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Comment by almostdigital | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that's true, although to do some sort of mass scanning stealthily they would need a system exactly like what they built with this, if they tried to upload everything for scanning the data use would be enormous and give it away.

I guess it comes down to that I don't trust an OS vendor that ships an A.I. based snitch program that they promise will be dormant.

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Speaking cynically, I think that them having announced this program like they did makes it less likely that they have any sort of nefarious plans for it. There's a lot of attention being paid to it now, and it's on everyone's radar going forwards. If they actually wanted to be sneaky, we wouldn't have known about this for ages.

They'd have to be transparent about it as someone would easily figure it out.You have no way of verifying the contents of that hash database. once the infrastructure is in place (i.e. on your phone) it's a lot easier to expand on it. People have short memories and are easily desensitized, after a year or two of this, everyone will forget and we'll be in uproar about it expanding to include this or that...

You're making the mistake of anthropomorphizing a corporation. Past a certain size, corporations start behaving less like people and more like computers, or maybe profit-maximizing sociopaths. The intent doesn't matter, because 5 or 10 years down the line, it'll likely be a totally different set of people making the decision. If you want to predict a corporation's behavior, you need to look at the constants (or at least, slower-changing things), like incentives, legal/technical limitations, and internal culture/structure of decision-making (e.g. How much agency do individual humans have?).

I feel that I was stating the incentives, though.

This being an area people are paying attention to makes it less likely they'll do unpopular things involving it, from a pure "we like good PR and profits" standpoint. They might sneak these things in elsewhere, but this specific on-device-scanning program has been shown to be a risk even at its current anodyne level.

No they wouldn’t need a system like this. They already escrow all your iCloud Backups, and doing the scanning server side allows you to avoid any scrutiny through code or network monitoring.

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