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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

>Apple's CSAM would scan your offline photos.

Apple's plan was to to scan photos that you uploaded to iCloud, only. Even that plan was canceled.

Google, however, still does scan everything in your account and has been doing so for the past decade.

For instance, this article from 2014:

>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...

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As does Dropbox, Aol, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, etc, etc.

Whether this is good or bad is a topic for fair debate, I think, but it continues to astound me both how little people are aware of this and that, in comparison, Apple's relatively privacy-preserving approach generated so much flak.

Apple iCloud is in that list.

And you still need to scan local photos on the phone?

It's better for a customer to scan images locally, on the phone, prior to upload. By doing this, the device can then encrypt images and store them in the cloud service. In this way the cloud service can be "CSAM sharing free" but never needs the symmetric keys to decrypt private images, period, for any reason.

The only thing this adds to the threat model is mistrust for false positives in scanning engine - but in even the worst case scenario here (forged false positives), you're still ahead of the Google model, where the same forged false positives would be extremely likely to result in a full account review rather than review of specific images. Everything about "the device looking at your photos" is tinfoil hat, because the device is already looking at your photos, they're decrypted in RAM! All of the threat scenarios about "Apple adds a secret government backdoor that downloads your photos and sends them to the FBI" are already equally possible today!

> Apple's plan was to to scan photos that you uploaded to iCloud, only. Even that plan was canceled.

The massive difference being that they would scan photos on my device. Not on the cloud. On my local device. How is that people consider that better?

The important bit is that Google does not currently have any capability to scan stuff on my phone. This is good. It's my stuff. They have no right to look at my stuff.

Apple proposed to implement tech that could scan stuff on my device, with a promise that they'll only do it when I am uploading stuff. Wait a few years, and some pressure from Authorotarian Government/Corporate Overlords and now the promise is just a promise that they can be easily removed and we can scan all stuff to make sure you're not stealing "content"/spreading "propoganda".

Again, nothing except photos you uploaded to iCloud was to be scanned.

Apple's plan was to have your device conduct the scan and encrypt the scan results so not even they could see them until a threshold of ~30 image matches was reached.

This protects the user from false positives.

Once the 30 image threshold was crossed, the plan was to have a human review before turning someone into the authorities.

I think we all know that Google is not ever going to hire expensive human beings to supervise it's algorithms, so a single false positive would likely see you turned in for kiddie porn.

> nothing except photos you uploaded to iCloud was to be scanned.

My point is that the difference between the approach from Google and Apple is that in one case (Google), we have a tech level blockage, it's not currently possible for Google to even do that.

On the other hand (Apple), the "blockage" is policy or "promise". That's far less reliable than the tech just not existing.

> the difference between the approach from Google and Apple is that in one case (Google), we have a tech level blockage

There is nothing stopping Google from inserting code to scan everything on your device. They can stick it into the binary blob of closed source Play Store code, and you would have no way of knowing it is there.

Google still does scan everything in your online account and has been doing so for the last decade.

Apple has backed down from even doing that for iCloud Photos.

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