Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by n8cpdx | Hacker News Reader

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Your apartment complex decides they don’t want to be party to anything illegal. Just in case, they set up a police precinct in the lobby. They set up hidden cameras in every room of your apartment, and if their AI model detects anything suspicious, they send the video to the detective. Because you aren’t doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about, right?

What’s crazy about this?

Another way of expressing the concern: does your iPhone work for you, with the help of Apple’s services, or does your iPhone work for Apple? Working for me means not having software designed to report me to the police for how I use my device. The hash database for now includes CSAM hashes; there’s no reason it couldn’t be extended to include similarly heinous material, like Winnie the Pooh memes, Hong Kong freedom posters, rainbow flags, hormone therapy instructions, or anything else offensive to the regime.

People that are comfortable with their device working for a company with the assistance of the user choose Android.

The apartment analogy doesn't quite work, as the scanning only happened with photos that were going to be uploaded to iCloud.

It wasn't like constantly monitoring your private residence, more like setting up a breathalyzer checkpoint on the way to the freeway.

Closer to scanning your vehicle for meth on the way to the freeway. Rather fraught analog either way perhaps.

Fixed:

Your apartment complex decides they don’t want to be party to anything illegal. Just in case, they set up a police precinct in the lobby. They set up hidden cameras in the lobby, the hallway leading to your apartment, and the balcony of your apartment. "All public spaces of course" the crowd consents. And if their AI model detects anything suspicious, they send the video to the detective. Because you aren’t doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about, right?

Isn’t this literally done in most office buildings in the US and probably a lot of apartment buildings already? There are CCTV cameras everywhere in the US (and other countries).

You’ve just described every photo upload service in America, although my understanding was Apple would use a list of hashes of known bad content, not an “AI” as google does.

Everyone scans for CSAM. I am not conjecturing on the ethics of scanning photos here, I am suggesting that moving from server- to client-side scanning had no effect on any of the things you are ranting about. Hence why I do not understand the outrage.

> Working for me means not having software designed to report me to the police for how I use my device.

Let me fix it: “how I use iCloud Photos, a hosted service on Apple’s servers”.

These analogies are wrong.

You agree _in your rental contract_ not to dump explosives in the apartment complex trash compactor, and that the apartment complex has the right to process your trash.

The apartment complex stops looking inside everyone's bags that land in the compactor (a bit late to prevent it from getting into the trash), instead sniffing bags as you put them into the trash chute on your floor, and tagging the bag with a red sticker if it the chemical composition matches a particular pre-registered explosive from a list.

At the other end of the chute, a counter checks if you've dumped a dozen bags with red stickers, and if so, a human may open one to see WTF you're up to. If you're indeed dumping explosives in bulk, they let the bomb squad know.

EITHER WAY, that bag would be headed to the compactor, you are affirmatively putting it there, and any explosives are a breach of agreement. In no other case besides you opening the chute to dump a bag is it sniffing anything else anywhere, except when you open the chute to send these bags to the compactor, bags you decide the contents of.

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