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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

Apple is manually reviewing every case to ensure it’s CSAM. You do have to trust them on that.

But if your problem is with NCMEC, you’ve got a problem with Facebook and Google who are already doing this too. And you can’t go to jail for possessing adult pornography. So even if you assume adult porn images are in the database, and Apple’s reviewers decide to forward them to NCMEC, you would still not be able to be prosecuted, at least in the US. Ditto for pictures of Winnie the Pooh. But for the rest of what you describe, simulated child pornography is already legally dicey as far as I know, so you can’t really blame Apple or NCMEC for that.

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Facebook I completely approve of. You are trafficking data at that point if you are posting it. I just recall the days of Usenet and Napster when I would just download at random and sometimes the evil would mislabel things to cause trauma. I do not download things at random any more but when I was that age it would have been far more appropriate to notify my parents then it would be to notify the government.

In any case it is likely the government would try to negotiate a plea to get you into some predator database to help fill the law enforcement coffers even if they have no lawful case to take it to court once they have your name in their hands.

> Ditto for pictures of Winnie the Pooh.

References to Winnie the Pooh in these discussions are about China, where images of Winnie are deemed to be coded political messages and are censored.

The concern is that Apple are building a system that is ostensibly about CSAM, and that some countries such as China will then leverage their power to force Apple to include whatever political imagery in the database as well. Giving the government there the ability to home in on who is passing around those kinds of images in quantity.

If that seems a long way indeed from CSAM, consider something more likely to fit under that heading by local government standards. There's a country today, you may have heard of, one the USA is busy evacuating its personnel from to leave the population to an awful fate, where "female teenagers in a secret school not wearing a burqa" may be deemed by the new authorities to be sexually titillating, inappropriate and illegal, and if they find out who is sharing those images, punishments are much worse than mere prison. Sadly there are a plethora of countries that are very controlling of females of all ages.

Drawings are prosecutable in many countries including Canada, the UK, and Australia. Also, iCloud sync is enabled by default when you set up your device, whereas the Facebook app at least is sandboxed and you have to choose to upload your photos.

> You do have to trust them on that.

If this system didn't exist, nobody would have to trust Apple.

> you would still not be able to be prosecuted

But I wouldn't want to deal with a frivolous lawsuit, or have a record in the social media of being brought CSA charges.

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