'd reasonably think through my response.

Perhaps you're the one who's wrong though? Your response makes no sense other than to grandstand how hasty and unreasonable the OP is being. You could have just omitted it and we'd be no worse off.

Does Facebook scan local files?

> which Facebook already uses

A company looking at content uploaded to servers they own is quite different from a company spying on the contents of a device they don’t own.

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