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Comment by farmerstan | Hacker News Reader

Unless some exec loses their job over this, this entire sequence of events was already playbooked by Apple. They knew to wrap the feature with CSAM to hopefully quell the protests, and also to add two features at the same time, so they could backpedal in case pushback was strong, and then they could blame “misunderstanding”. Even though they are being purposefully obtuse about the “misunderstanding” because there is none.

It’s a perfectly planned PR response but no one except the biggest sheep is buying it.

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I highly doubt it.

The other feature they're packaging with this (nudity warnings for children/teenagers) should be relatively uncontroversial. It seems well designed and respects the user's privacy: It shows a bypassable warning on the device, only sends a warning to parents for children up to 12 years old, and only if the child chooses to view it, and only after disclosing that the parents will be notified. I don't think there is much criticism they'd catch for that, no protests to quell.

On the other hand, the proposal that they're (rightfully) under fire for now is something that they can't easily back out of (they will immediately be accused of supporting pedophiles), and it's basically a "do or don't" proposal, not something that they can partially back out of. The press is also incredibly damaging to the "iPhones respect your privacy" mantra that's at the core of their current PR campaign.

I don't think they expected this level of pushback.

> the proposal that they're (rightfully) under fire for now is something that they can't easily back out of

They could just say “Following the unexpected pushback, we will scan iCloud content on server like all other major cloud providers. Unfortunately this also forces us to shelve plans for end to end encryption for photos”.

>The other feature they're packaging with this (nudity warnings for children/teenagers) should be relatively uncontroversial.

To me that's the worst of the two. From what I understand, it uses AI trained to detect nude photos. This is much more likely to produce false positives than a hash compare.

Not only is it less accurate by nature, it's a backdoor that can be later used to scan the entire device for whatever photos it's trained to find and report to whoever it's coded to report to.

The issue with things like this is, it's often a tradeoff of making the public happy vs making the government. If the initiative is partisan it might make sense to make the public happy. If the it's bi-partisan you make the government happy, and if you're lucky the government/political complex will eventually alter public opinion until your not really fighting the public anymore.

The PR show is kind of besides the point.

>The issue with things like this is, it's often a tradeoff of making the public happy vs making the government.

The company should only be concerned with following the law, not earning bownie points for extralegal behavior. Making the government happy shouldn't be a thing in a country ruled by law.

of course it is planned, even dropping this news on friday evening no less

They announced the whole thing back on Monday, though. If they were trying to hide it, the initial announcement would have been buried. Burying the "huh, we didn't expect this backlash" comment makes no sense.

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