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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

The practical difference is that with on-device scanning, the system is just a few bit flips away from scanning every photo on your device, instead of just the ones that are about to be uploaded. With server-side scanning, the separation is clear—what's on Apple's server can be scanned, and what's only on your phone cannot.

This all plays so perfectly into my long-time fears about the locked down nature of the iPhone. Sure, it's more secure if Apple is a good steward, but no one outside of Apple can inspect or audit what it's doing!

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With server-side scanning, the separation is clear

In all these threads everyone is coming close to the crux of the issue, but I want to restate it in clearer terms:

There is a sacrosanct line between "public" and "private," "mine" and "yours." That line cannot be crossed by Western governments without a warrant. Cloud computing has deliberately blurred this line over time. This on-device scanning implementation blows right past that line.

Our tools before the computing revolution, and our devices after, become a part of us. Our proprioception extends to include them as part of "self." A personal device -- a tool that should be wholly owned and wholly dependable, like pen and paper -- that betrays its user, is a self that betrays itself.

> that betrays its user, is a self that betrays itself.

And cloud computing are corporations that take your self away from you.

And that was always going to happen. And people have been fighting that idea in the shadows for a while.

This issue is just bringing it to the foreground in a most intense way. "Think of the children."

They are coming for your self. They will take it. There's not doubt. There never was. Your self is too valuable and you've just been squandering it anyway.

Eventually you become Apple. Unless you start resisting, but that's hard. Just slooooowly warm the water. This froggy is fine. Nice and warm. Just don't touch the bottom of the pot.

> There is a sacrosanct line between "public" and "private," "mine" and "yours." That line cannot be crossed by Western governments without a warrant.

This is a self-delusion, I am afraid. The line has been crossed more than once, and it will be crossed again. UK and Australian governments are just two prime examples of waving terrorism and pedobear banners as a pretext to get invasive with each new legislation, and the Oz government already has a new legislation draft to make it a crime to refuse cooperation with law enforcing services when they request access to the encrypted content (think Signal messages). Also, refer to the Witness K case to see how cases that are unfavourable to the standing government completely bypass a «trustworthy» Western judicial system, including the Minister of Justice.

CSAM is guaranteed to be abused under whatever new pretext politicians can come up with, and we won't even know that Apple has been quietly subjugated to comply with it in those jurisdictions. There will be even less transparency and even more abuse of CSAM in «non-Western» countries. That is the actual worry.

And all the while:

Sir James Wilson Vincent Savile OBE KCSG (/ˈsævɪl/; 31 October 1926 – 29 October 2011) was an English DJ, television and radio personality who hosted BBC shows including Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. He raised an estimated £40 million for charities and, during his lifetime, was widely praised for his personal qualities and as a fund-raiser. After his death, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse were made against him, leading the police to conclude that Savile had been a predatory sex offender—possibly one of Britain's most prolific. There had been allegations during his lifetime, but they were dismissed and accusers ignored or disbelieved; Savile took legal action against some accusers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile

Respectfully, I don't understand where you're going with this at all. I could point to it and say, "Wow, we need to make sure nothing like that ever happens again, no matter what the cost to personal liberty!"

I can see that interpretation for sure. My impression is that folks like Savile will always be protected from CSAM by the same powers that be calling for CSAM. I'm not certain if that viewpoint is realism or cynicism, or if there is a difference.

There's never been any indication that there has been any more difficulty in catching these guys with better smartphone privacy features. It's easier than ever largely because the police have become better at investigations involving the internet.

Asking the police to put some investigative effort in rather than a dragnet sweep of every photo on every persons device is not too much to ask.

Importantly this should be the hard-capped precedent for every sort of crime. There's always a ton of other ways these people get caught without handing over preemptive access to every innocent persons phone. Same with terrorism, murder, etc.

Maybe I should add more text in support of the parent comment's point. When I read "UK and Australian governments are just two prime examples of waving terrorism and pedobear banners," my first thought was: all the while _protecting_ monsters like Savile.

I see push for CSAM as an alignment of powers in the form of "The Baptist and Bootlegger." The well meaning moral campaigners are a tool for folks who seek to surveil and control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

The line between private and public has been crossed many times but we're still better off having that line officially there.

Even if the cops and private security along with TLAs are actively spying on people on an extremely regular basis, we're better off if officially they aren't supposed to be, if some court cases can get tossed for this, that they have to retreat sometimes, etc.

This is why having Apple overtly spying on the "private side" is still a big thing even with all the other revelations.

The line is not a delusion just because it happened to be crossed at some point. The line is there because humans intuitively consider it to be there.

The fact that the line is there gives us a reason and a foothold to fight back when someone attempts crossing it.

In the US however this division remains, even if it has been lost elsewhere. (This loss is one of the reasons I have had to never want to live in the UK nor Australia.)

>the system is just a few bit flips away from scanning every photo on your device

I prefer to think of it as being just one national security letter away from that happening.

Which is of course a schroedinger's cat kinda thing. It's already been sent. Or it hasn't. But why would the national security apparatus not take advantage of this obvious opportunity?

Anyone giving benefit of the doubt to this kind of stuff nowadays is IMO very naive or just poorly informed of recent digital history.

How would the agency issuing an NSL be able to generate a hash of a photo they’re looking for? Presumably if they already had a photo to derive the hash they’d already have whatever it is they’re searching for.

Because you're searching for people, not documents.

For a normal law enforcement context, say you bust 1 drug dealer, and are trying to find more. Maybe they have an image of a "contract" (document outlining terms of a drug deal) on their phone. You could find the other parties to that contract by searching everyone's phones for that image.

For a national security context, you could imagine equivalents to the above, you could also imagine searching for classified documents that are believed to have been leaked, or maybe searching for documents you stole from an adversary that you believe there spies are likely to be storing on their phones.

I'm saying documents here instead of images, but plenty of documents are just images, and I have little doubt that they could get this program to expand to include "scan PDFs, because you could make a CSAM into a pdf" (if it doesn't already?).

I think you already got one great reply, I have just one thing to add to it: your post literally presupposes a 1.0 version of this software that never has its feature set expanded. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption. After all, with 1.0 the goal of catching this class of person is barely achieved. They'll likely arrest people, 99% of whom are just CSAM jpeg collectors who get an extra kick out of viewing a class of image that is super illegal. And nothing more.

Then for version 2.0, they'll realize the INTERPOL, FBI, whatever can provide them a combo hash plus one string of text that can nail a known active producer. The holy grail. This small feature add to get so much closer to the original "moral goal" will prove too appealing to pass up. Now all the code is in place for the govt to pass over requests for data pinpointing mere common criminals.

It’s fuzzy hashing, so they don’t need the bit-for-bit same image.

Outside the US and other western countries, this could be a government (Russia? Chechnya?) forcing Apple to look for LGBT pride flags.

The program has capability to upload questionable photos for review.

Just make it do equivalent of .* of all photos on device. It would be hard to argue, that's more difficult than scanning for specific hash.

And there is nothing specific about images. Extending this to scan arbitrary data is probably not that much code, depending on how its program maybe configurable.

I agree. Our phones tend to hold all of our most intimate data. Violating them is akin to violating our homes. It would be nice if the laws saw it this way.

I feel like this is a false sense of security. Even before this change, they can easily access and scan photos on your device. If they do any post-processing of the image on device, they already do.

Apple already scans your photos for faces and syncs found faces through iCloud. I’d imagine updating that machine learning model is at least as straightforward as this one.

They're searching for different things though. To my knowledge, before now iOS has never scanned for fingerprints of specific photographs. It would be so darn easy to replace the CSAM database with fingerprints of known tiananmen square photos...

That is a distinction without a difference. I’m sure you could put together quite a good tank man classifier (proof: Google Reverse Image Search works quite well), and it’d catch variations which a perceptual hash wouldn’t.

The only difference is intent. The technical risk has not changed at all.

That is to say face scanning is equally insidious as the new feature?

The technical risk to user privacy - if your threat model is a coerced Apple building surveillance features for nation state actors - is exactly the same between CSAM detection and Photos intelligence which sync results through iCloud. In fact, the latter is more generalizable, has no threshold protections, and so is likely worse.

It's the legal risk that is the biggest problem here. Now that every politician out there knows that this can be done for child porn, there'll be plenty demanding the same for other stuff. And this puts Apple in a rather difficult position, since, with every such demand, they have to either accede, or explain why it's not "important enough" - which then is easily weaponized to bash them.

And not just Apple. Once technical feasibility is proven, I can easily see governments mandating this scheme for all devices sold. At that point, it can get even more ugly, since e.g. custom ROMs and such could be seen as a loophole, and cracked down upon.

This hypothetical lacks an explanation for why every politician has not demanded Apple (or say Google) do this scope creep already for photos stored in the cloud where the technical feasibility and legal precedent has already been established by existing CSAM scanning solutions deployed at scale.

I have to note that one of those solutions deployed at scale is Google's. But the big difference is that when those were originally rolled out, they didn't make quite that big of a splash, especially outside of tech circles.

I will also note that, while it may be a hypothetical in this particular instance as yet, EU already went from passing a law that allows companies to do something similar voluntarily (previously, they'd be running afoul of privacy regulations), to a proposed bill making it mandatory - in less than a year's time. I don't see why US would be any different in that regard.

Ok but now you’ve said that the precedent established by Google and others already moved the legislation to require terrible invasions of privacy far along. You started by saying Apple’s technology (and, in particular, its framing of the technology) has brought new legal risk. What I’m instead hearing is the risk would be present in a counter factual world where nothing was announced last week.

At this point of the discussion, people usually pivot to scope creep: the on-device scanning could scan all your device data, instead of just the data you put on the cloud. This claim assumes that legislators are too dumb to connect the fact that if their phone can search for dogs with “on-device processing,” then it could also search for contraband. I doubt it. And even if they are, the national security apparatus will surely discover this argument for them, aided by the Andurils and NSOs of the world.

As I have repeatedly said: the reaction to this announcement sounds more like a collective reckoning of where we are as humans and not any particular new risk introduced by Apple. In the Apple vs. FBI letter, Tim urged us to have a discussion about encryption, when we want it, why we want it, and to what extent we should protect it. Instead, we elected Trump.

The precedent established by Google et al is that it's okay to scan things that are physically in their data centers. It's far from ideal, but at least it's somewhat common sense in that if you give your data to strangers, they can do unsavory things with it.

The precedent now established by Apple is that it's okay to scan things that are physically in possession of the user. Furthermore, they claim that they can do it without actually violating privacy (which is false, given that there's a manual verification step).

The precedent established by Apple, narrowly read, is it’s ok to scan data that the user is choosing to store in your data center. As you pointed out, this is at least partly a legal matter, and I’m sure their lawyers - the same ones who wrote their response in Apple vs. FBI I’d imagine - enumerated the scope or lack thereof.

Apple’s claim, further, is that this approach is more privacy-preserving than one which requires your cloud provider to run undisclosed algorithms on your plaintext photo library. They don’t say this is not “violating privacy,” nor would that be a well-defined claim without a lot of additional nuance.

Exactly this. The whole thing is a red herring. If Apple wanted to go evil, they can easily do so, and this very complex CSAM mechanism is the last thing that will help them.

I’ve read your comments, and they are a glass of cold water in the hell of this discourse. This announcement should force people to think about how they are governed - to the extent they can influence it - and double down on Free Software alternatives to the vendor locked reality we live in.

Instead, a forum of presumably technically savvy people are reduced to hysterics over implausible futures and a letter to ask Apple to roll back a change that is barely different from, and arguably better than, the status quo.

Thanks. I couldn’t agree more.

We need both - develop free software alternatives (which means to stop pretending the alternatives are good enough), and to get real about supporting legal and governance principles that would protect against abuses.

If people want to do something about this, these are the only protections.

Nonsense. Building an entire system as opposed to adding a single image to a database is a substantially different level of effort. In the US at least this was used successfully as a defense. The US cannot coerce companies build new things on their behalf because it would effectively create "forced speech" which is forbidden by the US Constitution. However they can be coerced if there is minimal effort like adding a single hash to a database.

Photos intelligence already exists, and if people are really going to cite the legal arguments in Apple vs. FBI, then it’s important to remember the “forced speech” Apple argued it could not be compelled to make was changing a rate limit constant on passcode retries.

So you have User A - they upload a pic with User A and Peoples B,C,D,E,Z

icloud scans for those faces

finds those faces and ties them to other ID accounts via face - then via fingerprint recognition to a device, and to a location based on IMEI etc.

Apple's platform is literally the foundation for the most dystopian digital tool-set in history...

Once the government is able to crack the apple war chest, everything is fucked.

A false positive in matching faces results in a click to fix it or a wrongly categorized photo. A false positive in this new thing may land you in jail or have your life destroyed. Even an allegation of something so heinous is enough to ruin a life.

The "one in trillion" chance of false positives is Apple's invention. They haven't scanned trillions of photos and it's a guess. And you need multiple false positives, yet no one says how many, so it could be a low number. Either way, even with how small the chance of it being wrong is, the consequences for the individual are catastrophic. No one sane should accept that kind of risk/reward ratio.

"Oh, and one more thing, and we think you'll love it. You can back up your entire camera roll for just $10 a month and a really infinitesimally minuscule chance that you and your family will be completely disgraced in the public eye, and you'll get raped and murdered in prison for nothing."

Ok.

So iCloud Photos circa 2020 [and Google Photos and Facebook and Dropbox and OneDrive] aren’t a risk you should be willing to take.

This feature doesn’t change anything in that regard; the scanning was already happening.

I literally do not take that risk in 2021. I do, currently, make the reasoned assurance that the computational overhead of pushing changes down to my phone, and the general international security community, are keeping me approximately abreast of whether my private device is actively spying on me (short answer: it definitely is, longer answer: but to what specific intent?)

Apple's new policy is: "of course your phone is scanning and flagging your private files to our server - that's normal behavior! Don't worry about it".

It’s not a false sense of security, it’s a clear delimitation between theirs and mine; Debian package maintainers can also slip a scanner on your machine but that is a big line to cross on purpose and without notifying the user.

But with a debian package you can choose not to accept the upgrade and see any funny business in the release source code..

Somewhere along the line someone is producing and signing the binaries that find their way onto their computer, they could produce those binaries from different source code and I would be none the wiser.

Debian tries to be reproducible, so to avoid being caught they might need to control the mirror to so that they could send it to only me. I.e. if I'm lucky it would take a total of 2 people to put malicious binaries on my computer (1 with a signing key, 1 with access to the mirror I download things from).

That is technically true but in a real very practical sense everyone here using OSS absolutely is trusting a third party because they are not auditing every bit of code they run. For less technical people there is effectively zero difference between open and closed software.

It’s really disingenuous to suggest that open source isn’t dependent on trust, you just change who you are trusting. Even if the case is someone else is auditing that code, you’re trusting that person instead of the repository owners.

I’ll concede that at least that possibility to audit exists but personally I do have to trust to a certain extent that third parties aren’t trying to fuck me over.

Thinking about this.. I guess my trust, is that someone smarter than I will notice it, cause a fuss, and the community will raise pitch forks and.. git forks. My trust is in the community, I hope it can stay healthy and diverse for all time.

Trusting in a group of people like you to cover areas you might not is the benefit of open source and a healthy community.

With Apple you have to trust them and trust they don't get national security order.

I trust that if everyone who had the ability to audit OSS got a national security order it would leak and it would be impossible for many who live in other nations.

> Even if the case is someone else is auditing that code, you’re trusting that person instead of the repository owners.

Suppose Debian's dev process happened at monthly in-person meetings where minutes were taken and a new snapshot of the OS (without any specific attribution) released.

If that were the case, I'd rankly speculate that Debian devs would have misrepresented what happened in the openssl debacle. A claim would have been made that some openssl dev was present and signed off on the change. That dev would have then made a counterclaim that regular procedure wasn't followed, to which another dev would claim it was the openssl representative's responsibility to call for a review of relevant changes in the breakout session of day three before the second vote for the fourth day's schedule of changes to be finalized.

Instead, there is a very public history of events that led up to the debacle that anyone can consult. That distinction is important-- it means that once trust is in question, anyone-- including me-- can pile on and view a museum of the debacle to determine exactly how awful Debian's policy was wrt security-related changes.

There is no such museum for proprietary software, and that is a big deal.

That's certainly true, and it is a strong 'selling point,' so to speak, for open software. But openness is just one feature of many that people use for making considerations about the sort of software they run and frankly, for an average consumer, it probably weighs extremely low on their scale, because in either case it's effectively a black box, where having access to that information doesn't actually make them more informed, nor do they necessarily care to be informed.

Most people don't care to follow the controversies of tech unless it becomes a tremendously big issue, but even then, as we've seen here, there are plenty of people that simply don't have the technical acumen to really do any meaningful analysis of what's being presented to them and are depending on others to form their opinion, whether that be a friend/family member or some tech pundit writing an article on a major news organization's website.

Trusting Apple presents a risk to consumers but I'd argue that for many consumers, this has been a reasonable risk to take to date. This recent announcement is changing that risk factor significantly, though in the end it may still end up being a worthwhile one for a lot of people. Open Source isn't the be all end all solution to this, as great as that'd be.

Maybe if you drink from the NPM PyPI firehouse without checking (as too many do unfortunately).

For regular Linux distribution there are maintainers updating packages from upstream source that can spot malicious changes slipped in upstream. And if maintainers in one district don't notice, it is likely some in onether distro will.

And there are LTS/enterprise distros where upstream changes take much longer to get in and the distro does not change much after release. Making it even less likely a sudden malicious change will get in unnoticed.

The only way what you said is not true for any networked device is to just go down to the river and throw it in and never use a digital device again. It's not a false sense of security, it's a calculated position on security and what you will accept, moving spying from the server to the phone was the last straw for a lot of people.

There is also an argument that the cloud scanning is a few bit flips away from allowing random Apple employees from looking through all my photos while on device scanning means they have to be specifically looking for certain content. On device scanning is probably preferred if one's fear is someone stealing their nudes, which is one of the more common fears about photo privacy and one that Apple has already shown is a problem for them.

Sure, but I don't particularly care because I don't upload sensitive photos to iCloud. As I'd recommend to everyone else. If it's on someone else's computer, it's not yours.

But, I suppose my iPhone was never really mine either. I knew that, I just never quite put two and two together...

>Sure, but I don't particularly care because I don't upload sensitive photos to iCloud

So you are saying you have nothing to fear because you aren't hiding anything?

Is this a tacit admission that you don't want them scanning your phone for CSAM because they will find something?

I'm obviously not seriously accusing you of anything, just pointing out how your line of argument applies equally to privacy whether on the cloud or on your device.

> So you are saying you have nothing to fear because you aren't hiding anything?

No, I'm saying that if you're hiding something, maybe don't give it to someone else.

"I'm not giving my photos to anyone. I am just taking photos on my phone and Apple is automatically backing them up to iCloud. I have no idea how that feature was turned on or how to turn it off." ~ most normal people.

People here too often only think of these issues from the perspective of the type of person who browses HN. Apple is thinking of this from the perspective of an average iPhone users.

Or, perhaps many regular users do understand the separation, and that's why this issue is getting so much attention.

Is this issue getting much attention outside of tech circles? I have seen a few news stories here or there, but nothing major. I have not heard a word about it from any of my non-tech friends or from the non-tech people I follow on social media. Meanwhile people on HN are acting as if this is one of the biggest stories of the year with multiple posts on it every day.

There is a huge separation in the importance that the tech community puts on the general concept of privacy while the average person rarely worries about it.

I mean, absent a gallop poll there's really no way to know, but we were discussing this at my office today, and I work at a graphic design studio, not a software development firm.

You have to configure iCloud backups when setting up a phone for the first time. Someone who is non-technical, but privacy conscious isn’t going to do this.

I don't know why technical people assume non-technical people fully understand the privacy implications of certain technology.

When you choose to use a cloud (aka someone else's computer), you trust that someone else, because you're no longer in control of what happens to your data once it leaves your device. That's a sane expectation, anyway. But you don't expect your own device to behave against your interests.

You could enable scanning of all files using a few bit-flips, but that doesn't have any effect - the results need to be evaluated by someone. Afaik, the system is designed such that the client side does not know whether a match occurred. So to actually report anyone based on the results of the proposed CSAM scanner, Apple also needs to upload all of the scanned files, including the client-side scan result, to figure out whether there's a match.

How is it any more ‘bit flips’ away from scanning every photo on your device than it was before?

Because

    if (willBeUploaded) {
        scanPhoto();
    }

can become

    if (true) {
        scanPhoto();
    }

Obviously, this is stupidly oversimplified, I have no idea how Apple has structured their code. But the fact of the matter is, if the scanning routine is already on the phone, and the photos are on the phone, all anyone has to do is change which photos get scanned by the routine...

By the way they already scan photos that aren’t uploaded to iCloud. I’ve never used iCloud and I can go on the photos app and search for food for example

Right, the difference is that now, you can be reported to the authorities for a photo that the CSAM algorithm mistook for child pornography, whereas before the image classifying was purely for your own use.

This is simply a complete falsehood, because photos that are not uploaded are not scanned for CSAM.

Photos for your own use that you do not upload to Apple’s cloud are completely unaffected.

Exactly. They already analysed photos on your phone for search. They don’t in fact do CSAM detection on the photos on your phone.

But why are people only objecting now when they were already doing on-device analysis?

CSAM detection is a complete red herring. It is less of a general purpose scanning mechanism than the search function that was already there.

They're doing on device analysis, but there isn't any process by which an image of a hotdog will be sent to someone else without my knowledge.

Right, but neither is the CSAM code being used to detect anything but CSAM.

If a bit can be flipped to make the CSAM detector go evil, surely it can be flipped to make photo search go evil, or spotlight start reporting files that match keywords for that matter.

There is nothing special about this CSAM detector except that it’s narrower and harder to repurpose than most of the rest of the system.

> ... to make photo search go evil, or spotlight start reporting files that match keywords for that matter.

As your immediate parent has already said: there isn't any process by which an image of a hotdog will be sent to someone else without my knowledge.

Neither "photo search" nor "spotlight" report anything to third parties currently.

No, but a ‘bit flip’ could make them do so just as easily as a ‘bit flip’ could make the CSAM detector do something nefarious.

How are you still not getting this?: "search" and "spotlight" do not have the code to report anything to anyone.

How are you still not getting it? The code to ‘report’ something is barely more than a one liner http request. It could be added at any time.

On the other hand, making the CSAM code scan your text documents would be pointlessly difficult given that the other mechanisms exist.

> It could be added at any time.

It has already been added. That's the point here. The phone already has the code to report its own owner. People are rightfully pissed about that.

Also, adding a one-liner of code is a lot more than a bit-flip. That's the addition of a feature, which is a major business decision. Code that already exists is a lot closer to "misfiring" than code that simply does not. Flipping a policy config, OTOH, could be "explained" away a lot easier. In fact, Big Tech does it all the time! (Remember Facebook's "Oh. Sorry. It was a bug."?)

----

Please stop this poor attempt at moving the goalposts by saying, "But, similar code could be added at any time in the future! Why're you guys complaining now?!"

It's also not about where the scanning is happening, or whether that's new or old. The old scanning is not a problem, precisely because it does no reporting. The new scanning IS a problem, precisely because it does the reporting.

The former is not a problem on its own. The latter is. That's the point you keep missing.

Right, but the CSAM scanning routine is absurdly narrow and difficult to use for detecting anything but CSAM, whereas a general purpose hash matching algorithm really is just a few lines of code.

This whole ‘now that they have a scanner it’s easier’ reasoning doesn’t make sense. iOS already had numerous better matching algorithms if your goal is to do general spying.

Isn't the scanning routine searching for fingerprints? What happens if someone adds a fingerprint to the database, which matches something other than CSAM?

No.

It’s way more complex than that, and has been engineered to prevent exactly that scenario.

I recommend you actually check out some of Apple’s material on this.

The idea that it’s just a list or fingerprints or hashes that can easily be repurposed is simply wrong, but is the root of almost all of the complaints.

I've looked through Apple's paper, what are you referring to?

So you know it’s not just a fingerprint. Did you notice the parts about the safety vouchers and the visual derivatives?

Yes, I did. You do realise that CSAM is just a policy control, and there is literally nothing technical from Apple adding non-CSAM content to the same policy and systems?

I feel like you may not have actually read the paper in depth. The paper clearly shows this is a generalised solution for detecting content that perceptually matches a database. The "what" is CSAM today, but nothing about the technicals require it to be CSAM.

To answer your specific response of safety voucher and visual derivative:

- The 'safety voucher' is an encrypted packet of information containing a part of the user's decryption keys, as well as a low resolution, grayscale version of the image (visual derivative). It is better described as "backdoor voucher".

- The 'visual derivative' is just the image but smaller and grayscale.

None of those two technologies have anything to do with CSAM. Apple's statement that they will only add CSAM to the database is a policy statement. Apple can literally change it overnight to detect copyrighted content, or Snowden documents, or whatever.

You are ignoring how the parts of the technology are used to separate responsibilities.

> Apple can literally change it overnight to detect copyrighted content, or Snowden documents, or whatever.

No, Apple doesn’t run the database. NCMEC does.

It doesn’t matter where the fingerprints are coming from, they’re all just fingerprints. Today they come from NCMEC. Tomorrow they could be from the Chinese Communist Party.

It’s hard to take seriously the complaint that this mechanism would give the Chinese Communist party more power.

Also, in the US, the 4th Amendment protects against the abuse you are talking about:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/12/a-38-year...

This is false information, the scanning system is highly generalized to finding any type of photo via fuzzy matched perceptual hashes.

It can target a pride flag just as easily as CP.

Yes. This is it. When I wrote the above I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I felt like this but this is the reason. It’s the slippery slope of mine / yours.

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