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Comment by sparker72678 | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to be a privacy purist on this, but the fact is that there is not going to be any going back on CSAM content scanning of images in iCloud.

So either we take this approach, or end up with a worse one, like pure on-cloud scanning with no transparency whatsoever.

I read the technical paper today, and this solution is super clever, well considered, and checks just about every box a crypto-solution-phile would want. I don't know how it gets better than this. (Technical note: Apple's solution on this requires client and server communication to flag an image, which is part of the reason it's totally off if you turn off iCloud Photo).

If this opens the door to Apple offering E2EE on all photos in iCloud (which it could), then this ends up being a big win over the status quo, in my opinion. And even if not, there are far, far worse alternatives.

[Edited for spelling].

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So either we take this approach, or end up with a worse one, like pure on-cloud scanning with no transparency whatsoever.

With cloud computing, I can choose my cloud provider and I can upload encrypted files. On device scanning is evil because it's move to create a computing architecture entirely outside the user's control.

This is disabled if you choose to not use iCloud.

For now.

Yes, the key thing is that today you have both Apple and Google (Android and Chrome) selling products where the hardware, the operating system, the local applications and cloud application are melded together (with MS getting closer to this).

As a practical matter, personal control is easiest and perhaps only possible on local machines where you load software you control. Apple and Microsoft have up to now felt somewhat constrained to sort-of maintain the formal situation that the user can run what they want locally and that the system/OS doesn't just make decisions for the user by fiat. But this particular action seems to imply a general "we'll change anything in the system according to our agenda" position, which understandably has many people upset (of course people should use Linux but that's a different step).

> Apple's solution on this requires client and server communication to flag an image

Well of course it does, would be a very pointless surveillance system if it scanned for stuff and then threw away the result.

I've also read the technical papers and all other info put out by Apple so far and my takeaway is that the system is generic, it's not designed specifically for images but can be used with any old fingerprint and arbitrary data can be uploaded in the "security vouchers".

It does not take much imagination to see how it could be used to mass-surveil E2EE communications, hook it into Siri's intent system, add a bunch of banned intents and throw the message into the voucher. If a threshold of bad intents is reached a reviewer will check your messages to verify that you actually had some bad intent before dispatching a patrol to your location.

Sure, you're totally right.

But right now all that data is available to Apple.

If they wanted to they could just generate a set of keys, replicate one of your iCloud devices, and send all your iMessages to a 3rd party, etc.

If CSAM scanning is coming, show me a better solution. I don't think there's a world ahead of us that doesn't include it for all platform-hosted photos.

I reject the premise that CSAM scanning is a solution to anything, especially if the goal is to E2EE encrypt the rest of the photos.

My understanding from following this debacle is that law-enforcement don't have resources to investigate everyone who just have CSAM they focus on people who match and have other photos of novel abuse they can track down, and here they will only get an account name and a list of 30 CSAM photos the user had.

All this system will do is drive up Apples numbers on a "total child abuse found" scoreboard and do very little to help any actual children in need.

I agree it’s not a real solution to a crime problem.

Still seems to be the direction the political winds are blowing.

Accepting this stuff allowing yourself to blown by these evil winds, don't do that.

Part of the reason for these voluntary scans is because the state would have a difficult time implementing universal spyware on its own and it needs Apple for this. This stuff is by no means certain and how "we" helps determine whether it happens. Also, the state has secretly spied and attempted to legitimatize universal spying but we've had push back on many occasions. We should keep that up.

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