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It’s not just your house, it’s everyone’s house. Our smartphones and computers are our digital homes. When something is installed in those homes which monitors everyone for potential crimes, that is what I would label as an unreasonable search and a violation of privacy. It doesn’t matter what they’re looking for, our personal devices should be inviolate unless there is a suspicion of crime, and even then a court order should be involved.

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

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

We don’t have to excuse one of the most valuable corp around. They do understand, but are willing to cash-in some of the “privacy budget”.

> our personal devices should be inviolate unless there is a suspicion of crime, and even then a court order should be involved.

Even with a court order, your devices should not cooperate with a search, unless instructed to do so by you, their owner.

The analogy is missing a key part of the system as designed today - putting something on someone else's property. The house analogies are terrible, but closer to what's happening is as follows.

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.

Analogies are always misleading. A cloud provider is no neighbor. They facilitate a specific service, and it is clear that the package is owned by the client. The cloud provider shouldn't have any liability for the data he stores, especially if it's encrypted and not shared to the public, nobody should ever care what's inside the package. If the authorities have a good reason to think that you have drugs or CP in your package, then they can force you to open it.

IMHO, no combination of ones and zeros should ever be illegal. The act of distributing them to others or creating them in the real world should be. The energy stored on a flash drive doesn't harm anybody, human action does.

iCloud servers are not your property, they are Apple’s property. Even the neighbor terminology is accurate since there’s is an implied trust higher than a random stranger.

OP’s analogy is spot on.

It’s really not. A commercial service is not like a residential neighbor.

Apple is asking that people store their shoe boxes in Apple’s “house” in exchange for money.

I don't trust anyone even though I have nothing to hide.

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.

This is already the case with the iPhone. They could theoretically update it with software that does whatever they want at any time.

True, but that's tangential to the issue at hand.

To continue the physical home analogy, let's say you're a renter and your landlord has the ability and access to install something in your home at any time without you knowing. Maybe they include it as part of the terms for your upcoming lease renewal, maybe they don't.

Does that mean you should just accept it when they decide to install one of those devices in your home?

> should you just accept it when they decide to install one of those devices in your home?

The device they installed is invisible and you will never have any way of knowing they were in there, it's irrelevant what you accept.

That's a further problem. That's the reason why you shouldn't accept closed platforms and closed-source software.

But it also doesn't lead to the conclusion that what Apple is trying to do here is good or even neutral.

There is a giant difference,If you are a developer you might understand this better, it is much easier to have an application behavior setup from a config file or from a database then from code. So you have a config that looks like scan_everythin = false; and an update would flip this to true for everyone or for special users. Also with the hashes , the check is not done locally so the government will ask Apple "hey check those hashes you have stored against this secret database too and if you find even 1 match send it to us, here is a judge order so shut up and do it".

So after this the governments around the world job is easy, they throw hashes to Apple(and fortunately for Apple they can say they had no idea what original photos content was) where before the government would have needed to ask Apple to write new software and Apple could have said that it can't do it without starting a shit storem.

Exactly, and given the amount of information Apple knows about you and your device (home country, current location, etc), testing those hashes against different datasets specific to each governmental jurisdiction is trivial.

But in reality it‘s you installing this device by turning on cloud sync. And the law that needs photos to be scanned that are in the cloud. Which is done by all cloud providers. Because the photos are unencrypted. How are we going to change that?

Now change that a little bit. And imagine that you're renting this place. And that's not a police requirement, but home owner requirement who wants to prevent undesirable behaviour to protect everyone (or so he says).

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.

Hashing on device instead of on the server is a policy change too.

That is nothing like this… you’ve just made an argument against having smart phones at all. Not apples improvement to protect the privacy of your photos.

> Not apples improvement to protect the privacy of your photos.

This is quite the twist. What’s decreasing the privacy of my personal photos, before the neuralhash scanner is deployed?

Because the alternative is to scan all the images on the server. With the hash scanner only hash matches are scanned. All the other images are kept private.

Stop being disingenuous. They’re all scanned, regardless of whether it’s on the server or the phone.

Apple specifically said that isn’t the case.

I’m being disingenuous?

Interesting choice of words. What exactly did they improve with this and how?

The ability to avoid decrypting and mining your entire photo library in order to comply with us law. Instead performing a hash match on the device that gives their compliance team a partial key to decrypt only the images in question to confirm it wasn’t a false positive.

Mean while on a google pixel, google will just scan your entire library.

But iCloud is NOT encrypted, specifically because the FBI told them not to.

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

They are encrypted. Apple explained that. The article you referred to was for backups not iPhoto libraries.

Could you source Apple’s explanation, that you read?

It’s pretty common knowledge that most of iCloud (including Photos) is not E2E encrypted; in fact, here’s the proof right from Apple - https://support.apple.com/en-ae/HT202303.

> Mean while on a google pixel, google will just scan your entire library.

Google doesn’t scan anything on Pixel phones. Only photos and files that you upload to Google Photos or Drive. This is standard industry practice, and apparently Apple wasn’t doing that. So now they built this client side system that nobody else has, and created local surveillance.

> This device could be capable of seeing or hearing anything that happens in your entire home

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.