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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is similar to what happens with the War on Terror.

1) It is noted that governments could, in theory, be spying on everything. Widely dismissed as silly.

2) There is a trigger event (eg, 9/11). Inside government, a standard slips. They start spying on everything.

3) Years later it becomes public knowledge. It is too hard to monitor what is going on now though, so it is difficult to tell who specifically should be outraged about what.

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

5) (TBD) It gets turned on political dissidents. I'm expecting everyone will agree on this point in 5 or so years, at the moment that is probably maybe more a partisan observation.

Apple's partnering up will follow the same pattern. There just isn't enough transparency about what closed source software does.

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This is happening with Extinction Rebellion in the UK now. The Home Secretary is using the police to harass groups she disagrees with and changing the law to stop protests she doesn’t like. I think having “infinite surveillance” with someone like this in charge is a terrifying idea.

Ever since Theresa May, I've always thought that the Home Secretary is one of the most dangerous people in the UK - they always want more surveillance and anti-privacy measures, it's never enough for them.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/13/cruel-paran...

>The long read: Cruel, paranoid, failing: inside the Home Office

Some of the why (at least, according to The Guardian).

A good read covering immigration policies over the years - thanks for pointing me at it.

This quote stood out:

“They are terrified of the thought that any concession by them that can be perceived as soft or liberal or sympathetic, might leak out and be another set of Daily Mail or Sun or Telegraph stories,”

There is a really toxic and dangerous relationship between a large segment of the British media (especially the tabloid press), a large segment of the British public, and the government. It very often feels like the likes of the Daily Mail are the tail that wags the dog, and I just can't see how this long-running status quo can ever end.

Interesting. Personally, I feel that the Guardian, its readers, and government and media elites, are the ones in a toxic and dangerous love triangle. Do either of these ideas really mean anything more than "I disagree with the other side"?

I don't simply mean "I disagree with the other" side though.

I mean it feels like there is something very corrupt about the way the British public is kept whipped up into a FUD-driven frenzy by the tabloid press, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) seemingly makes many decisions to pander to that segment, rather than based on what's actually best for the country and all of it's people.

Ah, but you see, it feels like there is something very corrupt about the way that elites live in a self-reinforcing bubble padded out by Left media, and making decisions based on that fantasy, rather than what's actually best for the country and all of its people....

it multiple toxic love triangles varying on the policy/issue in question, department, party in power, and media provider.

I know how: fill The Guardian's pages with many nearly naked women from Love Island. Along with lowest common denominator gossip

Wow, the parallels between that and our Department of Home Affairs here in Australia are striking. I guess it’s not surprising, I think it was modelled on the UK’s Home Office when they put it together six or seven years ago. It has similarly been a disaster, but the people in charge love the power, so it won’t be broken back up into separate departments as it was before…

The US government was spying on everything well before 9/11 [1]. This sort of surveillance has been happening since the dawn of civilization. It's imperative for elites that wish to stay in power.

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

It was more narrowly focused in the Cold War era, though. NSA was very focused on the USSR, which was quite opaque from the outside. "Team A" worried about the USSR, "Team B", everything else. Huge amounts of effort had to be expended to get basic info like "where are their air bases"? One head of the NSA said during that period that they produced about three pieces of actionable intelligence per day, of which maybe one per week was important enough to be brought to the attention of the President. Much info went into NSA, but not much came out. NSA belonged entirely to DoD, which had no domestic role and wasn't interested in anybody who lacked serious military power.

The "trying to find small numbers of people who might do some terrorist act via SIGINT" is post-9/11. That's when surveillance became dangerous. Now, law enforcement has access to far too much take. Worse, there's a huge US anti-terrorist establishment that's orders of magnitude larger than the number of terrorists and doesn't really have enough to do. So they self-generate work.

How are you so certain they didn't have a domestic role?

Didn't McCarthyism rely on or expand domestic spying? And didn't they extend suspicions and charges against far more people than the evidentiary basis would have supported? According to Wikipedia, the FBI's ranks nearly doubled in size to accommodate all the new investigations being pursued.

Yes. That was Hoover and the FBI. The CIA also did some domestic stuff, more during the 1960s than later. NSA, not so much.

There wasn't much wiretapping in the US before the advent of electronic central offices. Phone switches just weren't equipped for it. Somebody had to physically connect wires to listen in. (Yes, you could listen to a few lines remotely using the test gear. Telcos hated that, because it tied up the automatic line insulation test equipment, COs had only 2 to 4 sets of that, each set took up three racks, and each could only do one line at a time.) In Guliani's old book about taking down the New York mob, he writes about the government having to pay phone bills to New York Telephone for wiretap lines. Once they didn't pay the bill, and the billing system billed the party being tapped. That's where the pressure for CALEA and built-in wiretapping began.

> That was Hoover and the FBI. The CIA also did some domestic stuff, more during the 1960s than later. NSA, not so much.

Project MINARET was one of the first times the public was made aware of the NSA. It started in 1962 and it involved the wiretapping of US citizens like Martin Luther King Jr and Senator Frank Church.

Yes, and it's almost expected at this point. But a private corporation doing it voluntarily(apple really doesn't have to implement this, lots of articles on this point) is at least something we can discuss and hopefully vote with our wallets against. Can't do that against a government.

That's the thing, is it really voluntary? I'm not sure if apple has as much leverage as everyone is thinking. The Chinese government certainly forces companies to do this sort of thing, and there is precedent in the US as well with national security letters and warrant canaries. AT&T has basically been an extension of the NSA, with tap rooms built into their centers, and I'm certain all kinds of things have been forced on companies using some sort of leverage behind the scenes.

So who is accountable? Because arguing that "it has always been this way" is not a satisfactory answer,

The powers that be.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-cost...

I agree with this statement in it's entirety. There are some pretty messed up demands going on I've heard.

"Vote with our wallet" is an illusion. Do you really think you can cast a vote by _NOT buying_ an iPhone?

In large companies -like Apple-, there is tracking of conversions (see the ad -> buy the product), churn (a client who stopped coming/buying), interest/reach (who am I targeting with this ad). And that's it. There is no tracking of "people who would have bought an iPhone but chose not to SPECIFICALLY because of the new tracking feature we added. Thinking this kind of metric is relevant and measurable is a complete fantasy, and borderline silly.

Public discussion might influence product decisions. But it have to be hugely controversial to have any effect.

You can't "vote with your wallet". That's it. I have no idea why such belief made it's way into pop culture.

> You can't "vote with your wallet".

If there's anything that will make a business listen, it's money (or lack of it). When it affects the bottom line, they are forced to listen.

Sure, I don't affect them much by myself. But everyone commenting about Apple around my presence will find out why I am not sponsoring them.

There is also the crappy hardware design, not just the privacy issues (which negate the advertising spending they made the months before). Here is what Louis Rossmann, who repairs Apple devices, says: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8

Pretty clearly, forty-plus years of sustained warnings and criticisms[1] of increasing surveillance and security failures have failed to have any substantive influence on the industry.

It's not that the concerns aren't justified. It's that they're far too complex to be communicated and grasped by the public as a whole, and they facilitate far too much by way of immediate profit and market advantage to the vendors who will more than happily ignore the warnings.

A boycott by the vanishingly small fraction of the market which does fully grasp the issue is no threat at all.

________________________________

Notes:

1. See: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193

> Do you really think you can cast a vote by _NOT buying_ an iPhone

Isn't that how any vote works? My ballot is one of several hundred million - statistically meaningless by itself. But it is a vote. And if enough people vote, the millions of statistically meaningless datapoints become meaningful.

And in the end, even if my single wallet-vote is meaningless, I'm no longer affected by what Apple chooses to do with their phones. A successful vote, IMO.

A boycott is an illusion?

To boycott, a large portion of buyers are needed on board. That’s why “vote with your wallet” in loneliness like a “rational agent” doesn’t work. Are you going to vote and convince others to boycott?

I find your argument a bit silly, but why do you think wallet voters would not show up as churn?

You need to correctly assign the churn event to the privacy issue. This is a) very difficult to do and b) not evaluated because churn relates to marketing, not product design.

"Wallet voters" live under the illusion that their intent is known and taken into account by BigCo decision makers. This is NOT the case. They just don't show up in reports. So what do you think they are going to do about it ? Nothing.

If you want to influence product design, you can talk about it online and condemn their choice. If that's big and controversial enough, they might do something about it. And ypu can do that while buying a new iPhone as well because it doesn't matter.

As stated above, if you want to show up in the CHURN. Many “voters” are needed (as in millions), a few guys mad at Apple, stopping from buying a product, are not even a blip. You need to spread awareness, convince others, to join in your crusade.

Of course US forced Apple to do so. Surely NSA have enough levers to force American company to do anything.

US undoubtedly forces Apple to hand over everything and anything they want. It's not fine, but I feel like we have no say over it anyway. Apple announcing publicly that they will scan your photos is something they chose to do, and the law doesn't require them to so this in their implementation of iCloud.

They probably made a deal with the Justice Dept.: We give you surveillance in exchange for not pursuing an anti-trust investigation. That's the only prize that could justify Apple's "voluntary" behavior.

Apple in 2022: it would be a shame if dissents could download apps outside the app store, like Signal, which refuses to implement encryption back-door...

Also see: WhatsApp being end-to-end encrypted, but not encrypting backups to Google Drive / iCloud.

Exactly, and even if it's already occurring in some fashion, that doesn't mean we should sit idly by and allow it to get worse.

And what would you buy instead?

Apple has been up front about what they're doing. They're explaining how what they're doing is specifically designed to protect your privacy in practical terms. No, they probably don't have to be doing this, and I would be happy if they decided not to.

But do you really think that any other phone you buy—apart from something ridiculously niche like a Librem—doesn't have exactly the same problems, only they're still keeping it secret from you?

"Voting with your wallet" only works if there are realistic alternatives.

>But do you really think that any other phone you buy... doesn't have exactly the same problems, only they're still keeping it secret from you?

At the moment, ALL of the other smartphone models (except iPhone soon) don't have this problem. There's no reason to bother with client-side given the current server-side implementations and this scanning can't be hidden for long.

Apple does not spy on your device. They only get information about the data you agree to sending it to them by using their cloud services. It's nothing remotely close to the surveillance we are talking about here.

I think that's a very dishonest take. The scanning takes place on your device before any data is sent to apple. The fact that you were intending to send that data to iCloud is almost irellevant to the entire discussion since apple has clearly built a system for scanning your files on your device, not in the cloud. There's nothing stopping then from using the exact same technology to scan for literally anything on your phone.

It's like if apple added a 360° motorized camera in your home but said "don't worry, it's only pointing at the door!"

Except Apple already turned iCould on without really making a big deal about it, just up the storage while making everything automatic and nobody would have noticed. This outrage just seems silly in that context because iCloud data is already available on request: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...

This is “simply” Apple leveraging people’s phones to run perceptual hashes rather than paying for the servers to do it themselves. Which is why the outrage caught them off guard, from their perspective nothing changed governments have been spying like this since 2011.

And on the bit about it being on your phone (rather than their servers), I think it opens the door to an entirely new phenomenon that either companies or governments want people to begin accepting: you no longer own your phone, but rather, rent it under certain conditions.

Those conditions would undoubtedly be tied to social credit scores, required viewing of ads, required on-demand "checking in" with the government, and direct access to local phone data on demand to catch and prosecute political dissidents sharing critical information and memes.

Example: Australians are now required to install an app that has them taking a photo of themselves and sent to authorities to enforce COVID mandates like staying in one location, even if you're not sick:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...

Semi-related - social credit score system: https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-australian-government-pl...

You never owned an iPhone. You can't read the OS source, you can't install other OS, you can't sideload apps, you can't repair it yourself, you can't buy official spare parts, and you cannot even reuse the parts of your phone.

There is no changes whatsoever in that regard. You never owned your iPhone, and you still don't, no more, no less than before.

You're not wrong!

I think the idea that Apple is just moving rote hash calculations from the server to the phone - and therefore they were “surprised” anyone cared - does a disservice to the smart people at Apple. They’re not dummies and they didn’t think this would be an easy sell.

The question of whether we can and should build client-side scanning has been a huge and controversial issue in our community since at least 2019 — when AG William Barr wrote an open letter to Facebook requesting these features. As a cryptographer who works on E2EE I’ve been reading opinion pieces on this, writing pieces and attending Stanford-hosted workshops since that time. Many people attended those workshops from child safety groups, policy think tanks and other tech firms. Apple was also invited and declined to attend. But to imagine they didn’t realize how controversial these systems would be — that defies belief. They would have to be living in a cave, and the Apple security leaders don’t live in a cave.

The Apple system was clearly designed to enable scanning on E2EE backup files. The fact that iCloud isn’t E2EE right now is amusing, but I think it’s safe to assume that they want to enable that feature but felt they needed this coverage. Apple doesn’t share their reasoning, but it’s fairly obvious they felt some strong pressure — largely instigated by government agencies and members of the Senate - to implement some kind of “voluntary compromise” here. This is the one they chose.

Where they were surprised, I think, is that there was so much broad negative reaction beyond the usual suspects like privacy groups. As you said, server-side scanning is already ubiquitous so what’s the big deal? My suspicion is that “server side scanning of your private files is ubiquitous” is something that is only actually well-known to tech experts. Most of the general public is ignorant about all this, and they only really get a chance to react to any of this technology when something big makes it national news: as Apple did this summer. (Putting it on your phone and making it apply to private backup photos rather than shared albums, as some cloud providers have in the past, also didn’t help.)

Encryption at rest is easy, but E2EE isn’t on the table simply because they don’t trust people to keep secure backups of their own private keys. Thus Apple needs a way in, and if Apple has a way in they are required to let the FBI in.

As to scanning on device, that’s not what is involved in the child porn system as the list it’s being compared to is kept secret. So inherently the system requires an upload of each image for comparison. Further, it also needs to actually upload an image for comparison not just a hash.

I think you are wrong about this. Android has already enabled E2EE backups using their Titan HSMs. While Apple will certainly have some concerns about UX, they already protect user data like passwords E2E. I anticipate an (at very least) opt-in E2E backup system to be available within a year.

Your phone is the camera. It can already read and write everything that's inside because that's how an operating system works.

There is zero breach of privacy unless the result of the scan are sent without your consent. Just like for everything else that's on your phone, scanned or not.

> "The fact that you were intending to send that data to iCloud is almost irellevant to the entire discussion since apple has clearly built a system for scanning your files on your device"

This is a very dishonest take. They already have a system which runs on your device and processes all photos in the photo library, tagging categories like faces and pets and food and so on. They could have added this new system into that one with much less engineering and design effort using a system which scans all your files. They didn't, they went to a lot of extra effort not to. They already have system services e.g. location awareness or device monitoring and diagnostics, they could have built this new system as something like which would run 24/7 and access everything and be a simpler design, and they didn't.

What they did was put it into the iCloud upload feature to be matched by additional code on the iCloud server side. Something which took them more time, more effort, more complexity, and gave the whole thing less power and less flexibility.

If this system is as dreadful as all the complaints say, it should be plenty of ways to show that without having to make stuff up. If describing it accurately isn't scary enough, maybe it's not as scary as y'all want people to think.

You could argue that the public at large "agrees" to total surveillance by:

1. Claiming such things are conspiracy theories, despite an abundance of evidence 2. Not giving a shit, even during the (very brief) period where it was covered (very briefly) in the news 3. Buying into all the thingly-veiled gov and media FUD about terrorism, paedophiles, organised criminals and communists 4. Not protesting en-masse 5. Not voting for a party that runs on privacy and anti-surveillance policies 6. Not starting such a party as in (2), since AFAIK it doesn't even exist...

After 9/11 surveillance had been privatized. (not to say it was not going to happen anyway)

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019...

> (TBD) It gets turned on political dissidents.

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

I think it meant "inactive dissidents" or "potentially one day active". Non-conformants.

As is very, very frequent in history - today, with more instruments.

this is also already happening.

"If you Tweeted about BLM protests last yr, there's a good chance your Tweets were forwarded to the LAPD. Even if you don't live in LA."

https://twitter.com/ShotOn35mm/status/1434203354696019971

https://www.lataco.com/lapd-social-media-surveillance-protes...

Assange is being punished by almost all western countries. Sweden had a big role in it too and so does UK. And Australia is doing absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening to their citizen.

This. It literally happened to me yesterday. The internet was blocked altogether and one Sim card service was allowed after a long time so I did something interesting. I asked a friend in another country to log into an old reddit account, I dictated him the text I wanted to post and he pushed it.

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-...

I’m really sorry to know this. And I’d like to apologise for not being able to convince some of my close friends to not vote the fascists in, in the last national elections.

I see your words, but what are you exactly apologising for?

The upcoming mau Zedong or xi is the cow in charge of India. That is what he/she is apologising for. This person is saying they did not know in 2014 the country would crumble like this,

Eh. You need a billion people to change their opinion. I am in a small minority which gets trampled on.

So this is step 1 then and we’re basically waiting for an event for step 2, because “privacy-preserving” surveillance system is production ready at this point and is going to be deployed in near term.

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

You can either have privacy or surveillance, Apple is trying to sell the idea you can have both which is a false statement.

Since Apple have been pushing privacy as a differentiator with Android, i can see their problem when they also want surveillance.

The answer is simple: Drop all plans for surveillance also known as on-device scanning.

Sadly, “privacy-preserving” surveillance is already a thing. After the Snowden revelations the NSA didn't stop collecting everyone's data, they just refined the legal justification. They claim that it isn't illegal surveillance if they don't look at the data.

So if you become a person of interest they get a warrant and then trawl through your digital life since forever.

So… await elites making a big pedophile catch (perhaps recycling Epstein’s story, which gained a lot of popularity among the youths), and using it as a launchpad for “see, we needed an automatic iPhone search”.

> 3) Years later it becomes public knowledge.

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

Per number 5, even sticking to just the verified stuff it is well known Obama used these powers to spy on Trump’s campaign, and Trump used them to spy on Biden/force Apple to be silent giving up Biden-people’s iCloud data via NSL gags.

Even if it's well-known, and I'm not convinced it is since this is news to me, it won't be forever. Sharing some sources would help a lot both for people now and people finding this post 10, 20, 30 years from now.

It’s going to be hard to avoid bit rot on that scale.

Anyhow, I would guess he’s talking about “unmasking” issue with respect to Trump adjacent figures.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210813094317/https://www.cnn.c...

"...force Apple to be silent giving up Biden-people’s iCloud data via NSL gags."

I terribly misread that as SNL gags.

My brain was awfully (in hindsing - hilariously) confused for a good two minutes... trying to figure out how exactly was Apple sidetracking the imposed silence coalmine-canary-style by creatively leaking some data to Biden's people - via the medium of Saturday Night Live gags.

(My only defense is a self-eyeroll.)

> Inside government, a standard slips. They start spying on everything.

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

To be fair the (5) been professed for decades and is yet to happen. I've been hearing that all my life and my hair is greying.

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.

I've been wondering for decades if privacy advocates are ever going to go back and examine the dystopian proclamations they've been making to see how many actually turned out to be true.

This sort of reminds me of the whole thing with lockdowns

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.

I know there is a case to be made as to whether lockdowns are effective, but as someone who is not trained in epidemiology, it seems like something that you can try that's well-intentioned and within your available set of tools. This would be especially true during the early phases of a pandemic, when you don't necessarily have great models for disease transmission, preventing more precise restrictions.

If the goal is to single out and persecute some specific opposition, this seems like an incredibly clunky and inefficient way to do so. Surely it's easier to tie them up ny having some proxies bury them in court actions or plant some drugs on them, than to throw the entire country into rictus. If nothing else, they're having to personally pay for the economic blowback of declaring a lockdown and all the inevitable egg-on-their-face moments when they themselves break it.

I am really missing something in this whole thing. Everyone is already partnered with gov. Gov have access to all the servers. So that doesn’t explain this outrage, Microsoft, google, Apple will all comply with warrants asking access to cloud stored data.

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?

Because it's my device, it belongs to me and should obey me instead of gigantic corporations or governments. I don't care about some government agenda trying to improve whatever situation. I want my computer out of it. They can go "honestly improve the situation" elsewhere, hopefully as far away from me as possible. And we don't need to provide any other justification either. They're the ones who need damn good reasons and warrants before stepping foot in my property.

Your own device? That ship has sailed long ago, as you decided to buy it and not root/jailbreak it. You never had any power over that device.

A user can have more or less control over their device. There are many shades of gray between "I fully control my device" and "I don't control my device." When a change to the device software, like the introduction of on-device scanning, reduces the level of agency the user has over their data on their device, it's an adverse change that the user is justified to protest.

Why do people like making these comments on HN everyday? Is it some weird feeling of superiority? I’m tired of low-effort shit like this.

How do you distinguish this from any other optional network-based service that does some of the processing client side? If you choose to use a particular client/server based service aren't you telling your device to do the client side processing that service requires, and hence the device is obeying you?

> How do you distinguish this from any other optional network-based service that does some of the processing client side?

The line is drawn at the network layer: the point at which my computer talks to their computer. If I don't like what their client is doing, I can reverse engineer their network communications and make my own client that lies to the server.

Like online video games. The game client ultimately doesn't matter. I can trash it, make my own client and automate the whole game if I want.

Device belongs to you, but software belongs to the Apple. If you want your device to fully belong to you, you need to find a device supporting software which you can control. Otherwise you're at corporation mercy when it comes to privacy and other sensitive topics.

I agree this is effectively how it is today in some countries, but I don't consider this an acceptable stance. Software cannot be exempted from normal rules of physical ownership of sold goods.

You sold me a device, which also means you sold me the software within because the device is useless without it. The software is not separate from the device, it is the device.

Of course, that doesn't mean I can do whatever I see fit with the software; I cannot redistribute it under my own terms. But insofar the actions I take with the software strictly pertain to my own usage of my own device, I should be allowed to do it. And it also means you (the company) shouldn't be able to do with the software installed on my device as you see fit.

> Otherwise you're at corporation mercy when it comes to privacy and other sensitive topics.

Despite HN’s desire, the vast majority of touch points in our daily lives are NOT open source. I’d rather laws be setup to safeguard my privacy versus relying on “FOSS” as if that’s a panacea.

True, so turn off auto updates. Your device.

There is a weird mistrust of Apple here, despite them doing nothing to betray it

Tell me you’re joking. * It’s not your device. * Ok, What does it mean to own something? To hold it? To be able to destroy it? To use the services it provides? Maybe the receipt makes you the owner? If that’s your definition, in a very limited sense, you own it. But you don’t control it, because you can’t understand it fully, because you didn’t design it. In fact no one person designed it, it’s the product of the group, and advanced technological products like the iPhone serve the interests of the group, first. It just so happens in most cases the interests of the group align and benefit the user. After all we are very similar to one another and so this is a mutually beneficial arrangement. You want to buy, they want to sell. You need a service, they want to serve and so on.

With a product like the iPhone you’re purchasing access to an iteration of a design. Delivering that to you in a white shrink wrapped box is a clever marketing illusion. You can’t see the many huge factories full of calibrated robotic pick and place machines or the lithography setup used to create the chips or the lines of workers that assembled the phone one tiny piece at a time. You don’t see the endless cell towers on the horizon and all the engineers that maintain them. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the human labor that forged the design. There’s easily 500 straight years of skilled engineering labor in the modern iPhone. Perhaps even double that.

Here’s my point already. There’s some brain damaged, mentally ill, psychotic people who like to rape children, take photos of it and share it with their friends. Then what happens is those kids go kill themselves. This problem is happening at scale and it’s not in the interests of the group to let it continue. If the group believes it’s interests and your own diverge, you’ll quickly discover who really owns that device. They control the product they designed and manufactured and they can do whatever they want via signed software update, and you can do exactly nothing about it. That’s a fact.

A $1200 iPhone might be the best deal ever offered to a human being in recorded history. But you’re buying a service, leasing a disposable product. You’re a guest. That’s the truth.

It’s a really ugly image I have of the simple type of person who’s having a hard time choosing between email privacy and stopping a child predator.

God when did this world get so screwed up?

I'm buying a phone. I'm not buying a service, an experience, a design or whatever. I'm buying a phone. How is it even possible to twist this?

Buying a phone is really just a fancy way of saying I'm buying a computer. And if this world was just, this computer would not execute a single instruction without my consent. I don't really care what "the group" wants, they're not gonna use my computer for it.

> It’s a really ugly image I have of the simple type of person who’s having a hard time choosing between email privacy and stopping a child predator.

I don't have a hard time choosing between anything. I will choose privacy every single time. If authorities want to stop crime, they can go out there and do real police work. They don't get to surveil everyone on earth just because it would make things easier for them.

If you have such an easy time giving up your privacy and freedoms, then you should be the first to be scanned. Who are you anyway? You're not even posting under your real name, threshold.

You don’t want to be a part of the group and reap the benefits of collaboration and economies of scale? Well then your $1200 isn’t going very far. But you can have a lump of aluminum, a pile of sand and a sheet of glass. And there’s enough left over for a huge pile of books so you can learn how to fab chips, make circuit boards, write your own operating system and build your own phone network. Good luck

This idea that you’re somehow special and exist in a vacuum is privileged and arrogant. You’re relying on other people to do everything for you. They feed you and look after you when you’re sick. And they build these fantastic technologies and work long hard hours and die early just to make it affordable. You got a great deal, the best any living human ever was offered. But the group asks you to run a program you can’t even see so their children don’t get raped and suddenly you’ve been cheated and violated and wronged.

That's a very unreasonable take. Privacy is not reserved for "special" people, it's for everyone. A $1,200 smartphone is generally not considered a "great deal" and definitely not "the best deal ever offered to a human being in recorded history". And users are absolutely justified to oppose on-device surveillance introduced on their smartphone, regardless of whether you consider it a "product" or a "service".

I recommend this piece from Snowden for a different point of view

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i

Imagine you use some OS, say Ubuntu or Windows and the company behind it canonical/Microsoft creates an application that scans your files for illegal shit and reports you to the government. This application is optional you download and install it if you want it.

Who in the right mind would download and install such an application that runs in background , uses your resources and reports you to the police, no advantages for you.

So the equation is clear, the user has nothing to gain, a lot to lose if the system triggers and the user also needs to blindly trust(no way to check the hashes or the binaries) that the system will not be abused.

If you are a person that strongly thinks Apple should handle CSAM then ask them why they did nothing until now? They collaborate with FBI/NSA on other stuff.

> Imagine you use some OS, say Ubuntu or Windows and the company behind it canonical/Microsoft creates an application that scans your files for illegal shit and reports you to the government.

You don't have to imagine it. This has literally been happening for the past decade.

>The system that scans cloud drives for illegal images was created by Microsoft and Dartmouth College and donated to NCMEC. The organization creates signatures of the worst known images of child pornography, approximately 16,000 files at present. These file signatures are given to service providers who then try to match them to user files in order to prevent further distribution of the images themselves, a Microsoft spokesperson told NBC News. (Microsoft implemented image-matching technology in its own services, such as Bing and SkyDrive.)

https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/your-cloud-drive-really-pr...

Google has been scanning everything in your account for the past decade as well.

>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account

https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...

Apple will only scan photos you post to iCloud Photos, and their system is set up in such a way that they cant see the scan results until a threshold of 30 matches is met, to protect you from being flagged to the government for a few false positives. (They do have a human verify there is a real issue, and that you haven't just somehow posted more than 30 false positives to iCloud)

Google and Microsoft's systems have no such protection.

Anyone who can issue a subpoena can maliciously use false positive data against you.

We've seen the data trove companies like Google retain used to imprison innocent people before.

>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

>You don't have to imagine it. This has literally been happening for the past decade.

You either do not understand or trying to avoid the question

Is there a TurnMeToThePolice app for linux or windows ? and who installs it for free ?

For server side makes 100% sense , I use Facebook,Gmail, Dropbox for free so I expect they will scan shit for stuff. For sharing files I am also expect that cloud providers will also scan and respond for copyright violation, makes sense , for stuff you post on Facebook I also expect they scan for porn or other stuff that is against their TOS.

But it would be retarded to install something to scan my local files and report me to the police if I had nothing t6o gain from it , so you have already the iPhone, you paid for it, if Apple wants you to allow them to install this shit you should think, why? what I have to gain? Do I trust Apple and my government, what about the future government and the future Apple? The equation is that you gain nothing and the future is unclear so it is 100% a FACT that is a net negative for the user.

Still nobody found an answer why Apple did not scan iCloud for CSAM? And why are they starting now with this "think different" way of doing it. If you are a think of the children person you should denounce the fact they did nothing so far , if you are a privacy kind of person you should ask why Apple is giving up now on privacy.

> Still nobody found an answer why Apple did not scan iCloud for CSAM?

They do.

Nope.

Apple prefers to keep that sort of data private, and a kiddie porn false positive is not the sort of data that should be vulnerable to misuse by anyone who issues a dragnet warrant.

Google's data hordes are already widely abused today.

>Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all US demands

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/

Another example would be that Google scans all your photos to identify the people in them and retains that data on their servers, while Apple chooses to perform those sorts of actions on your own device without uploading it to their servers.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/09/apples-scanning-...

https://web.archive.org/web/20200119050834/https://www.apple...

Please. This information is out there. It takes 5 minutes to look for it.

It's all fucked up. all of it. Google, Facebook Apple, Microsoft, whatever they are a disease worse than covid

From what I read they only scan images that are attached to emails. So iCloud could be filled with CSAM.

> You either do not understand or trying to avoid the question

I understand perfectly.

Google and Microsoft have been scanning everything in your account for the past decade and turning customers over to the police.

Apple is set to start scanning iCloud Photos and only iCloud Photos in the future.

They waited until they found a way to preserve your privacy until they were reasonably certain there was a real issue with what you were uploading to your online account and not just a false positive.

With their system, Apple cannot see the scan results until your device informs them that you have crossed the threshold of 30 images flagged as kiddie porn and hands over the encryption key for the scan results. They can't turn over scan result data to the feds before that, because they can't read it.

Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, would have to hand over an every account with a single false positive to anyone who issues a dragnet warrant since they carry out their scans on the server.

Apple have the key to read your photos, they probably are even encrypted since you can view them from browsers, so this is fake news. They could have scanned the images on the server at the moment you uploaded them, they could have reported CSAM to the authorities and catch the bad guys.

I want the proof that Apple is unable to scan on the server, that they don't have the keys and the only solution is on device scanning.

Of course Apple can read data you have uploaded to iCloud.

Every cloud service can read the data you upload to it.

How do you think Google and Microsoft are scanning everything in your account?

What Apple cannot do is see the results of a scan that was not conducted on it's servers, since those results are encrypted with a key Apple doesn't have until the threshold of 30 images matching known kiddie porn is reached.

This logic makes no sense

1 Apple can read data you have uploaded to iCloud. 2 What Apple cannot do is see the results of a scan

What makes 2 impossible? if 1 is true then Apple can generate the scan and check the hashes on the server so 2 is possible.

What is the advantage? Apple will also have to push the scanning on device to the laptops too and what do you do with devices that don't get updated? Instead of having a simple solution that works for all images in iCloud you get a privacy-invasive solution that only works for some hardware that runs latest stuff. Seems to me that this implementation is not solving the problem of "Prevent CSAM to be uploaded to iCloud" but solves soem other problem and the CSAM is a cover.

The scan is not conducted on Apple's servers, so they don't have access to the scan results the way Google and Microsoft do when they conduct the same scan on their server.

Apple designed the system that way because it is more private to keep potentially damaging information from being readable on their server, where it can be misused by anyone who can issue a warrant.

They can't decrypt the scan result until the device tells them that 30 images have matched kiddie porn, whereupon the device hands over the decryption key.

The theory is that you are unlikely to have 30 false positives, but the next step is to have a human make sure that's not what happened.

Since Google refuses to hire expensive human beings when a poorly performing algorithm is cheaper, I have no doubt Google is turning in people for as little as a single false positive.

>They can't see the scan result until the device tells them that 30 images have matched kiddie porn

Isn't this FALSE? the devices hashes the images but it does not have the database, so the hashes are sent to the server, and Apple servers compares your hashes with the secret database, so Apple knows how many matches you have.

Your argument would make sense ONLY IF your images would be encrypted and Apple had no way to decrypt them so the only way to compute the has is with the creepy on device code.

The system is designed as if iCloud photos is already E2EE. It's not currently, so Apple could have simply done mass decryption server side and scanned there.

But the way the CSAM system is designed works exactly as described. It's technically pretty cool. Each matching hash builds part of a key. Only when the key is complete (~30 matches) can the matches and only the matches be decrypted for review. This also only works on photos destined for iCloud, and actually makes it harder for LE to show up and say 'here is a warrant to scan all photos for X' since the matching hash db is included in the iOS release.

>The system is designed as if iCloud photos is already E2EE. It's not currently,

and it will never ever be E2E because of the US laws or if it will be ever encrypted it will use the backdoored NSA crypto (and Apple PR not even tried to hint at it to calm down the waters).

I agree the algorithm is prety clever but it feels that is not designed to solve the CSAM problem but to look good on someone CV.

Now you have the worst of both worlds, Apple has access to your photos on the server(and if they would respect the laws they should scan them for CSAM already since they are responsible on what they store and share (I mean when you share stuff)) and Apple has a scanning program inside your phone.

> it feels that is not designed to solve the CSAM problem but to look good on someone CV

It feels like it's designed to protect customers from being accused of having kiddie porn (by prosecutors who issue a dragnet warrant of everyone who had a single positive result)

Dragnet warrants on location data have become very common.

>Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all US demands

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/

The solution to resisting these warrants is to never have access to the scan results, until you are reasonably sure there is a real problem.

By setting a threshold of 30 positive results before you can see any of the scan results, customers are much more protected from the inevitable false positives.

I understand perfectly.

If you did, you would stop mentioning on-cloud as part of your response.

I would just like to point out without diverging or causing too much of a "flame war", that this same line of thinking is the one us Libertarians point to regarding "voluntary" things like taxes. I.e. If you asked people to voluntarily sign up for taxes, "who in their right mind would" do so?

My overall point being: To the government, this is the same. It's a power imbalance and they don't see anything different because they think they have the right. We've opened up that can of worms a long time ago and it's important for us to realize it instead of continuously living in pretend-land where we think we have a "choice" over what government does.

>.e. If you asked people to voluntarily sign up for taxes, "who in their right mind would" do so?

Those who would naturally cooperate in the prisoner dilema, those who believe society is better by having a government instead of going full anarchy, those who think humanity is better off if the strong protects the weak.

So only the tiny subset of people who care about people instead of those who adhere to the "fuck you, I got mine" point of view.

I really didn't want to get into this, I just wanted to point out how we've already "breached" that whole "if you make this optional will people choose it" line. You're now attaching a moral argument about how only the "fuck you, I got mine" people will say no to taxes.

And as a side note: I, as a libertarian/an-cap, would be perfectly fine with paying for all manner of things (with taxes) if I could choose how it was spent to some nominal degree. Here we are in a discussion about government surveillance, which would probably be a non-issue if we all just had the ability to slide that slider next to the "NSA Contribution" heading in our tax-contribution forms.

You gain something from taxes, like police to protect your big pile of money and villa. But from this scanning you gain nothing , Apple could have scan iCloud and caught the evil guys already if they exist so you can't claim that the society benefits from this when it could have implemented exactly like Google does it a few years ago.

The gain is, an Apple user can assume that Apple is not scanning their photo library for csam. Because the only time Apple start scanning is if the device gets 30 positive hash matches.

Where as if they used another service, all their photos will be scanned all the time.

There is a clear privacy gain here

Hashes are generated for all images(I think some thumbnail is also generated ), then sent to Apple that checks each hash vs the secret database, the if(matches>=30) code runs on the server too.

I would say the scan is on the device and the check is on the server to make sure the secret database of hashes does not get leaked. The image is never encrypted and if FBI (or the corresponding national agency)comes with a warrant your iCloud data will be fully readable.

The image is never scanned either, unless you consider generating a hash: scanning.

Given hash comparison is how we treat passwords (an extremely sensitive piece of information). I don’t see how anyone can make a compelling case that: generating a hash is an image in some way compromises the privacy of the owner of the image or contents of the image.

>The image is never scanned either, unless you consider generating a hash: scanning.

You are a really torturing the language and logic,

Example, some malware lists all the files on your system and sends the file names to Disney. Your logic says that is not scanning your devices, it is just listing the file names and your logic implies the scanning happens on Disney server.

You're using the word "scanning" strangely here. Most people would consider the perceptual hash checking of all images to be "scanning".

A hash is a string comparison. No details (privacy) are leaked during that comparison.

When your phone tells you it only has 1Gb of storage left, do you consider that “on device scanning”?

Checking an image against perceptual hashes is a little more than a string comparison, but that's moot. Also, "scanning" does not require anything be leaked for someone to call it that, which is again, almost definitely what the person you replied to meant when they used the word. Your insistence here that the word doesn't fit that situation is peculiar.

Reporting filesystem stats is simply a bad analogy, it's not like checking image contents against perceptual hashes.

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/scanning

2. [Computers] To search (stored data) automatically for specific data.

> no MORE access than any company already has

Yes, Google and Apple are both capable of writing code to scan your device for anything. Only Apple (to our knowledge) has written this code. It's a distinction with meaning.

For the moment, yes, they are only scanning things that will eventually be stored on their servers. It's just another minor policy change to scan things that you are keeping locally.

My hope is that they will delay this until they can announce E2EE for iCloud, which would then at least be give and take on privacy, potentially a net win.

As it stands, this is a net loss.

To put it bluntly, because whataboutisms do not compose a valid argument for accepting a new client-side system with a high potential of abuse.

There is almost 0 potential for abuse… it’s scan workflow ends in a human verifying that it isn’t a false positive.

Not whataboutism, the alternative to apples solution is companies openly scan your entire photo library. That’s what’s happening right now. People are upset because Apple suggested: “how about we only scan when we suspect there is something not right?”

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