If you don't use iCloud Photo Library or sync photos to the iCloud, none of this will apply to you.
https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia...
https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia...
Not true. They will be scanning your messages also for inappropriate content - https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
If you're talking to adults, or children whose parents don't want to use the service, you're not getting your photos scanned.
Has Apple thought this through?
Without iMessage/Facetime, a large part of the peer pressure teens get for having an iPhone is gone. Now they might start asking for a Galaxy or something like that.
This is obviously not effective given that you can get around it that easily if you want to. Coincidentally though, it will be totally effective at surveilling the 99.999% that are normal users and won’t go out of their way to disable iCloud. The whole CP thing is such an obvious farce.
My sense is Apple is trying to keep CASM off their servers. Scanning phones before it gets there was their solution to what I assume is a government demand/ultimatum. “Do this or we repatriate your foreign entity taxes” or some other shit.
I too feel that Apple just caved and eroded trust that took decades to build up. The only way this gets sorted is the “screeching minority” continues to screech and brings other in. Notify state attorneys general, FTC, etc. will that do anything? Who know? My bet is that it’s the DOJ behind all of this.
Hopefully the plaintiff bar which are already preparing class action lawsuits will find a way to get documents in discovery that allude to government coercion. But then again I’m sure there would be a clever way those are not produced under some “national security” bullbaiting reason.
All we can do is try, and keep the pressure on.
Firstly - CASM scanning is done via fingerprinting - the image is fingerprinted on device and when uploaded to iCloud that fingerprint is compared with the "dodgy images" fingerprints and an alert raised if a threshold of matches is reached (what's the threshold and with whom?)
Secondly - there is on-device AI image recognition - when you send an image to someone else (via iMessage or the share sheet) it is checked for nudity and if the iCloud account in question is registered to a 13-year old or younger, their parents are alerted.
In both cases the fingerprinting/scanning is on-device and is triggered by the images leaving the device.
Nope. The comparison is done on the device and the threshold is set there as well.
I am not sure how alarmed I am yet at this whole affair but I do know that maybe 50% of posts I read about this have glaringly incorrect information which definitely dampers my alarmism.
As I understand it the fingerprinting and comparison is done on device, but it only happens as part of the upload-to-iCloud process. So the grandparent's phrasing isn't unreasonable.
It could (maybe) also be a prelude to enabling E2E encryption for everything in iCloud.
But what happens the second they get an order from $GOVERNMENT that tells them to use the spyware to also look at other documents on the device?
I think it's pretty obvious what Apple will say. They'll say "OK." They have no plausible deniability to tell $GOVERNMENT to go pound sand - they have demonstrated the capability already! Telling the spyware to scan different files is a trivial change from a technical perspective.
That doesn't make sense. The issue is that Apple is very publicly signaling they are changing their approach to privacy now. Companies change approaches to any number of things all the time, they're not static entities. As such you have to evaluate their nature as a consumer on an ongoing basis, not one time forever. It's true of food, it's true of consumer electronics, it's true of general product or service quality, it's true of privacy issues or censorship, and so on. Apple even knew the consequences ahead of time - per the insider notes - and don't care, they charged ahead regardless.
It would be much harder for them to pull of if the system was open with user actually in control.