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Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

Let's not forget what the alternative is: this is about images that are uploaded on icloud anyway. The alternative is to upload the image in clear (or with ane encryption key that apple controls), and let apple run the CSAM filter on their servers.

Apple now has the ability to encrypt the images before sending them to icloud, with a private key you own. Except that some percentage of images that match the CSAM fingerprint with their neural feature extractor will be sent to a CSAM filter on the server side (whose workings we don't have many details about)

This whole thing backfired on Apple entirely due to psychological effects, not because they are really doing anything more "panopticon" that they would already able to do now on their icloud storage (after all people are ready sending their photos to apple)

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They already have the decryption keys for iCloud. Undoubtedly they've already been running a similar CSAM filter server-side for ages. The only thing doing this stuff client side has done is reduce privacy and erode trust.

> Undoubtedly they've already been running a similar CSAM filter server-side for ages

Apparently they have not - They say facebook reported something like 20m images in a year, and Apple reported 250.

I don't see how the privacy is any more eroded than it already was?

Eroded trust, sure, but that is mostly because they did a terrible job communicating it.

Theres not even a need to do that, upload the encrypted image and its neuralhash.

What should they do if the neuralhash matches CSAM? Should they trust that the nerualhash actually matches real CSAM and you will should be reported to the police? That's clearly wrong, since there are going to be false positives, by design.

The whole point for this is to be a probabilistic filter, so that they need to run the real CSAM scanner on a subset of files.

You can fall into two camps:

a) apple should never ever scan my private images I upload on their cloud. b) apple can scan the images once they reach their servers.

If you pick (a), then clearly neuralhash shouldn't exist and you can argue against that on the ground that you want utter privacy. But you have to be consistent:every other cloud service that does scan the images server side should receive the same critique.

If you pick (b), then you must recognize that this additional machinery doesn't increase their reach to your private data, but quite the opposite, it allows them to implement e2e encryption for 99.9% of your content. You may argue that it's unnecessary and confusing and spooky and be afraid of the slippery slope precendent for other uses.

But if Apple really cares about children why they did not done this scans in iCloud like all the others? Did not care as much as Google or Facebook? Seems to me like Apple does not care at all and seems more like a dev with big ego wanted to add neural hashes to his CV but if you can explain how Apple cared for children all this years but only now are doing something I really want to see the explanation

Because Apple is the one company that actively tries not to know anything about you.

FB and Google will exhaustively analyse every single facet of your online presence and use your pictures to train their ML models for face detection and object detection.

Apple, on the other hand, even explicitly splits Map directions to segments so that they can't know where you left from and where you are going to.

Apple was sending unencrypted on the network what application you started, if they would "actively tries not to know anything about you" they could have implemented this better.

Anyway how is your assumption make sense , Apple cares about children and about your privacy so scanning your images in iCloud was wrong until 2021 when something changed, what changed? does Apple cares more about children starting from now or they care less about privacy? or are they forced to do it?

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