Governments saw it can be done, so there is no reason Apple won’t do it for them.
China&co probably already busy writing laws mandating on-device scanning of all media and messages for anything remotely matching Winnie-The-Pooh.
Apple won’t have a choice when it is a law of land. They can’t quit China.
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.
This is extremely common - i.e. blame the immigrants stealing jobs, blame the muslims for eroding our religious institutions, blame literally anyone but "us". That's because it's so much easier to blame someone else for our own societal problems.
"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...
Also this technology does not develop similar images, the image has to be essentially identical…
Now please idividually hash every word of every message on the phone. Then give us all illegal messages that contain _exact_ hash match with the dangerous word “Tianamen”. Government abuse is impossible though: our team of Apple employees here at iCloud-China will manually review them before passing the list to firing squads. Thanks!
It will likely be a fuzzy match on though crimes. But every citizen will get their budget of 30 or so “security” vouchers, so we can all vent a bit once in a while.
Oh and they will also double check it with “totally independent” blacklist on server before running it by a party person last.
The images in this link [1], are completely different. One is a cat, one is a dog. Same hash produced for both.
It’s mind-numbingly unlikely that 2 images would match 2 unique perceptual hashes and a human review and not be the same image.