Does anyone know Apple's internal motives and why they enables CSAM in the first place? They must have known the consequences, PR and otherwise.
> why they enables CSAM in the first place?
Apple's privacy measures, such as not scanning your Cloud photos, is what helps enable CSAM.
Sexual abusers very often take photos and often upload these to their communities, and Apple has given them a secure device with which to do that. This is becoming increasingly widespread — the number of reported CSAM material grew by more than 50% last year, to nearly 70 million images and videos [1].
Due to Apple's privacy, the numbers look like this: Facebook reported over 50 million combined images and videos, Google reported 3.5 million, Dropbox, Microsoft, Snap, and Twitter over 100,000 images and videos. Apple reported only 3,000 photos in the same period, and no videos. [1]
Sexual abuse is experienced at some point in childhood by around 1 in 9 girls, and 1 in 53 boys. 93% of perpetrators are known to the victim. In 2016, CPS substantiated or found strong evidence to indicate sexual abuse of 57,329 children [2]. That's CPS, meaning in the US alone.
> They must have known the consequences, PR and otherwise.
The PR consequences of that have gone largely unnoticed, interestingly, and it's more so their attempts to curb it that are getting flak from the media.
I suspect this is because we can't create statistics on what we can't detect. There can be no "Apple is enabling, and allowing to continue, the sexual abuse of 50,000 children a year."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/us/online-child-sexual-ab... [2] https://www.rainn.org/statistics/children-and-teens
Secondly, I don’t believe those statistics at all. You’re telling me 11% of girls have been sexually abused? That’s preposterous. There’s gotta be some selection bias or misreporting.
The numbers are correct and it's shocking and heart-wrenching; here's a linked study [1], but there are many.
I went to college in Boston, where the Boston Globe broke a scandal that around 150 Catholic priests in Boston were accused of sexual abuse, with more than 500 victims [2] [3].
It was immensely tough to grasp and accept that in a small city like Boston, that many priests were sexually abusing children.
[1] http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/9248.pdf [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/21/boston-globe-a... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Archdiocese_of_Boston...
None of the stories I've heard about would remotely have been helped by this tech.
Every woman I know has a story to tell. Nearly all of them would make you weep.
We could do so much better, but then people like yourself just straight up don’t believe it.
this is what baffles me.
I'm sure a good number of iphone customers have their photos automatically uploaded to icloud.
For all intents and purposes, the end result is the same for most people. Apple is scanning your photos, and doing so on your phone feels much more intrusive.
For what it's worth, Apple has nothing to gain with this much of a privacy stir, especially when they're accomplishing the same level of detection that other companies accomplish with the simple cloud scanning.
While it's possible that something nefarious is going on with Apple and the U.S. government, it's more likely that Apple got really 'big-brained' about this, had a lot of talks of "we want to retain privacy" and the iCloud team pushing against scanning, and so they ended up with this as a "more private" solution.
Then in 2020, there was the EARN IT Act proposal, which nearly passed and would have required scanning for CSAM on pretty much every online platform that wanted Section 230 immunity.
Apple puts two and two together, realizes Congress is concerned about CSAM's spread and isn't interested in changing, and still wants E2EE on iCloud. OK, put the scanning client-side, then the way is paved for E2EE iCloud because the FBI's biggest argument against E2EE is neutralized, and so is Congress' argument for EARN IT (which would basically have banned E2EE).
Companies try to do stupid things and end up with egg on their face all the time.
They'll backtrack from this and people will forget it ever happened in a few months.
I am unconvinced they've lost it. There is a lot of noise right now, but how much of that is coming from people who already hated Apple?
Out in the real world, even people who've heard something about this largely don't care. It's a tempest in a teapot -- granted, a little larger than usual, but it's easy to fall into the fallacy that everyone else should care the way HN does about something. And this topic seems to be pretty divisive, almost political in nature.
Kinda reminds of GOT and the biggest mistake of the "good guys", they left the dead dragon in the ice which then later burned down the wall and accomplished the "impossible".
FB might use this to crush Apple in the future.
Remember, Google was so nice and held in so high esteem that even valid criticism could be downvoted mercilessly.
Today you can run a karma farm on criticizing Google here on HN.
Google had mountains of goodwill, but with smart people, dedication and hard work one can burn true it like they did.
I'm afraid Apple can manage this too...
The second market is bigger and less discerning. Its a purely economic decision: come and bring your kids to our nice safe child-proof walled garden.
There is also the parallel requirement in places like China and Russia to police what people have on their phones. This move clearly differentiates Apple from other Western tech companies and maybe protects them from bans in big and fast growing markets.
Remember those NSO iOS security revelations from a few weeks back? It might be quite possible that the government(s, specifically the US) are handling some information over in exchange for this. It would make sense for Apple to reach out to the government and get information about some of the vulnerabilities in exchange for brownie points, because this CSAM system is totally controllable by Apple while unknown security issues aren't.
Now whether Apple designed this only with CSAM and actually ignored/forgot its possible issues.. that's another question.