Delays aren’t good enough – Apple must abandon its surveillance plans

Apple is a company reliant on public tax payer dollars, and should be regulated as such.

Apple are not doing this for anything other than Political reasons. They see the writing on the wall, governments want this level and are either explicitly asking Apple in secret or implicitly encouraging it with their rhetoric.

You already do. It’s called taxation.

how do you define "spies"? As that could apply to pretty much any phone (smart phone or not, the cellular provider (and almost certainly the government)) tracks everywhere you go, modern TV's, cars, and many modern appliances have some degree of spying built in.

Unless you’ve figured out how to eliminate the pervasive use of common client SDKs from popular mobile apps, or forgo mobile apps altogether, this is hyperbole.

Watch a MITM while running Android or iOS, you’ll discover a wide array of apps using a ‘usual suspects’ set of client SDKs, all checking in frequently.

Go read the docs for those SDKs. Turns out they’re offering any number of user analytic, registration, or management conveniences. Easy to see why devs include them like boilerplate.

Look closer, you’ll find them doing cross app and cross device linking and behavior aggregation, and “sharing with our partners”. Tracing further, the partners are adtech. Look more broadly, you’ll find these used as sources by firms commercially offering user screening, fraud prevention, credit approval, etc. to enterprises that are making increasingly automated decisions about who qualifies and who doesn’t.

We aren’t talking about this*, and that’s weird.

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* Footnote: We talked about it when weather apps were using some offending location SDKs, Apple got more aggressive on surfacing ongoing user location tracking. We talk about it when one firm such as Facebook does it across their own properties. We don’t talk about it when everyone from indie devs to mega banks are doing it by using these client SDKs and libs, either on purpose or inadvertently.

The outrage was: Apple were spying ON the device. But then they explained, they were hash matching so they didn’t need to give unfettered access to your cloud data.

The device doesn’t notify police, it has protections from false positives and is no MORE access than any company already has.

This seems like outrage with no substance behind it. Gmail scans your mail, Facebook your messages (on and off device). Why is Apple suddenly terrible for doing something that seems to honestly improve the situation not make it worse?

Just a minor update away from a ML-powered thought crime prevention as step 3.

I had kept that reddit account dormant for over 7 months for this very purpose because I remember somehwere about reddit 90 days history policy or something. This is the level of threat I am looking at. I was willing to dictate PNG base54 character by character so that the other person could reconsititute it but they reopened internet the next day but this is the level of threat facing a casual internet user

https://m.thewire.in/article/media/internet-shutdown-blocks-...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

This is not TBD. All the people who exposed this and similar coverups (Snowden, Assange, Manning) are being prosecuted by the USA.

The worst hit democracy has taken was not from sinister NSA bureaucrats but from kooks calling themselves citizen journalists, real estate developers, one-book activists and Crossfit trainers.

1) It is noted that governments could, in theory, be requiring and enforcing lockdowns not because they're scientifically better for public health. Widely dismissed as silly and "anti-science".

2) Some scientists come out in opposition of lockdowns, evidence from other countries shows that lockdowns don't help, both get banned/censored or painted as lunacy.

3) Years later, it becomes public knowledge that lockdowns did not in fact help, and countries that had zero lockdown policy did just the same as those that did. It is also too hard to know what went through exactly and to hold people accountable, technically everyone was complicit.

4) The situation persists because it is convenient to the people in charge.

5) It gets turned turned on political dissidents. If a government wants to get rid of your noise, they can paint you as an endangerment to public health and suggest to the public to "cancel" you by banning or by being painted as a "conspiracy theorist".

Australia is following this plan almost to the letter at the moment. People getting arrested for not wearing a mask while they're with their daughters and government officials "advising" the public not to talk to their neighbors and to avoid interacting with them socially, even in public, and even if wearing a mask.

People are still treating this like "oh we don't know what's going on" or "it's still dangerous" while in a few decade or so, the way we're headed (if nothing changes) seems to be a form of soft-occupation by CCP ideology. It'll be too late to change anything, and then people wonder how can the Australian government pass a bill that allows police to add, delete, and modify your data during an investigation.

There is no slippage. Wholesale surveillance has always been the aspirational standard.

And Edward Snowden is still exiled in Russia for fear of retaliation (and considered a traitor by some).

What apple doesn’t understand is that scanning on the device is worse for privacy than scanning on the server, not better.

If Apple was serious about privacy maybe they'd put some of their lobbying / peer pressure efforts towards that instead of trendy social fads at least this once.

That would be a better analogy. You don't own your iPhone at all. You own few dozens of grams of steel, glass and silicone. You don't even own parts of it, they're sealed, DRMed and non-functional without proprietary firmware. And of course you hardly own the entire device, as you can't control software which runs on it.

Don't pretend that you own a house.

This device is your smartphone. It can already watch and listen everything you do. It can already read and write everything that's inside because that's how an operating system works. The fact that it can now scan for CP makes zero difference privacy wise.

If you don't trust your smartphone to do what they advertise, you don't use one.

If you believe Apple can make the iPhone send data to them or the governments without your consent and without even telling you, you shouldn't use Apple software in the first place because you'd have no reason to believe that such a feature hasn't already been implemented.

Your device scanning its content is not a breach of privacy until that information is send without your consent. Wether it is for malware or for child porn. Claiming that this is a slippery slope is like claiming that building a bridge is a slippery slope as the worker could place a bomb inside anytime.

I'm your neighbor and I want you to store a box for me. It's tapped up so you don't really want to open it, but would you store it for me without knowing what's in it? You could be like other cloud providers, rip the tape off and rummage through looking for whatever.

Apple has designed a method for me to scan the box at my house only for CSAM (agreed upon by the intersection of multiple databases), then hand it to you with a note that says 'this is not CSAM'. Now you can store the box with some confidence in knowing you're not storing CSAM. It's also more private because you don't need to go rummaging through my box - even though you currently can if you want.

Of course we're starting from the basis that you have decided you don't want to store any CSAM. If you don't care about what you store it doesn't matter.

And you're right that Apple could make a policy change to scan my whole house and upload that somewhere, but guess what? iOS users (smart phone users in general) have always been one policy change away from Apple/Google doing something like uploading/sharing all the face ML data (which IMO is way more valuable than some hash matches). So nothing has really changed.

None. All the main ones scan your entire library of content you upload.

Apple’s solution is the most privacy conscious by far.

Hmm maybe that's their game. You don't need to scan, just need to see who deleted all their photo's over the last few days. A higher than random hit rate I'd guess.

No. You can't trust proprietary software. Even if it's not doing anything bad now, that could change tomorrow.

All this Apple polish is a mirage that distracts us from the truly important stuff. Real computing is built on top of open software. Software that works for us instead of them. In the end that's the only thing we can actually put some trust in.

You're getting pretty far into "affirming the consequent" territory here.

And to specifically answer the question of what they can do. When the police come with a warrant because they have good reason to suspect some customer X is storing and/or transmitting child porn, then transmit a covert over the air update to that customer's device and that customer's device only, scanning photos on-device before they get encrypted for iCloud backup. Don't push the surveillance update to every single customer on the planet before they're under any suspicion and this suspicion has been certified by a judge just in case.

How long do you expect that policy to realistically hold when some three-letter-agency comes knocking?

Note that Apple doesn't do end-to-end encryption, there's little evidence they are even thinking about it, and there are other issues that would stand in their way if they had tried to. Under the current system, we get client-side scanning and server-side scanning whenever Apple feels like it. Right now, there's no privacy benefit other than the made-up one some Apple fans invented from thin air.

>So they came up with a system that they felt was a good compromise between privacy and trying to stop the spread of CSAM.

It's a terrible 'compromise'. In return for a bad precedent, they get a system that catches way less cases than the typical server-based ones. Unless Apple expands the system further to catch these cases too, in which point one should ask how much privacy is really kept.

I've never seen a single person ask this question in good faith. It never stops. Every single day we have a new crisis involving children and the solution is surveillance, more government control, less freedom, whatever.

Nothing but emotional manipulation. None of this will ever stop crime. None of this will ever undo the suffering already inflicted. All of this is mainly justified by the debatable notion that demand for CSAM causes child molestation, the actual crime authorities should be trying to prevent. Instead of doing that they use children in order to establish the surveillance tools needed for government oppression. Using children as a political weapon should be considered child abuse as well.

Also this technology does not develop similar images, the image has to be essentially identical…

"We know there are a number of solutions that would ensure illegal activity online can be addressed, without weakening encryption and still allowing lawful access to information needed in serious criminal investigations. Solutions include: using certain types of encryption that allow proactive tools to function, implementing proactive detection tools at transmission, rather than on receipt, moving AI and proactive technical tools to the device level."[1]

The main problem with client-side scanning is that to have any effectiveness it requires a situation where "Trusted Computing" becomes a legal requirement for sale and use of computing or communications devices, where only registered operating systems can be installed and software can only be installed from registered application stores. And in terms of the Internet, registered operating systems would have to only permit access to registered web services, and registered web services would find themselves quickly unregistered if they allowed end users to execute their own scripts within a browser session. It'd require the end of "General Purpose Computing"[2] e.g. along the lines of regulations such as [3].

Criminals are being pushed increasingly down the Phantom Secure [4] path (developing their own technology that doesn't implement backdoors, client-side scanning, etc), and in response, public policy is increasingly seeking to outlaw[5] "General Purpose Computing" and the current decentralised model of communications. It'll take a long time, but perhaps over the course of the next 20 years we'll see the end of "General Purpose Computing"?

[1] https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/tech-trends-and-challeng...

[2] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139679

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Secure

[5] https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/tech-trends-and-challeng...

I can't understand why so many people see a US company try to spy on US citizens and say China must be at fault.

1) You're missing something.

2) Everyone else is missing something. That includes organizations like the EFF.

In terms of missing nuance: What Facebook is doing absolutely and completely different from what Apple is doing. You should take time to understand why Apple's approach is so utterly repulsive, while I'm 100% in support of Facebook's.

There are distinctions other than your "ONLY distinctions." You should take time to understand what those are, and why they're important. As a hint, those have to do with where users might or might not have expectations of privacy, with due process, and with who owns what.

Apple is stuck between rock and a hard place. They don't want to be like Google or MS, but their solution is worse from public's perspective. Optics aren't looking so great at this point, because they are also dragging Google and MS through the mud by effectively saying, "Well, they've been doing it too!"

It's useful to remember that organisations are made of people with individual aspirations. Some would really want to have listening devices implemented to everyone so that they can do their jobs better(usually the intelligence people, the police etc), others will want it for less "Acceptable" reasons but at the end of the day the people who can allow or disallow it will have their careers determined by the general population in a very public manner.

Forcing citizens to perform work would be reserved for something that's part of a punishment for a crime conviction, such as prison labor. This would be "design, implement, test, release a brand new system to tell us which users have this image on their phone."

There's some academic debate over whether the "all writs act" can compel work/action/speech, but that would be the only avenue I'm aware of, and it's on pretty shaky ground for something like this.

If the system doesn't exist, Apple could fight an all writs act type request. If the system does exist, they probably can't really effectively fight a FISA order/subpoena to add some hashes in.

If they had never invented it, they might have been able to tell China "its not technically feasible" and potentially convince Chinese leadership that its even true. But at this point that game is up and China could definitely compel Apple to finalize and release this.

https://www.justsecurity.org/29634/readers-guide-magistrate-...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/feds-used-1789-l...

https://thefederalist.com/2016/02/19/cut-the-crap-apple-and-...

I'm still sticking to iphone due to it since it was not going to be implemented where I live anyway, but switching back to google would not be a good option. I'm currently looking at the pro 1x[1] phone though.

[1] https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x

And yes, both are bad, let's have none of that.

Apple: We scan your phone

Since when is iCloud end to end encrypted? In fact, it’s explicitly not encrypted, at the request of the FBI.

source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Yes, they scan stuff in the cloud (we all know this) as does Microsoft OneDrive / Outlook, Facebook, Dropbox, etc. but none of them dared to add code on your device to look at your private data.

You know what you get when you use Google accounts.

> Apple are doing this because they have a child porn problem.

They're also under relentless pressure. From governments, who demand backdoors and full access. From hackers, who are pwning the entire stack.

Like the EFF, I oppose the image scanning.

But I'd like someone, anyone propose what Apple (Google, Facebook, ...) is supposed to do?

My hunch is that Apple is trying to thread the needle. Do the absolute bare minimum, to fend off the inevitable governmental policy overreaches. Find some technical solution to mollify all the would be tyrants.

If Apple's attempts to find a balance don't work, the default position is backdoors, not Matrix-style end-to-end full encryption.

I'm not saying EFF should stfu.

EFF and others should be savvy enough to see the meta game and advocate their own policy (platform) accordingly.

Edit: u/dhx makes similar points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28412861

The main sticking point (as you know) isn’t what it looks like now, but how small a leap is required before the privacy is stripped away and all that’s left is oversight.

And outlaw phones won't likely be allowed on local phone networks. :P