There is no way Apple released their initial PR piece without thinking it through and deliberately fusing all those new features together as one big unassailable initiative. It was typical my way or the highway.
Which also make it funny now that they attempt to distinguish between them and run into same hole that they dug for other people.
I don't know what you and tharne are talking about here. There was definitely confusion. HN is a tech forum and I still saw plenty of people here worried about how they would get in trouble for having innocent photos of their own children on their phone. You are allowed to be against Apple's plan while still recognizing that many people didn't understand what exactly was part of that plan.
1. I don't want to financially support anyone going through my private things in conjunction with what is basically the police, looking for reasons to imprison me. Reasonable suspicion first, thankyou very much.
2. I don't trust them to use this in a politically neutral way. This is too much power.
3. I don't trust them to manage the false positive rate. Everyone knows how reliable software engineers are when they claim a system does something. At heart they aren't 1 in a trillion people.
This is a great time to be outraged. I can't really do much about what they do on their servers, but I can certainly get antsy about what happens on my phone.
They just gave a talk at the USENIX Security Symposium on how this works and the safeguards put in place. The scanning functionality is part of the icloud photo upload module. Security researchers can determine if they change the scanning algorithm in future updates. I don't know what else you can hope for.
Going back to the slipper slope argument, you could say nothing stops them (or Google on Android) from uploading your passcode and share it with X. It's all just software in the end that they write that powers the lock screen and security checks.
If they start claiming they do that then I'll get angry about that too. You'll notice that only the fringe is accusing Apple of being liars or acting in bad faith here. Apple are pretty up front about what they do.
The problem with this plan is they're claiming they are only going to do selective law enforcement (only 1 US law, only things that are strongly supported by consensus and even then only sometimes). That isn't a position with a reasonable foundation, they are going to change their mind. I want them to change it in the "we don't snoop on people's phones" direction rather than open season.
Again, I don't expect them to do this. But they could add a useful level of trust if they were really motivated to do so.
As for no company giving up rights, I did say I didn't expect Apple to actually do this, only that they could. Though, companies do actually make binding contractual promises all the time. It's just that they don't tend to do it with consumers or small businesses who have no negotiating leverage and/or no desire to insist on those promises.
Regarding your hypothetical, anything that's actually legally mandated by the government generally overrides contract law since the courts won't enforce illegal contracts and illegality is a defense to breach of contract. They can always do what the law actually requires.
But we're not talking about the government mandating things, since both the iOS 14 behavior and the iOS 15 behavior comply with the law.
Which means this action is just a charade, as I pointed out. Because fundamentally it doesn't really matter. The gov is going to do what they do, and Apple is not going to create a situation in which an external group can determine how or if they can be sued in court based on how overreaching they feel that day.
Also go check how many arbitration clauses exist in your ToS, just as an exercise. I'm all for banning arbitration clauses and allowing consumers recourse in actual courts. I don't believe we should have companies sign their death sentence prior to doing business, this raises the barrier to entry and results in even less competitors who have to do the same.
I could hope for being able to trust that an intensely personal device such as a smartphone isn't something that I have to be constantly suspicious of.
Admittedly, that ship sailed a long time ago, but I could still hope.
You being able to trust them is a personal choice. It seems people are happy to trust companies that don’t talk about what they do with their data rather than the ones that do. Which, while understandable seems counter intuitive.
Could they write and deploy something overnight that hoovered up everyone's data? Maybe on iOS, less so on OS X, but now they're going to ship with that capability. I don't understand how some people can't see the difference between "they could always push some nasty update," versus literally shipping hardware and software with a backdoor.
But it would be very hard to spot new weights of the neural network and a new list of target hashes. These are pretty much guaranteed to change regularly as they retrain the embedding network and/or change the list of known target images. So it will be very hard if not impossible to see what they're searching for. That latest update could just add the ability to recognize CSAM pictures that had meme texts added to them. Or it could change the embeddings and target list to spot unlicensed posting of copyrighted still frames from movies. Or it could now retrieve any picture of people in police uniform. No way to know if you don't have a hunch and a targeted picture you want to test with.
Do you know this for certain about any vendor? If a company the size of Apple were pushing the same update to everybody, then it would likely be known about by the world pretty quickly. But... if a targeted signed update is sent to a handful of selected devices, that's harder for the world to find out about. It's risky, but it's definitely technically possible.
You cannot be serious.
Let’s compare:
— Apple’s market cap is more than twice of Facebook’s.
— Apple’s user base is less than half of Facebook’s. Even fewer use iCloud Photos (and much fewer upload more than the free 5 GB, shared across photos and other content).
— Facebook is entirely made of UGC with no storage limit for a given user, and their moderators have to review every bit of content to ensure the gore is away from advertising targets’ eyeballs (and, indeed, report CSAM). Apple only needs to review images that trigger multiple hash matches occurring within the same account.
Considering the above, my intuition is that Apple’s NeuralHash would have to be completely broken for a company this size to not be able to afford enough moderators to manage the false positive rate. I sincerely doubt they are so inept, and I’d be willing to live with the potentiality of an Apple employee peeking at a photo of mine once a year (me using Apple tech already implies I trust them enough, as I’d never be able to personally verify every privacy claim they make).
What is worth screaming about, and what is eroding my trust, is the fact that since 2019 Apple’s ToS (quietly changed, presumably, to accommodate this feature currently in the news) give them carte blanche for pre-screening any content that they deem potentially illegal. Unless they tighten up that phrasing to limit it to CSAM only, they’re allowing it to be used as a political prosecution tool.
Edit: Factual error, iCloud Photos does have a free tier.
Anyone trusting Facebook with a level of access to their life comparable to a mobile phone is foolish. There is no way I would pay money for Facebook to control my phone.
If it costs them too much money to have too many people personally looking over every single positive hit to make sure it’s not false, then they’re not going to do it even if they technically could.
I live in a place where the government arrests you for having a VPN installed on the phone and labels you a terrorist outright. My phone is checking with physical frisking on the roadside and content critical of state gets automatic manhandling and trip to the police station where I am treated as a criminal.
How I see this as a problem not because I am not going to buy an iPhone in future, but because such ideology would be made normal. That is what is scaring me
The technical implementation is trying to hide the fact that the design mojo of this system is an actual Backdoor for governments of the world to oppress, censure and do whatever they like.
The technical implementation is optimized towards minimizing the cost for Apple. That's why they scan on the device. And this decision is made with knowledge that in the near future "scanning" will be not limited only to hashes. Scanning and processing will be required for $Some_Cool_Functionality to work.
The same slippery slope applies there.
It's Sir <firstname> or Sir <firstname> <lastname>.
https://www.geni.com/projects/Naming-Conventions-for-Knights...
I don't like the feature. Putting this on the client device is dubious and should never have made it past the brainstorming stage.
Having said that, technology companies, big and small, are bound in the US to do this. By law. If anything Apple was by far the laggard of the bunch (with reporting counts magnitudes lower than peers, despite a larger customer base). As I said in another comment, no company can protect you from your government.
Much has been made about it being on device, which while a serious optics issue...the hot takes being given on here are manifestly absurd. Like, literally the company that holds all of your data, all of your passwords, all of your info and you need to invent slippery slopes to imagine up what they "might" do?
If they want to have their way with your data, they could have been doing it for decades.
They should never have announced two very different systems at the same time. Contrary to some of the insincere claims given in this very thread, there is massive disinformation and confusion about them. In the end I feel like 98% of the "the end is nigh!" comments are by long time Apple detractors who just see this glorious opening.
And while I still hope that Apple says "Mea culpa, we're just going to scan on the ingress to iCloud Photos", whatever they do in a month this is going to be completely forgotten.
Law requires reporting CSAM. They are not required to scan for it.
They are surely not required to scan client devices, and that was a foolishly, ill-considered plan (that I still would wager they will abandon), however they absolutely must scan iCloud Photos unless they were technically incapable of doing this. US law doesn't say "you go to jail if you don't", it says "you face enormous liability if you don't".
Those are not US companies but I've never heard of AWS, DO, etc. scanning people's storage either.
Except with an iPhone, you don't have a choice.
Pre-Snowden, that was insourced by the NSA.
Plenty of people believe that the Facebook and Instagram apps are recording audio 24/7 and target you ads based on the speech the apps hear. That doesn't stop people from using the apps.
A few years ago some of the most famous people in their world had their iClouds accounts hacked and had their naked photos leaked. That is a lot of people's worst fear. People literally commit suicide over this sort of thing. It didn't hurt the iPhone's market share.
People largely don't care.
1. The penalty of social ostracism due to the network effect. This is a severe punishment to most humans - particularly in today's socially disconnected world. Without these apps, a large # of people would not have any contact with much of their social circle - including family.
2. Learned helplessness. I think that many people have just given up. Even if they knew how to fight for their privacy, they see time and time again that money always wins.
This is old thinking. In the 90s and 00s it was miraculous to trade in a little privacy for some awesome free service on the internet. Google, Facebook and others became huge, and everyone has been influenced / manipulated by them and people are getting tired of having a family dinner conversation next to their smart speaker and seeing ads for six weeks for Depends diapers because someone told a bad joke at the dinner table.
Take all the paranoia and “muh privacy” around contact tracing or the European Green Pass: It’s as anonymous as it can be, yet millions of people argue against them across the political chasms that separate them. So yes: unless it becomes a divisive topic (which would be undesirable), this CSAM scanning will go away with the news cycle.
About your comment on celebrities’ “sex-tapes”. I guess it takes a certain kind of extroversion and (positive) narcissism to be one, and they’re expected to be gossiped about or to show their bodies in movies or photos so I don’t think those victims blinked that much - some like P. Hilton probably manufactured some porn to ride the wave. On the other hand, revenge porn did drive ordinary people to suicide because in this case the victims weren’t prepared or expected to let the public to see that.
Who knows how much it will matter in the end? But it is hard to argue it doesn't matter.
Other companies scan their servers instead. And what law banned E2E encryption?
This potentially means all of iCloud, not just photos, could start to use E2E encryption as well - which is fantastic.
They have to scan things that are not photos. What if the bad guys just zip their photos and upload that?
There also needs to be a solution to CSAM uploaded before NCMEC had a chance to tag it, especially to cases where the bad guys uploaded their CSAM and deleted it from their iPhone. What happens then, the bad guys get E2E and nobody can find them? There has to be a technical solution in mind for this, and everything I can think of has implications (Let the iPhone store hashes of deleted images? Would it be enough to scan also during download?)
IMHO, any serious attempt to find CSAM using Apple's client-side approach requires more scanning, and Apple not being forward on that makes me trust them less. Also, the moment they expand the scanning, we should think carefully if there actually are any privacy benefits.
What law do you think banned real E2E encryption?
And I said information. The hash matching is information.
[1] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Security_Threat_Model...
I keep seeing this asserted, but there is never any legal citation. What exactly compels a software company to make their software product scan for CSAM?
I get that a service provider like cloud storage may need to scan what they themselves are storing to avoid possessing such material themselves. And iCloud could scan uploaded blobs all day to fulfill their legal department's recommendation.
But what exactly compels a software developer to include a content scanning function in code they distribute? And does this requirement also apply to the authors of rclone?
Apple only scans photos being uploaded to iCloud photos. Google scans. Facebook scans. Microsoft scans. Even tiny image hosting sites scan.
Apple decided to implement this functionality on device, but they could as easily (with much less fanfare and dissent) have placed it on the ingress to iCloud.
When iCloud scans stored files like Google Drive, nobody complains. It's understandable that risk adverse legal departments have come to the conclusion that doing such things is necessary, to avoid a company being in possession of trivially-discoverable CSAM. And from an individual security perspective, you should consider everything you upload unencrypted to be the subject of similar analysis.
If iOS were to encrypt all files before uploading, making any iCloud scanning mostly pointless, Apple would still not be running afoul of any law. Apple is making general software for end users, and encrypting files to upload would be doing the basic user diligence I alluded to. If users end up using the software to do bad things, those specific users are liable and not Apple.
As far as I am aware, there is no legal requirement for a software developer to modify their software to perform scanning of content it will process while being run by other people. But this is what is implied when you say that Apple is forced to do this by law.
Furthermore if this development was driven by iCloud worrying about legal liability from the combined system, then iCloud should be spun out into a separate company that cannot affect the development of the iOS software.
I'm tossing the mac and iphone because my phone is mine.
Yep. They just altered that deal. (Darth Vader quote deleted)
Disagree.
Something this ludicrously intrusive, over-reaching, reckless and trust-destroying is a dealbreaker for exactly the demographic of technology enthusiasts who influence others purchasing. It may not be instantaneous, but it would certainly propagate.
It's anecdotal, but I know zero people who are NOT reconsidering even lifelong loyalty to Apple over this.
It's just too crazy big a wrong, it's like the company just had a nuke go off inside it and is trying to pretend nothing happened.
They may as well have announced a partnership with Trump to put MAGA engravings on all future products, and then in the ensuing furore say they "regret the confusion", whilst carrying on with it regardless.
Though I suppose in that scenario they'd at least be targeting a significant market.
The same can't be said for the size of "sign me up for software-automated police raids" market. A market whose naiveity-induced initial "size" would rapidly shrink after the first few innocents went down, as they absolutely would.
I mean depending on the targets chat software preferences, could a malicious actor potentially ruin an Apple iOS users life just by sending them an image?
There are many troubling scenarios one could imagine. In fact, there is nothing but troubling scenarios.
It's not a can of worms so much as a wormhole, blasting an endless stream of worms at the speed of light.
I'm left not just questioning Apple's leadership, but - honestly - their mental faculties. Really.
No innocent person wants to walk around with an automated snitch in their pocket - I mean, hacking? Bugs? Oversights? Just the overall preponderance of fear that every millisecond you walk around with this thing, it - and its parent corporation and all the depersonalised machinations that go along with it - could be busy organising a blithely mistaken police raid on your family?
Say, because someone you've never met, sent you a message on that new chat app you forgot you installed, that autosaves all media to your iCloud? Or because someone stole the spare phone you keep in a drawer at work, used it for God-knows what and you didn't even notice it was gone? Or, maybe your teenage son got sent something from his teenage girlfriend who unbeknownst to any of them had her phones images uploaded and subsequently catalogued and flagged? Or any number of other entirely plausible scenarios that provide the very reason we have law enforcement protocols and procedures for reporting crimes and that are complex, nuanced and have evolved over hundreds of years and mountains of cases into a massive structure that exists primarily to protect the innocent from exactly this kind of freaking crazy shit?
And Apple expects people to pay them to carry the weight of all that around with them?
Putting it server side is categorically worse. Putting it in the client SDK for iCloud (architecturally speaking) rather than on cloud storage or in the OS is clearly the better correct technical choice, tying surveillance’s hands in a way server side or OS would not.
Most every client SDK routinely checks content before upload, it’s a best practice. Careful examination suggests this was engineered better than that practice.
(Note: even tech trade posts such as LWN, Stratechery, or Daring Fireball trying to write well about this need to sit down a minute and have how it actually works walked through for them, as do many in this community.)
FWIW, I agree with much of the rest of your post except the rationale for low reporting counts.
It's basically engineering with the goal of creating a perception of privacy rather than actual privacy. I don't really care that much about Apple policing what you upload to iCloud, but this disingenuous architecture does annoy me a bit, and there's also the added insult of having a device in your pocket that by design works against its owner (reminiscent of "treacherous computing"). These problems would go away if they just did the check on the server side.
The architectural reason is to do things the server couldn’t.
> You're uploading a photo to iCloud, encrypted with a key that Apple controls.
The architectural reason is so the server doesn’t have to be able to read the photo, and it need not be a key Apple controls.
Your first two sentences are the exact reason to do it on the client instead of on the server, such that it’s possible to have e2e encryption opaque to the server.
The list of apps is such a treasure trove. Signal? Clubhouse? Telegram?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying...
I need to research what Signal does on iOS. My next canary is encryption of messaging apps other than iMessage.
Why? Putting it server-side means that it's only possible to examine the images that they claim they are targeting -- those going to the cloud. That seems like a much better and more private way to do it, because it's putting the surveillance "in their house", so to speak, instead of mine.
Upcoming contenders like Purism [1] and the Pine Phone [2] will start gaining a great deal more traction from this. Other SV firms will sense business opportunity..... If merely 5% of the TAM around mobile is willing to prioritize non-spying features that would be enough to stand up very healthy businesses.
It isn't like an iPhone is very customizable, repairable, or that usable with all the App restrictions Walled-Garden stuff.
I’ll bet you $500 to the charity of your choice that this won’t come to be. Set the terms on how you want to measure the outcome.
Since you want to have a friendly competition around "put your money where your mouth is" will look into whether or not Purism is accepting investments and what the terms are. AAPL valuations are pretty lofty right now at ~$149 a share if you'd be interested in the reverse :)
AAPL closed 90 cents short of an all time high share price today. Why isn’t the market pricing in the loss of market share?
It's a hit to their brand from technically knowledgable people for sure though. When someone asks their tech friend if they should buy Apple, more people will likely say, "yabut," or "nah." We'll see if that makes a difference in a year or three.
To me, it just feels icky. I'm sick of all the spying. I've been in computers since the Commodore. The current computer world is shit because of spying. It killed any passion I had left. It seems like no last vestige of privacy remains.
As for market share, this might barely register on people's radar outside the tech community beyond "Apple is trying to prevent child porn."
But I haven't seen any positive discussions about it, which is odd.
There are legitimate privacy concerns, and Hacker News users are right to be upset. But that's not an excuse to pretend like this issue is broadly understood.
It was not universally understood that this would only apply to photos sent to iCloud.
It was not universally understood that this was only looking for previously known CSAM.
It was not universally understood that they were using some sort of hash matching so photos you took yourself would not trigger the system.
I understand if you consider the where more important than the others, but it is simply a fact that there was confusion on what exactly was happening here.
A lot of the contention wasn't about the specifics of their plan, but rather how subtle changes could vastly expand the scope of their plan.
"this would only apply to photos sent to iCloud." for now, until scope creeps.
"this was only looking for previously known CSAM." for now, until scope creeps.
"using some sort of hash matching so photos you took yourself would not trigger the system." well this one is immediately concerning even within claimed scope because there ARE going to be false positives that apple records some database. Millions of iphone users are going to have a non-zero "possible childporn" score.
They are building an engine for iphone users to self-incriminate. If they rigidly hold the scope to only what they announced and never expand, it could be argued that this is a reasonable concession to fight CSAM. However, in making the announcement, they boldly stepped past their existing hard line in privacy (local device content is private and not surveilled by apple), so it seems naive to expect that this announcement reflects the eventual scope of this self-incrimination engine for the next decade of apple updates.
I don't think this is right. The apple pdf on the features says
> With the initial match threshold chosen as described above, iCloud Photos servers learn nothing about any of the user's photos unless that user's iCloud Photos account exceeded the match threshold.
This implies to me that they are using some sort of encryption to prevent iCloud from learning even how many matches there are until the threshold is met.
The how helps show us how changing this system is not a subtle change. It isn't like they can flip a switch and suddenly they are identifying new suspected CSAM on people's phones. That would require a new system since the current one is only hash matching.
>However, in making the announcement, they boldly stepped past their existing hard line in privacy (local device content is private and not surveilled by apple), so it seems naive to expect that this announcement reflects the eventual scope of this self-incrimination engine for the next decade of apple updates.
This is an arbitrary line that is being drawn. These are photos that are marked for sending to iCloud. Whether the scanning happens on the phone before they are sent or in the cloud after they sent is largely immaterial when it comes to the impact of the code. People are acting as if the line Apple drew was motivated by technology. That was never the deciding factor. Technology is the easy part here. That line was only a policy line and that policy has not changed. Only photos that are sent to iCloud are scanned. If you fear Apple changing that policy going forward, you should have always feared Apple changing that policy.
This is a strawman. Identifying *novel* CSAM is a very hard problem to do accurately - the reason they can't flip the switch is because they don't have the technical capability. All of the other things people are concerned about are things that apple does have the capability to do.
EDIT to reply since at max thread depth: *novel* image detection was never on the table, I think you missed that word
> This is an arbitrary line that is being drawn.
It seems the vast majority of people in this thread disagree that this line is arbitrary.
EDIT: whether the threshold is "verging on impossible." depends entirely on the effective false positive rate. If apple's claimed 1 in 1 trillion rate is true, it's probably not a concern. However, I find it unlikely that perceptual hashes on portions of images won't have higher false positive rates when subject matter is similar (non-CSAM legal adult porn, or images of children in swimsuits, etc). If that rises to 1 in 1 million for these types of images, that's hundreds of thousands of people being falsely accused.
You just used this as an argument against this system. Why do you fear this if you don't think Apple can even accomplish this technologically?
>It seems the vast majority of people in this thread disagree that this line is arbitrary.
I would argue that people who believe that this decision crossed that line were being naïve to not have always known this was a possibility. I don't think this move brings us any closer to Apple scanning our devices for anti-government memes or whatever the fear is because what was stopping that was always more policy than technology.
Also to go back to your earlier comment, in the time since you posted it has now been revealed that this system needs to trigger 30 times before any action is taken. The odds of 30+ false positives is likely verging on impossible.
I'm a huge Apple fan and a Mac devotee of 30+ years. I love my iPhone. If this thing becomes real, I will go shopping for another phone.
This is absolute insanity. I can't believe they even thought about launching this.
I'm completely disgusted.
Maybe. I wonder how many people are choosing not to respond because they’ll only be voted down by the people who feel very strongly about this. I’ve curtailed and hedged many my contributions to this topic on HN because of this.
This is a common issue when social media is used to debate matters which are highly emotionally asymmetric.
* It was not universally understood that this would only apply to photos sent to iCloud.
Since the scanning doesn't happen on iCloud, this distinction is irrelevant.
"We are going to intrusively scan the subset of your photos that you care enough to back up to the cloud that we've been pushing to you for years" is pretty clear.
* It was not universally understood that this was only looking for previously known CSAM.
It was only looking for whatever is in an opaque database which, according to a third party we don't have any contract with, contains CSAM.
* It was not universally understood that they were using some sort of hash matching so photos you took yourself would not trigger the system.
Yeah right, I feel totally safe knowing that I won't be falsely reported to FBI by a "some sort of" hash matching.
Here's a hash function: f(x) = 0 for all x
It's "some sort of" hash, too.
It’s really not irrelevant. A third party photo library that avoids using the PhotoKit library would not be touched by the CSAM detector. There are many of these on the App Store.
One step further and store the photos encrypted, with a custom renderer that decrypts the content on the heap, and that would take some tremendous performance-hitting detection abilities it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen.
OK.
Misrepresenting each other’s arguments is not how you have a discussion.
I hope that's precise enough, and sure, everyone is welcome to make their own decisions regarding this.
- Whose fault is it that those points were not clearly communicated?
- Who wrote the perceptual hash matching code?
- Who is allowed to audit the code, the review system, and the hash database?
- Who updates this code?
- Who decides if your phone OS is updated?
- Who decides the iCloud upload defaults?
- Who decides if you are reported?
- Who asked for this feature?
To the extent that other parts of this story was explained to us by Apple, I did try to clarify some exaggeration in other thread.
This is ignorance in extreme.
> HN is a tech forum and I still saw plenty of people here worried about how they would get in trouble for having innocent photos of their own children on their phone.
They're confused about this. NeuralHash doesn't look for pictures of naked kids. It looks for pictures that are identical to the ones they've put in their signatures list.
The problem is that Apple claims that the signatures in their list are all pictures of sexually-abused kids, but we have no way of verifying that. Heck, they don't even have any way of verifying that. Everyone just has to take NCMEC's word for it.
The public does not know what the false positive rate is for 'average iphone user pictures'. As engineers we can be certain the false positive rate is not zero. This means that some number of iphone users are going to have non zero "possible child pornographer" scores in the apple database.
The false positive rate is crucial to understanding how concerning this should be. If the average iphone user has 1000 photos, and the false positive rate is the claimed 1 in 1 trillion, there is a 1 in a billion chance that you'll be flagged as a potential child pornographer. (~1 in the world will be falsely accused). This seems reasonable enough with the apple-internal screening step.
If the chunking and perceptual hashing functionally ends up having a much higher false positive rate for images which have similarities to the dataset (parents' pictures of kids playing shirtless, legal adult porn, etc), the false positive rate could actually be more like 1 in 1 million or worse. In which case there are potentially hundreds of thousands of people who will be falsely accused by this system.
How many matches will US judges require before they sign warrants for arrests, search and seizure of digital devices? If they are technically competent it shouldn't only be 1, but I don't trust all judges to understand probability well enough to require multiple matches.
Even that doesn't come without issue. How long before '1' becomes the value, because, say for example the number is ten, there's also a horrendous PR spin of "Apple has a high degree of suspicion that you have CSAM on your device, but since there's only 8 images, they won't do anything about it" - "Apple allows up to X non-reported CSAM images on Apple devices" is hard to represent in any positive fashion.
I yet to understand what happens to people who only have those synthetic positives? Regardless of what counter threshold is, can’t those people be hoovered up by a subpoena of counter >0 ?
That's really really really user-hostile design.
If allowed to go forward, it is only a matter of time before the capability is expanded.
So it's a big no to the scanning capability, you would think that Apple had gotten the message by now.
And the other initiative is also open for abuse, by allowing the device administrator to spy on the user. Admittedly not as bad as the on-device scanning.
EDIT: It has now come out that you need to trigger the system 30 times before Apple acts on it. I can't imagine the odds for someone to have 30 hash collisions.
Apple:
- Isn't going to be remote work friendly.
- Shut down internal polls on compensation.
- Bows to the FBI, CIA, FSB, CCP.
- Treats its customers as criminals.
- Treats its employees as criminals.
- (Spies on both!)
- Doesn't let customers repair their devices or use them as they'd like.
- Closes up (not opens up) the world of computing. Great synergy with the spy dragnet.
Take your time and talent elsewhere. This bloated whale is bad for the world. There are a lot of good jobs out there that pay well and help society.
Of course we might not know of cases that got resolved by internal pressure, because they got resolved, however we do know this was not one of them.
There's a facade that we really work for other reasons, and money is just an inconvenient byproduct. During a job interview, you may be asked "Why do you want to work for us?". And for some reason "So I can afford to buy food" is not a good answer.
But usually not solely for the money. And usually there are lines people aren't willing to cross just for the paycheck.
As opposed to what??? Free apple stickers??
Something I bet wouldn't have happened when Katie Cotton was in charge. But yeah. Tim Cook thought he need new PR direction. And that is what we got. The new Apple PR machine since 2014.
I googled that name and gawker article from 2014 showed up… and I’m speechless…
Industry is learning from omnibus bills
But in this case, of course, if you're an adult, the Messages part of this doesn't apply to you at all, and the photos part can be completely avoided by not using iCloud Photos.