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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree with the author. Apple did this feature not for "increased privacy" or "better cloud security". Sorry to say that but that's a desperate believer right there.

Why did Apple do it, though? To create precisely this kind of cognitive dissonance. It's not Apple that's observing you. It's the government. Apple has basically created an API for government surveillance and can now say "see, we don't collect the data. We don't even know what big brother wants to know about you."

Apple just side-stepped the question on how to reconcile trust in propietary software and surveillance requests from the government. And everyone who tells you that it's not guaranteed that this feature will be extended to texts, spoken language, and other contents, is not worth talking to.

We now live in a world, where our personal computers come with "AI" that detects illegal use of those computers and automatically turns us in to the authorities. This general pattern won't disappear, ever. In a couple of years you will have to carefully consider every word you say in a car, every movie you watch, every website you visit, every program you write, because some neural net will use it to create a fingerprint that might be classified as illegal behavior.

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I think the author, amongst others, speculates that Apple will announce E2E encryption of your iCloud data, such as backups, in the future. This is not an unreasonable speculation, nor does it imply support of the whole CSAM scheme.

BTW: I've been an Apple fanboy since the mid-80s, but I find the whole concept of my phone suspecting me of child pornography appalling. It's the thin end of the wedge, and IMHO Apple have made a huge mistake.

“It’s the thin end of the wedge”

This is the biggest worry. Apple essentially waved their hand in their FAQ and said something to the effect of they’d never do something like that.

Yes you would. You’ll get called to congress and told in no uncertain terms what you’re expected to do, you’ll say no, the law will be changed, then the gentleman in a suit that people don’t say no to will call to your nice headquarters for you to walk him through his shiny new surveillance tools.

Yes, Apple's defense is literally the "If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about" line that is universally recognized as laughable.

Not only that, when they suggest that morally they would or would not do something they’re either being dishonest (which to be fair I don’t think is the case) or genuinely naive as to the limits of their control here, even over their own products.

Once the tool exists, they’ll add whatever features governments in major economies tell them to or they’ll be forced into adding them.

All this said, I don’t blame Apple alone here and I have mixed feelings about it still - as I really do believe in their fight against CSAM. I just don’t think this is the magic solution to solving CSAM while preserving an innocent user’s right to privacy that they’re selling it as.

I’m also certain there are engineers who worked on this system who also share these concerns.

Congress has already gone a few steps into your hypothetical. The EARN IT Act[0] proposed to ban E2E encryption based entirely on making companies criminally liable for any CSAM they can't scan for. While EARN IT wasn't passed, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple sees the writing on the wall and figured they'd get out ahead of things.

I also feel it's important to note that every major image host is doing the same thing Apple is doing, but server-side on unencrypted images. What Apple is planning to implement is, out of context, an improvement; in the same way that Google's FLoC is an improvement over ad tracking based on third-party cookies. Get a trusted client to cooperate in some smaller act of self-surveillance and we don't need the server to do full take.

That being said, I don't think we even need to rely on governments threatening Apple into doing surveillance. The scanning scheme relies on paying human moderators to basically look at CSAM all day and check if it's a valid match. Big tech moderation is already understaffed and overworked as is - so it's almost certain that the people involved will just forward everything as their sanity degrades. Apple will almost certainly wind up accidentally or unknowingly forwarding along bogus CSAM reports, no coercion required.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020

> I've been an Apple fanboy since the mid-80s, but I find the whole concept of my phone suspecting me of child pornography appalling.

In The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll tells about having his computer page him when it detected a hacking attempt. Telling about one time when his pager went off, he said, "My computer wanted me."

Now we have so many notifications and suggested actions from our phones and computers, it feels like we have become computer peripherals. Our computers want us to do things. They have agency, and we're responding to it.

But at least we still had agency, too. The computer had the initiative, and we could choose to respond, or not. Now, though, the computers are limiting our agency. They are becoming the controllers, and we the controlled.

I don't think it's just that Apple has made a huge mistake. I think humanity is making a huge mistake. We are allowing tech to turn us into children.

I agree Apple is giving in just like they did in China. However, they were already doing this on the server. Wasn't that already the thin edge of the wedge?

At this point "my phone" is a pretty meaningless distinction. It's just Apple's phone as a service. For whatever reason people have drawn this, to me arbitrary, line where it's decided that it's not your MySpace page or your Squarespace site just because someone else distributing it on your behalf but once you hold it in your hand that rule can't apply because reasons.

It's been a decade and a half of software not being the user's agent and instead some company's agent that in some cases you buy the hardware for.

Unless how we talk about software changes this is just the world we live in now. How many apps do you have that are genuinely extensions of your intent as a user and not company kiosks? Of probably about 100 apps on my phone I think I have maybe 5.

It is unreasonable speculation, insomuch as it begs the question _why_ - they're unrelated propositions. There's no legal framework where youre only allowed to encrypt data if you check if it's child porn first.

My biggest fear is the only reason I've seen this come up this week is the Apple community, that built me into a programmer from a waiter, has become susceptible to the same kind of irrational tribalism we see everywhere else - "surely this bad thing is happening because it's part of a secret plan to fix the other bad thing!"

E2E encryption of iCloud data is completely useless if it also comes with a feature to selectively upload some of that data unencrypted for snooping purposes. Even ignoring the issue that child porn will turn into child porn or terrorism or the cause du jour, the imperfect nature of the scanning includes a review process. This is more like Youtube content id than it is like an md5sum of known CSAM files. That's the violation.

Another article recently points out that even the md5sum databases include bad matches (a rhesus monkey was mentioned).

I find myself already contemplating the websites I visit, the videos I watch and the things I post, even anonymously, because my interests include military electronics among other things. Even when I'm not worried about attracting unwarranted attention I still hesitate because my life is being hoovered up by big data and if I accidentally watch one click bait video suddenly the algorithms are hell bent on only feeding me fake news, alt right indoctrination material and conspiracy theories...

I mean it would be great if you could configure your device to just refuse to even load these banned items. I don't want that shit on my things.

Who decides what the banned items are? Can we be sure these items won't suddenly change, when an authoritarian government gets voted in?

If it's things that will get me imprisoned why would I want them? If there's an authoritarian government, I'm not planning on protesting by viewing childporn.

Sorry, you seem to have visited hacker news more than 30 times. This website is frequented by criminals who share hacking tools and information about illegal encryption technologies used for CP. You have been reported to the authorities.

Don't cower in fear. Learn to use about:config, VMs, VPNs, and TOR.

Not everyone is able to do this, but you're technical enough to be spending time on Hacker News.

(Also, this doesn't preclude lobbying for restrictions on government and corporate surveillance. It's not a dichotomy)

What about smartphones? Increasingly, an up-to-date and unmodified Android or Apple smartphone is required to interface with the modern world. Want to use a Linux phone? Sorry no banking app for you. No check-in for flights. So you either need to accept massive day-to-day inconvenience or subject yourself to surveillance and control. This era of computing is a disaster from the perspective or user-control. You know what, Stallman was right.

> Increasingly, an up-to-date and unmodified Android or Apple smartphone is required to interface with the modern world. Want to use a Linux phone? Sorry no banking app for you. No check-in for flights. So you either need to accept massive day-to-day inconvenience or subject yourself to surveillance and control.

On my desk right now there are five Android phones (two of them don't even have SIM cards). I use them for different things. I wouldn't dream of signing in to all of them with the same Google account.

If you want to retain some degree of privacy and use Instagram on your phone, you need to get another phone for that.

They're cheap.

First, having a Free computer doesn't prevent you from also having a corporate terminal. Devices are inexpensive these days, especially used devices that can have Free software installed onto them.

Second, phones are a terrible platform for privacy preserving technologies, both currently (mobile OS dumpster fire) and intrinsically (lower resources, poor input, well-known network identity). Anybody who cares about digital privacy should have a real computer laptop/desktop that they use for the bulk of their activities.

And that is why having an open web is important.

Not being locked-in into apps is critical nowadays.

How does open web make it better? Then your data is swimming on a server outside your device on an unknown operating system with god knows who looking at it.

Someone earlier astutely stated the metaphor “the thin edge of the wedge”; the movement to the “cloud” via the open web over the last decade was the thinnest part of the wedge.

Without one we would be forced to use apps on a locked down OS and unable to switch to any up-and-coming alternatives at all.

Even to the extent web is open today, I’m able to run Linux on all my PCs/laptops and not to have an extra one to run proprietary OS in order to participate in modern life.

My bank has a customer portal website. My airline has a check-in website. Using a website instead of an app is a minor inconvenience, certainly not a "massive" one.

That's not a realistic "solution" for any more than a minuscule fraction of users.

If we don't want to live in a surveillance-based dystopia, we need to push back against it politically as a society, not play cat-and-mouse as individuals.

> we need to push back against it politically as a society, not play cat-and-mouse as individuals.

And for that to work, we have to counter the usual "but think of the children!!!" narrative with one of our own - prevent CSAM creation at the source. I have written about how to get started previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114076

I’ve been a loyal VPN user for a decade plus. The problem is the web’s becoming increasingly unusable for anyone who comes from a VPN IP. Every single search and website click results in 90 seconds of barely decipherable captcha challenges.

Presumably the widespread proliferation of (ironically!) iCloud Private Relay and the like will help alleviate this.

One is better off suffering that and letting it inform your behavior (avoiding sites that implement that trash, to the extent you can), than continuing to buy into the surveillance web and making it ever harder to separate yourself.

How do you know if the VON you're using is trustworthy though?

I've recently tried Express, Proton and Nord. They all seem to have the same issue. Don't know if anyone has any suggestions of VPNs that don't lead to captcha hell, but I'd appreciate any pointers if there's one out there.

What you say is agreeable and true. But privacy is a collective problem for society! If I have privacy for myself, and can express myself freely, but essentially nobody else can, what kind of society do I get to live my so-called free and private life in? A cyberpunk dystopia, that’s what.

There's something weird about this line of thinking. You know it's the very people who invented those boogeymen that you're afraid of becoming associated with, who are also the ones that want to do this to you? It seems like you already bought into their propaganda for justifying surveillance but you don't like the result.

> It seems like you already bought into their propaganda for justifying surveillance but you don't like the result.

I think one can arrive at the opinion they would prefer not to have their recommendations flooded with stuff from from alt-right or conspiracy Youtube/Twitter/whatever without buying into propaganda.

I believe the demonization of the term "conspiracy theory" is propaganda. Aren't we in a thread discussing a theory that organizations that are not apple will eventually conspire with apple to utilize this invasive new technology? I find it so confusing that the idea that different factions may be working together in non-public ways is such an impossibility to so many people.

Sure, fine. But one would not arrive at using terms like that if they were not being exposed to and buying into the propaganda being put out there. The proof that they're affected by the propaganda is them using the jargon of it. Before that, no one was going around saying "God I hate it when I see conspiracy theories!" It wasn't something on anyone's radar.

I can see that, but that sense of the term (which is, I'm confident, the main one in use by a long shot) dates to, like, the aftermath of the JFK assassination and early Roswell-related groups, no? The term itself is older, but I mean the colloquial use of "ideas expressed by kooks and crackpots with excessively-complex and unlikely explanations for things, with an intense resistance to even clear evidence that they're wrong, and far too strong a prior that their unlikely idea is correct". IOW I think you lost that fight by the 70s, at the latest—it's been on people's "radar" since then.

Meanwhile, groups/people/movements that completely match that description are real and it's handy to have a term for that behavior, even if you think it's applied too broadly (and maybe it is). We've got the similarly-abused word "cult", but abuse aside it's still handy to have a way to refer to groups that actually do closely fit the colloquial, pejorative meaning of the term, and there's no way you're going to get people to stop using the word that way.

>This general pattern won't disappear, ever.

It should disappear due to active push back because freedom, democracy and human rights cannot coexist with such surveillance.

Privacy is where independent thinking is happening and generated and if it's not guarded properly the whole idea of democracy is not possible. More on that here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28084578

Yes, it should be obvious by now why Apple must back down.

But to convince Apple there needs to be plenty more articles about CSAM and where it leads.

For some reason, people living from paycheck to paycheck are expected to be "good citizens", but if you make billions (and pay much less in tax, percentage-wise), your obligation to not be a shitbag is, well, waived.

Everyone here is hating on Apple, but looking at what Peter Thiel is involved in - oh, that's FINE. He is rich, he is better than you, obviously. Don't believe me? Watch the Peter Thiel shrine that is HN downvote this.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5db4ad/google-bans-safegraph...

And yet... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...

Apple has just created a product that slowed the government down and they wouldn't stand for it and so they compromised.

But America talks a good talk about pushing back against surveillance but if it doesn't affect people day to day, no one will care.

Hell, almost a million Americans are dead and about half care more about being able to go to a bar than the easily preventable deaths.

Honest question though - but what _should_ Apple do here? I'm moving away from Apple due to this decision so i'm no fan of it.. but i also don't think it's on some corporation to spend their money to defend my freedom.

Corporations have done nothing but repeatedly invade my privacy, exploit my data and attempt to squeeze money out of me at every turn. The relationship has seemed adversarial for quite a few years. So what should i expect from Apple here?

It sort of feels like the alternative is for Apple to stand up to governments. To fight for the people.. But this seems super, super hopeful. A desperate plea founded in wishful thinking that corporations have any incentive aligned with ours.

So what in your eyes is the right solution here? Apple letting us down here is par for the course here to me. But i also don't see an alternative where i'm not just blindly hoping some corporation will defend my freedoms for me. I've lost all trust in literally every other corporation.. honestly, should i have trusted Apple?

Apple should do nothing. Child pornography is a problem for law enforcement. It should not involve blanket and universal surveillance of personal devices.

Today it's child pornography. What about tomorrow? Let me make a case. First, let me make something clear at the outset. I am 100 percent against child pornography. For all I care, castrate all the adults involved, when you catch them.

Now, with that made clear, let's take a look at how bad, comparatively, pornographic photos of underage individuals on a person's phone is—and my apologies to those who cannot stomach the following discussion.

The photos have already been taken. The harm here is indirect. The harm is that possession of photos means that you have become part of the market for child pornography, and provide incentive for the production of future materials. The direct harm occurs when the materials are being produced, and the direct harm is categorically worse than dissemination and possession of the photos.

Compare that to something like terrorism. Recruiting terrorists and planning terrorist activities is, I would argue, a greater and more direct harm than mere possession of child pornography. (Leave aside the production.) So, how can someone accept that this is okay for child pornography and not terrorism? And once we've accepted it's okay for terrorism, who is the "potential" terrorist? What is terrorist contraband?

And now that we've accepted sniffing for terrorists, what's next? Election "manipulation" that "threatens" our democracy? Public health "misinformation"?

This is the Panopticon.

> Today it's child pornography. What about tomorrow?

Our latest Antipope.org post (discussed here yesterday), suggested we extend the child-pornography treatment to possession of unauthorized cryptocurrency.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28145918

Ah, thank you! Yes, I see. Users of cryptocurrency are monsters who, because of the carbon footprint of mining, threaten the very planet. Why, that goes beyond mere hatred for humanity—you have to include the entirety of the Five Kingdoms.

https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/animal/animal_3.htm

How could anybody be against criminalizing it!

> For all I care, castrate all the adults involved, when you catch them.

Interesting. I’m not familiar with a criminal justice system with a false positive rate lower than NCMEC’s perceptual hashes.

I think this is the best comment I’ve seen to date on this topic. From beginning to end, word for word.

> For all I care, castrate all the adults involved, when you catch them.

I doubt it would suffice. Chemical castration, perhaps.

> Apple should do nothing.

Is this a viable option when governments are pushing them to do something? To give governments access, etc?

Ie why should Apple fight governments here. They seem to have next to no incentive to do that, in the capitalist sense. Our society doesn't typically financially support moral stances, so is fighting the government, which "doing nothing" surely is, a realistic stance? It seems insanely hopeful to me.

> Honest question though - but what _should_ Apple do here?

Implement encryption and say the same to the FBI the last time they wanted apple to unlock something: Sorry, we can't.

It's not like encrypted cloud storage without holding the keys or client-side scanning would be new ground. Providers for that already exist and have existed for years.

But then doesn't that invite the exact types of people that this type of technology is trying to distance from? If everything is truly 100% encrypted and there's nothing that can be done about it, then iPhones just become tools of criminals and there's no way Apple wants that type of image tied to its brand. Maybe we messed up by making the conversation only meaningful between governments and corporations. So how do we change that or turn the tide when voting with our wallet is the only option?

I don't really agree with this system either but I, at least, appreciate the sentiment that they're trying to solve this problem while also providing E2E encryption (assuming that the internal info is correct and the end goal is full E2E encryption).

> just become tools of criminals

Or activists, journalists, doctors, lawyers, victims of police overreach, etc. If this is a question of framing then shouldn't apple be more than qualified to handle it?

Apple can’t fight this battle. No one can. The best you can do is make sure you are well versed in the current revision of wrongthink. Make sure you stay up to date. Adhere to the correct beliefs, actions, and words. Start now!

double plus good advice, Citizen.

> Honest question though - but what _should_ Apple do here? I'm moving away from Apple due to this decision so i'm no fan of it.. but i also don't think it's on some corporation to spend their money to defend my freedom.

Honest question, were are you going that has less privacy issues than this?

For the Phone, no idea. For my laptop i'm switching to the Framework Laptop and Linux (for work). For my phone, god only knows.

I _want_ to support some Linux-only phone, completely off of Google/etc. However, i suspect that will be too poor of a UX, lacking basic functionality that i deem essential. I may still buy them to support them, but i think i'm going to have to buy a Android-based phone and then heavily de-google it. I don't like this option because it still supports the Google ecosystem, but it may be a necessary evil while the Linux-phone market hopefully grows, and while i continue to buy the Linux-phone market to "do my part".

https://calyxos.org/

https://gitlab.com/CalyxOS

Calyxos is one i'm debating going. Seems a more realistic option (compared to Purism). Does CalyxOS recommend phones to buy for their OS?

I think only the Snapdragon SoC is fully supported. So, yes, the google Pixel phones and the Xiaomi Mi A2 are curently recommended: https://calyxos.org/get/

I've flashed mine 2 weeks ago and I am very pleased. Without the Google Services Framework you are restricted to the F-Droid store though (not a problem for me personally). And there are several Apps that won't work even if you install the GSF and the Aurora-Store: Banking-Apps, Online-Check-In for Flights, etc. -- again not a problem for me personally, I fly maybe once every 5 years and use Online-Banking from my browser...

Librem 5?

What makes the Framework laptop so great is that it provides a user-controlled system without being ancient and crippled. It stacks up pretty comparably to a standard XPS or MacBook. As much as I respect Purism's efforts the Librem 5 is so much less functional than an iPhone it's almost a different class of device.

Some of the open source phone projects are interesting. But I stopped carrying a phone entirely about 3 years ago.

HN is a weird crowd, so this obviously isn't a solution for +99% of people. But I'm choosing to opt out entirely. Living in the 90s is annoying when coordinating with unreliable people, but this isn't some kind of impossible feat. I don't even think about it anymore, it's a non-issue. Just get on with it.

They are sitting on ~$200B in cash. If they want to continue to be viewed as protecting users data and privacy, that is exactly what they should do. Spend some of that money in court, defending the privacy of their users. But they won't, and they will lose the thing that differentiates them for some subset of their users.

Even $200B is minuscule when compared to the money that governments can spend to make this a requirement for everyone. People need to push back on the situation that led to Apple even thinking they needed to do something like this. We need to go against the root cause, not the solution one company came up with to try and fight against that cause.

It's not about what Apple should do. This story is not so important to their business, marketing-wise it's a minor annoyance. It's all about what users/you should do. Support, participate in, and use open/self-hosted, private and properly secure services and devices.

Yes, it's hard, cumbersome, and not "there yet" for a long time to come on a lot of fronts, but it's the only way out of the corporate multiverses.

And we know that all of that is feasible, because Linux on Desktop is a great thing now.

Years ago it was something that only nerds and techy people would use and now one can easily install it for any family member and never look back.

> Honest question though - but what _should_ Apple do here?

How about not moving forward with this system?

Corporations have to obey the law, but they don't need to be zealous and build spying infrastructure when they aren't required to.

If this is a preemptive response to full E2E encryption, does that change your opinion in that regard at all?

Not who you asked, but: it wouldn't change mine. My phone is one of the most private things I own, it stores private thoughts, communications and pictures. If someone goes out of their way to try and sniff data in there, that's a no go. I might even go to the extreme of saying that I'm willing to even give child pornography consumers some uncomfortable freedoms, if it guarantees that my freedoms remain untouched.

(and all of that would be before I even consider false positive rates)

If this was the case I'd think Apple would have mentioned it by now to appease the situation.

But even if that was the case, the tool will now exists for any dictatorial government to spy on "troublemakers". The Chinese government, which has already gotten full compliance from Apple, would be foolish not to use it.

I don’t think that trusting a corporation is any good either. Imagine the alternate scenario where the government is benevolent and has no interest in surveilling its citizens. Companies in this case still have an incentive to gather as much data as they can from their customers because the ability to manipulate people into patronizing their products is a competitive edge.

The exec's should quit (if they care about privacy).

I remember a decade ago that Freedom of Speech was a pretty common sentiment shared here and pretty much everywhere online. Today though, that freedom is no longer even prized over the rights of private mega corps, sometimes doing the bidding of the government.

On one hand it's encouraging to read your take, but I have no faith that in another 10 years, the government scanning all our devices for "misinformation" that the then regime deems as such, will be anything but hand waved away by the majority of SV employees as "it's the law".

“They’re just consequences for abusing your right to privacy,” they’ll eventually explain.

The proposal is the exact opposite of how you characterize it.

> Apple just side-stepped the question on how to reconcile trust in propietary software and surveillance requests from the government.

They actually inserted themselves into the process, not side-stepped it. They could’ve kept status quo (no scanning) and kept supplying iCloud Backups to governments at large rates. As part of this, they’re also forced to add a greatly increased human review function.

> We don't even know what big brother wants to know about you.

They’ve explicitly stated what they’re scanning for and went further to say they will not scan for other types of content. You may not believe them, but this is not a content-neutral or blind justification.

You're suggesting that Apple's motivation was "precisely" to enable general widespread government surveillance? Why would Apple have an interest in doing that? What evidence do you have that this is their motivation, how do you know what motivates them?

I would suspect because governments repeatedly want this surveillance and as the GP comment correctly pointed out, this gives governments what they want while Apple sits on the side and acts innocent.

Given pressure from governments for this type of surveillance is, i think, well agreed upon - Apple giving in while avoiding direct responsibility seems quite the incentive in my view.

I also wonder about it. Maybe the agencys had something in there hands to make pressure to the apple people who decided this. Maybe optimised taxes, maybe lovers, we will never know.

For sure there had to be a lot of pressure. I don't believe Apple did just because it was a beautiful morning once.

Makes me think further...are there any documented cases of a three letter agency being on the board of any company?

I'd guess they tried it once or twice, and it was too slow so they went for more forceful means.

This just reasoning from what they've already done in the past.

An SRE friend told me that they're pretty confident that a three letter organization have attempted a serious breach at a data center. There's a good chance that Apple has negotiated a deal so they'll stop attempting hacks in the future.

“A SRE friend” is “pretty confident?”

That’s a very bold claim to make on hearsay. Does your friend work at Apple? Are they just speculating, or do they have actual evidence? Why do you believe them?

C’mon, people, I know this is a knee-jerk issue, but exercise some basic critical thinking skills.

Basic critical thinking skills would tell you that Apple would spend millions of dollars developing something that isn't making them any more money. The most obvious explanation is that the government is pressuring them to somehow.

As far as the attack goes, I have a few more details, but I'd rather no reveal them since I could be violating confidentiality somehow. I understand why you'd be skeptical.

So the gov't it got exactly what it wanted and instead of getting Congress to actually pass a law, they just effected a much simpler solution by force.

Winning!

> Why would Apple have an interest in doing that?

To follow the law? You can already read a bagful of stories where it caved in on law enforcement pressure. It already follows much invasive legal systems in China or India like any other major tech company. The measures there are being presented as "anti-terrorism", maybe a less marketable term in the US currently.

> We now live in a world, where our personal computers come with "AI" that detects illegal use of those computers and automatically turns us in to the authorities.

Wait a second, but only if you're uploading photos to iCloud? They were presumably already doing this once you upload them, so what is the big difference? I have totally missed this detail in a lot of the coverage, and it changes my view of it.

It's my understanding that they weren't actually checking photos on their servers against the CSAM database, which is why Apple's reporting of CSAM on their network has historically been orders of magnitude less than other companies -- Facebook last year reported ~20M, other companies reported tens or hundreds of thousands, and Apple reported, IIRC, 265.

I'm aware the general sentiment here is "don't assume governments are putting pressure on Apple to step up their reporting, this is all on Apple bad bad bad bad bad," but sorry -- those numbers do indeed lead me to strongly suspect governments are putting pressure on Apple to step up their reporting. And I don't think Jason Snell (the author of the linked article, who probably knows more about Apple's world view and internal politics than almost anyone outside the executive team does) is wrong to theorize that Apple sees this CSAM-hash-detection system as a way to meet that pressure while protecting user privacy as much as possible, because they've convinced themselves that "protecting user privacy" means "do as much on device and as little in the cloud as possible".

To be clear, I don't think this is a good idea -- letting the camel's nose in the tent through a different opening is still letting the camel's nose in the tent. The irony, though, is that I think Apple's inventively bad solution comes from the most canonically Silicon Valley mindset ever: all problems are engineering problems.

Yeah it's kind of odd, because now law enforcement/the courts can say "well, you have the capability to scan content on device, you just choose not to in some cases", which would seem to open Apple up to being forced to do it in far more cases.

I think we have to look at this through the lens of governments around the world attempting to ban E2E encryption. E2E encryption has both security and privacy benefits, and IMO most people are far more affected by the security benefits, given the frequency of data leaks/hacks. So maybe Apple is saying "let's preserve some of the E2E encryption benefits", but show it can be compatible with LEO demands.

I think the unfortunate reality may be that that is the least bad option.

I think there are a lot of great arguments to be made against this system, and the road that it is going down.

But I think your arguments would be improved by actually reading and understanding the current system Apple is proposing. Which, for example, does not include automatic reporting to authorities based only on a hash detection.

At the end of the day this is mostly an issue of political and legal requirements. Apple is doing what they think they need to do to cover their bases as they wrestle with governments over things like E2E encryption policies.

Think of it this way. Ever see the movie where they put the neck shackles on people that blow up if they do something wrong? Running Man is an example. With local device scanning, I feel apple is putting a neck bomb on me, but promising they won't blow it up unless I do so and so. I can't take the neck bomb off and never should have let them put it on in the first place. My head is now at the mercy of Apple now and forever because it's locked on. Now Apple can change the terms of service, boom. Apple has a bug, boom. Why in the hell would I want this neck bomb on me?!

Sure. I'm not saying this is good. I'm saying there are a lot of kneejerk arguments being made that directly conflict with Apple's description of the system.

The problem is that you have to trust their description when the technology is a black box. And trust that it won't change in the future.

Sure. But like I said the causes are mostly political and legal.

A utopia of GPL-only mobile devices with no proprietary cloud service connections doesn't seem like a valid option. At least not for a large enough share of users to make a societal difference.

>We now live in a world, where our personal computers come with "AI" that detects illegal use of those computers and automatically turns us in to the authorities.

Nah. Everybody else will live in that world because they are addicted to convenience. Personally, I'll be scrapping my iPhone and buying something with free software.

For my edification, what are you going to buy? I want to look at it and if it fits my requirements for a device, I might get right in line behind you.

I don't know yet, I'm aware of the Librem 5 and Pinephone, the former being more attractive to me because of the isolated baseband modem. But let's be real, the user experience of these devices doesn't come close to an iPhone, so it will be a tough transition I reckon. But one I deem necessary.

I looked at the Pinephone and, user experience not coming close is an understatement. Looking at the table of OSes, it looks like getting it working would be like installing Linux on a laptop circa 2008. Librem 5 looks a bit better, but a 6mo lead time for a $900 phone with a 720p screen and n WiFi? I’m going to continue my search.

The author felt nothing like a true believer. At least not compared to coverage from MacRumors or other mainstream media sites which keep mindlessly vomiting up the "but Google's been doing basically this for ages, so it must be harmless" type logic. Intentionally misinterpreting every relevant point from critics.

Google has been doing this for ages in their cloud. As have all the other major clouds.

Apple's the first to do this on your own device. Sure, only content that would have been uploaded to iCloud. For now. But this is the start of that particular slippery slope.

I'm thinking about encrypting all data in the cloud and disabling the platform specific image upload/backup altogether. Not sure how I would a) automate the backup process from our phones to the cloud and b) how to make it somewhat convenient to look at and share pictures among the family

Any form of automation and convenient goes against the main point that is privacy.

I use cryptomator for this. On Android it allows auto uploading to any of the major Android-enabled clouds, while encrypting. You do need to keep your vault unlocked though for the auto upload to work, otherwise it will need to catch up whenever you unlock it. Not sure if it has this feature on iOS.

If you share cryptomator and the vault to your family/friends they can access it but it's not possible to look at the pics on the web that way.

The app is also paid but it's a one-time fee and not expensive.

Imagine if your luxury car came with cameras equipped in all the compartments, sending an alert to authorities that what looks like a baggie of cocaine was detected in the glove box, blowing away any protections from unreasonable search.

> 'Apple ... can now say "see, we don't collect the data. We don't even know what big brother wants to know about you."'

I don't know what Apple is thinking, but I doubt it's that, because people who care about being surveilled are very unlikely to be persuaded by that argument. (And obviously people who don't care much about being surveilled are unlikely to care very much whether such surveillance happens on device or in the cloud.)

Oh the irony...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

I can actually see it as something that encourages parents to have fewer qualms about giving their kids iPhones. I don't know how the thing works but if it makes it annoying for my kids to take/send nudes, then great.

Edit: I guess at worst Apple's just sending a cryptographic hash of unencrypted data so that the known childporn can be flagged. It's basically like sending a hashdeep record of the data. It's an interesting concept with at lot of implications for tracing the spread of files within networks without knowing what they contain. Presumably if it was expanded to all files in cloud storage then LE could say something like "Give be a list of everyone that has object XDFAECXDZE" when LE knows that XDFAECXDZE is Catcher_in_the_Rye.pdf and Apple does not.

>I don't know how the thing works but if it makes it annoying for my kids to take/send nudes, then great.

My understanding is that this only works for known abuse images and even then only if the files are identical. So apple has no way to know if high schoolers are sending nudes to each other.

Very well articulated, in a worse prose, it would be “you will have less and less privacy as you depend on more technology because the govt will want more and more power.”

> We now live in a world, where our personal computers come with "AI" that detects illegal use of those computers and automatically turns us in to the authorities.

No, we don't. Your refusal to understand how any of this actually works, your desperation to conflate this process with the worst hypotheticals, does more damage than Apple ever could.

Are you refusing to see how this opens Pandora’s box of surveillance on a device that many people store there most personal communications, memories, and other data?

If everything is a Pandora’s box, then nothing is.

Scary.

Dystopian.

You could just get a cell phone that you can turn off. I think they still make them, but get them while you can. Eventually that won't work, because your car will be able to observe you just as easily probably.

I have an old razor flip phone I might start using again. That and an iPod touch with no cellular.

This is here to stay. Time to adapt to it.

Can’t you “turn off” anything by just sticking it in a Faraday cage to block it from phoning home?

You can block the signal, but since the new scanner is now on the device itself, it can still snoop and phone home later. I want a phone that I can use as a phone still but be able to control when it does stuff and what stuff it does. I don't need a portable computer if it's just gonna spy on me all the time.

> Apple has basically created an API for government surveillance and can now say "see, we don't collect the data. We don't even know what big brother wants to know about you."

This is straight up a lie. Comparing hashes is not anything crazy, nor is it an API for big brother

Except the list of hashes is a black box. Today it's child porn, tomorrow it's anti-government or something similar. It's a slippery slope that's only going in one direction.

Agreed, but as of today, we are at the top of the slope. Maybe we skip, maybe we don’t.

As implemented, I agree with Apple

Where there is a slope, riders will come. The only way to prevent people from riding the slope is to never built the slope in the first place.

“Anti-government” is absurdly vague. Not how this system works.

> “Anti-government” is absurdly vague.

That's the point. It's not an open to the public list, it's secret and controlled by few. It can contain whatever they want it to contain.

> Not how this system works.

That's absurdly naive.

The only naiveté is self-inflicted by reading clickbait articles instead of how the system actually works. When people start worrying about Apple scanning for abstract subjects like "anti-government" they're worrying about some hypothetical system, not the one that's been built.

No, we’re worried about the precedent it sets.

Scanning for CSAM on a server was a precedent for scanning on a device. Everything is a precedent for anything.

Your entire iPhone is a black box. If you don't trust Apple, there are so many points in the chain where they could backdoor you. The fact they are out in front of this is a good thing.

Also, I'm willing to sacrifice a tiny bit of privacy to stop child porn collections.

This[1] comment explains it very well. It just cements why I moved back to Linux on my laptop, and will be moving to something running open source software on my phone, and open hardware on all my devices.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28159353

But Apple doesn't report to authorities based only on a hash match.

They hash the files on your device.

The hashes are then sent out to for comparison to the hash table.

Right now they are only comparing to the CSAM table but they can add other later.

Also, how are the hashes sent? Can they be intercepted?

Yes but there is a manual review step. A hash match does not automatically report to authorities.

If the Apple reviewer looks at the images that were flagged and doesn’t see CSAM, they don’t report it.

A human at Apple reviews thumbnails of the flagged images to see if they are actually CSAM. You do not get reported just because of a hash match.

>Comparing hashes is not anything crazy.

If they just hash photos, and if they only use the NCMEC database and if they only look at photos being uploaded and if the government has no access, then it is not anything crazy. But by implementing the system they invite scope creep at every one of those ifs.

This is exactly how they describe it. If it changes, then I’ll change my position.

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