A wake-up call for iPhone users – it's time to go | Hacker News Reader

A wake-up call for iPhone users – it's time to go

fsf.org

34 pointspabs327 comments

People have nothing to hide. People love inertia and convenience. People don't believe in privacy, they care about status and virtue signaling. People are consumers first, everything else is second or third. There is no "alternative". Less privacy is better than no privacy, right? Right. People love Apple. I repeat. Love. So to summarize: In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. Just watch Apple breaking another iPhone sells record.

Reminds me of Intel Management Engine (IME) [1] in “ring -3”, except that, unlike IME, the ones in iPhone cannot be “turned off” in the BIOS.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

I'm strongly considering not upgrading to iOS 15 because of this on-device photo library scanning stuff.

Apple tracks upgrade rates internally and externally - hopefully they'd see the message loud and clear.

Meanwhile, iOS 14 will still receive security updates for another couple years.

Go where, FSF?

To Software Candyland, where Richard Stallman will supervise everything instead of naaaaasty bad Apple people.

I think Richard Stallman advocates for the exact opposite of what you seem to imply. He favors open source for everything, and not using any closed source. How is that him "supervising everything?"

You're missing the point. Folks are advocating not having Apple policing the app store and allowing other app stores, instead, which will be magically better-policed somehow, which is of course total bullshit. Thus my comment. FSF wants to get rid of what works for consumers, and gives consumers very tangible security and convenience benefits, and then replace it with...nothing. Nothing at all. And then just fantasize away all the benefits like they were not there. That's bullshit.

Android with F-Droid and all the Google crap turned off isn't bad at all.

That may be, but with regard to every single issue that FSF is griping about here, it's unquestionably worse than Apple.

Every single issue… are you certain about that?

To my knowledge Android doesn’t censor the Taiwanese flag emoji at the request of the Chinese communist party, if the locale is mainland China.

But maybe you consider that a pro and not a con.

I wouldn’t be so confident Google won’t kowtow to the CCP just because they haven’t done this specific thing

Well just try using google in China for one thing.

I really don't get the outragefilter here - Apple (take 'em or leave 'em) lays out for the public a system for checking uploaded content for illicit material that everyone else is already checking for and just didn't tell you. And somehow the disclosure is reason to get pissy?

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying the only alternative is to love the largest corp that's ever existed because that's a dumb-ass false dichotomy. I just don't understand the vitriol expressed in certain quarters over this issue when you know that the rest of FAANG, and smaller players, are doing no less and never even bothered to figure out how to do so with even an iota of respect for their users. Hell y'know google's using your photo backups to sell you advertising at least, training models in the mid, and at worst going to comb through everything you ever brought within their arms reach the moment local law enforcement makes them. If they're not doing so already.

I really don't get how mildly or not technically educated people cannot comprehend the massive difference between scanning on servers (company property) and scanning on user device (user property). And the next level of madness - scanning with third party non-auditable (due to sensitivity of the material) parameters. I think we collectively are having "frozen mind" moment. Just move along, nothing is happening here. Even worst, comparing the most powerful company with full spy devices ecosystem and mass adoption with GNU and Free software. Apple is worst than every totalitarian government because Apple is the gateway for policing and monitoring. And they don't care. You will comply because they are looking at the numbers and they know that you are have sick minds. Just look at the timeline of events. Public reaction over Pegasus/NSO - Apple mumbles some technical shit, no real response. Weeks after this Apple announces CSAM scanning, cryptography specialist and organizations explode with reaction - Apple sends Federighi to WSJ. After more than 20 days they announce that some states will adopt digital ID as a convenient way to policing. The biggest corporation on the world is becoming a reliable governments partner and people "have nothing to hide". At this point in time I say: You will get what you deserve people.

Perhaps on a stock image, but that can easily be remedied.

Librem 5?

"In the coming weeks, users will be allowing Apple to comb through a portable computer containing private messages, photos, videos, banking information, and business records; all without anyone being able to verify what it is looking for, or with whom it is sharing that information."

Does anyone know if security researchers will be able to figure out this kind of information? Are the hashes known, for example? So would non-CSAM hashes be detectable? Seems like people could, in principle, load various non-illegal images and video onto an iPhone and see what, if anything, is reported - the phone must send some information at some point so traffic analysis should reveal it.

I hope i got it right: they scan private content, which users try to upload to an Apple/Amazon cloud server? The scan job is done by the iphone instead of the server, maybe because it's "smart", resource-saving or because it happens before the upload. First thought in the private law domain would be: entities controlling access to their ressources (serverspace) is nothing new or special. People uploading images and videos, which they want to be private, to "clouds", which are sold as private, but are unhappily not private, maybe because digital culture is faster than law, deserve a wake-up-call and new laws.

Not only this, but google and amazon both already scan the stuff you upload to their clouds for the same thing, they just do it on their server.

The theory I've heard for Apple doing it on device instead of the server is that its cheaper for them and in theory could be more private.

A huge essay by the FSF and no alternatives for the concerned users.

Alarmism just makes people even more scared to take the first step to move to any alternatives. When they realise nothing is lost, they will just stay.

And make Android a monopoly? How would that be better?

Linux distros for phones - PinePhone, Librem, or even hackable Android phones like Pixel 3a - exist and depending on your usecase are... mature enough to use as a daily driver.

As long as you avoid platform lock-in apps anyway. Again, very dependant on your usecase.

Yeah, they're really not. Not for average people.

And I 100% guarantee you that if a Linux-based phone did become popular, it would have every major privacy issue Android does now—including, in many cases, Google getting access to stuff, because most people will want their Gmail, Google Photos, etc to be accessible through the phone.

I know people think this decision of Apple's is somehow way worse than anything anyone else in the industry is doing, but...how, exactly? When it's literally the same thing the other players in the industry are doing, just in a way that attempts to preserve user privacy in a technologically meaningful (if ideologically impure) way...

It's a US company which complies with US laws.

Ok, I need to ask this question:

HOW is this scanning different than what antivirus has been doing since like forever?

If you can't tell the difference between malware and your personal photos, I can't help you.

That is not the issue. AV scans files, you might be able to actually configure what kind, but the matching is done based on whatever the AV company decides is worth matching.

No one in their right mind thinks this scanning has not been abused by others.

But now that (you know) images are being scanned the world's ablaze.

It is still silly, proof me wrong.

If you can't answer a question without handwaving, I probably don't believe you even understand it.

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