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Comment by 734129837261 | Hacker News Reader

What's worse than child pornography in, say, Saudi Arabia? Atheism is. They can force Apple to tag accounts that have images that are popular in atheist circles (memes, information, etc.) and track these people down. The penalty for that in Saudi Arabia is death.

China can start finding Uyghurs based on the images they tend to share. If we're unlucky (as a world), they can even start searching for particular individuals.

"Save the children" is just the classic political ploy to get a ruling through that's just a precursor for evil things to come.

I'm absolutely disgusted by Apple.

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I don't see how this is any different from what Apple could already have been forced to do. If the argument is that they're going to knuckle under to an abusive request involving this system, then they'd presumably have done so under the prior status quo which was no more secure.

They already were storing the photos unencrypted (or with keys available, at least) on their servers, so any government that was able to push them to add a hash to this scanning system could have gotten them to scan for something in iCloud.

China, in particular, could definitely already be doing that, since China made Apple host all iCloud data for Chinese users on servers inside China that're operated by a Chinese company. See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

It’s worse because it blurs what was a previously clear line. If the photos weren’t in iCloud, they couldn’t be scanned. In this new implementation Apple will only scan photos destined for iCloud, but they now have the capability to scan photos on your device and all that’s holding them back is corporate policy.

Apple already did scan photos on your device, though. They do a massive pass of ML classification over all photos on a pseudo-regular basis (I assume "whenever a new OS release includes a new ML classifier build") -- it's what makes things like searching for "cat" in Apple Photos work.

If Apple's willing to change the new system to do a full scan of all photos on-device and send notifications to them outside of the upload-to-iCloud-with-security-tickets mechanism, they could just as easily have done that with the old system.

> they now have the capability

What do you mean by capability here?

That iOS will have a mechanism for checking for banned content and phoning home about it when found. As the comment above you mentioned all photos do get scanned for classification but as far as I know this was strictly on device, it didn’t report what was in your photos to Apple.

But it’s not that different from “checking for changed content, then sending it home” (basic iCloud functionality). They already had that “capability” and the “capability” to update the OS/program code that runs on our phone to include changes. Hence, the “capability” already existed in a real way.

I fully understand the difference, but I’m just saying it’s not like Apple had to build a massively different system to support this.

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