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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.

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

I doubt it would suffice. Chemical castration, perhaps.

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

> 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".

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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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)

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).