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False positives can make your life a living hell by bringing the authorities down on you and then requiring you to prove your innocence to them.

People are routinely arrested over the results of field drug tests despite their high sensitivity and high probability of false positives.

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Why would it bring the authorities onto you? It flags the photos for manual review.

Apple recieves a visual derivative of the image, such as a low-resolution version, for manual review. This makes the human review process tricky. Because there is, understandably, no actual CSAM image to compare the visual derivative with, images that look similar enough (contain nudity or a child in a swimsuit) may get past the human review process.

So your concern is that someone is unlucky enough to a) suffer 30+ neural hash collisions, b) some subset of those are indistinguishable from child pornography due to low resolution (flesh colored bathing suits), c) those images match the multi stage hash, then d) authorities subpoena the full resolution images, which turn out to be innocuous but they decide to harass the user anyway.

I dunno man, I’m not to worried about this chain of events.

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