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Comment by robertoandred | Hacker News Reader

Apple's system doesn't match content.

You can do stuff like listing top K trending anti gov memes past day and blacklisting them. Thats definitely a content.

You cannot, because the models are shipped the OS image. Apple would have to publish a new OS update every day new memes come out.

If you're talking about photo library scanning, people would have to be saving the memes to their photo libraries, cloud syncing would have to be on, and they would have to save lots of them.

If you're talking about using the iMessage content scanning, this only applies to under-13 accounts, and it only notifies parents associated with the account.

If you are suggesting that Apple would be compelled to modify either of these to do something else, why would they bother with these, which are built with many constraints and multiple levels of failsafes, rather than just implement a new feature? Governments could ban end-to-end encrypted chat like iMessage. They could demand the next iOS update uploads your saved social media passwords to them. It's not very plausible that anyone would want to modify _these_ features rather than just implement something more direct and harder to evade.

Governments could make these demands at any point. They do not need to wait for this feature and then spring into action. The Chinese government did regarding where iCloud data is hosted for its citizens. The US government did regarding the San Bernardino iPhone case, and Apple fought back very publicly in court that any kind of modification of the OS was unacceptable.

The image saving is migrated by using apps that autosave received images by default. I.E WhatsApp.

sed -i "s/day/month/" parent

You think Apple will have people downloading an OS update every day?

You think old memes are never reused?

What are you saying? That regular iOS updates will never update the database used for matching?

This sounds the same as claiming that biometric fingerprint devices don't match user's fingerprints, they just match vectors.

It seems apple devices are a black opaque box: support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 Every thing is encrypted except imap email storage. They have no access to anything except that. They can't do anyting with any data except imap emails stored on their server.

The governments want them to do some thing preventing CSAM, so now they can match a perceptual hash--not content--to known images from an non-governmental organization. That is about the minimum invasive CSAM prevention anybody can do.

Can someone suggest an alternative CSAM prevention which is less intrusive?

It seems the alternative would be to continue to be a black opaque box, or NOT encrypt you photos and rumage through them.

They _can_ rummage through your photos. They are encrypted in transit and on the server but with a key that they have access to.

If it's not explicitly listed in the end-to-end encryption section then assume Apple can access it.

From https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 >End-to-end encryption provides the highest level of data security. Your data is protected with a key derived from information unique to your device, combined with your device passcode, which only you know. No one else can access or read this data.

So messages are opaque but photos are not?

Read the next line: "These features and their data are transmitted and stored in iCloud using end-to-end encryption:"

Notice the absence of photos from the list that follows?

> So messages are opaque but photos are not?

Yes. Unless you use iCloud backup, in which case your key is included in the backup and technically even your messages could be accessed.

But it can still locate the originator which is the problem.

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