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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's weird. Speaking purely personally, whether the scanning happens immediately-before-upload on my phone or immediately-after-upload in the cloud doesn't really make a difference to me. But this is clearly not a universal opinion.

The most-optimistic take on this I can see is that this program could be the prelude to needing to trust less people. If Apple can turn on e2e encryption for photos, using this program as the PR shield from law enforcement to be able to do it, that'd leave us having to only trust the OS vendor.

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> Speaking purely personally, whether the scanning happens immediately-before-upload on my phone or immediately-after-upload in the cloud doesn't really make a difference to me.

What I find interesting is that so many people find it worse to do it on device, because of the risk that they do it to photos you don't intend to upload. This is clearly where Apple got caught off-guard, because to them, on-device = private.

It seems like the issue is really the mixing of on-device and off. People seem to be fine with on-device data that stays on-device, and relatively fine with the idea that Apple gets your content if you upload it to them. But when they analyze the data on-device, and then upload the results to the cloud, that really gets people.

This seems like a necessary discussion to have in preparation for widespread, default end to end encryption.

Is this really surprising to you? I'm not trying to be rude, but this is an enormous distinction. In today's world, smartphones are basically an appendage of your body. They should not work to potentially incriminate its owner.

They should not work to potentially incriminate its owner.

But that ship has long sailed, right?

Every packet that leaves a device potentially incriminates its owner. Every access point and router is a potential capture point.

When I use a web service, I expect my data to be collected by the service, especially if it is free of charge.

A device I own should not be allowed to collect and scan my data without my permission.

A device I own should not be allowed to collect and scan my data without my permission.

It's not scanning; it's creating a cryptographic safety voucher for each photo you upload to iCloud Photos. And unless you reach a threshold of 30 CSAM images, Apple knows nothing about any of your photos.

From the point of view of how image processing works, what is happening can indeed be called “scanning”.

Them adding encrypted hashes to photos you don’t intend to upload is pointless and not much of a threat given the photo themselves are they. They don’t do it, but it doesn’t feel like a huge risk.

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