Child safety advocates disrupt Apple developers conference
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
I'm trying my hardest to not assume this person is an industry plant, but... didn't we all arrive at the consensus that local iCloud scanning is a dangerous political Rubicon to cross?
It doesn't make sense why someone would advocate for this feature without also addressing the security and privacy concerns that (supposedly) made Apple drop it entirely. Their demands are just bringing us back to square-one and repeating the same tautology that failed to prove the feature's worth in the first place.
We did but these people aren't interested in the privacy aspect, just scanning. Our privacy is their enemy. "Not our problem".
> It doesn't make sense why someone would advocate for this
It makes sense when you consider that their motivations may be different from the publicly projected image.
And some "activists", like Ashton Kutcher, are interested in making money out of this, via his startup, Thorn.
EDIT: And, to absolutely nobody's surprise, the CEO of this group is a former VP of Ashton Kutcher's Thorn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-gardner-aba90013/
> Prior to the Heat Initiative, [Lily] worked alongside Sarah as her Chief of Staff at Thorn.
> Prior to the Heat Initiative, Brooke spent the last 9 years as a strategy, programs, and operations executive at Thorn...
Their community manager is the only one with no stated connection to Thorn.
I imagine some people, including these advocates would find my opposing position that no crime can justify mass surveillance nonsensical.
It doesn't make sense to you. Very, very many people don't care about security. Honestly outside of tech it astounds me how unconcerned most people are. But they are concerned about sharing of stuff you or I would also recoil from. They care about that, not security.
(I am just agreeing with your comment)
They are the target for the political ads and talking points that seize on a single point and use it like a cudgel against the opposition. The worst part is so many of those at protests have only a limited understanding of the issue they are protesting against. Perhaps that's how its always been but social media has just made it more glaringly frustrating.
Consider one of the top threads today [1] and the vitriol in the comments almost as if Satya Nadella had personally schemed such a predatory Minesweeper game.
The truth is likely more nuanced, that a disparate part of the Org chart, or even a contractor or partner, was incentivized to build a shit game within their own walled garden, and nobody else at Microsoft are aware or care to look at it.
This nuance is important because if you actually want to fix the problem you often need to understand its origin and deconstruct it - likely by setting better organizational guidelines and re-evaluating the incentives that encouraged it in the first place.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40647278
Yes the vitriol is deserved, but if your goal is to actually-fix-the-problem you need to deconstruct how the bad thing occurred
I admit to doing it myself in the past (in real life, not Reddit).
I have tried to move past it but still find myself falling into that trap.
I have lately tried to approach issues from an assumption that both sides are probably right, they are just focused on different aspects of the same issue. Similar to the elephant and blind men analogy. In our case though the blind men are very aggressive.
I'd give a political example but don't want to deal with the downvotes :)
You're being far too nice.
Monocultures. Facile arguments. Stupid people.
Hey, if you want the government accessing your phone, then you should pack up and go to china.
Some of the our supposedly smartest youth at our Ivy leagues are acting in this manner. I think its the same reason people join cults. Lack of friends, the need to belong, an general emptiness inside. Political movements prey on these people.
Overall though, I do think you are right, once they join these groups they want to keep their friends and sense of belonging so they are willing to discard any critical thinking or common sense.
I think its sad overall.
So many people cut off their family members based on political identity in the last 8 years.
You're free to do that. But cutting off people who aren't "in" your group is one of the signs of a cult.
Scientology is even OVERT about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disconnection_(Scientology)
Really what seems to be happening to me is the gradual extreme politicization of individuals which over time erodes relationships. An example is an Uncle going from a general “respect everyone” position to advocating in favour of certain groups losing voting rights. Then his family members who may be part of those groups no longer wanting to spend time with him.
This is very different from cults, and narcissistic abuse as well, which tends to rely heavily on intentionality (eg a boyfriend isolating you from all your friends so it’s easier to manipulate you). That intentionality is missing when it comes to families breaking apart due to drifting beliefs. Again if we assume their beliefs are the only reason and it’s not stacked on top of others.
So abandon a person who is being manipulated?
> isolating you from all your friends so it’s easier to manipulate
Someone is being isolated so they can be manipulated?
Thats an interesting paradox that you have created to excuse a set of behaviors on one side and blame shift on the other.
'The Heat Initiative' has been linked to political dark money: https://theintercept.com/2023/10/01/apple-encryption-iphone-...
This group is an industry plant. Check out the prior work experience of the majority of Heat Initiative's leadership team:
This was already thoroughly discussed, and the consensus was that privacy needed to prevail. You can either have privacy, or you can open the doors to invasive content-scanning. If you let them scan for one illegal thing, that opens the doors for them to scan for anything they want.
Examples of how this could slope down:
* Oh, you took 30 seconds of video at the Taylor Swift show? Since we let governments scan your private data, we're now compelled to forward your PII to the RIAA.
* You have Metallica mp3s from 2001? Since we let governments scan your private data, we're now compelled to forward your PII to their lawyers.
* EXIF data shows were driving on private property? Since we let governments scan your private data, we're now compelled to forward your PII to the township.
Which is exactly what this protest is for, all the “think of the children” is a charade to fight encryption. The protest was organized by Heat Initiative, which is a group funded by private billionaire money, with unknown agenda.
More info here: https://theintercept.com/2023/10/01/apple-encryption-iphone-...
They make it pretty clear. Check the prior roles of the leadership team:
The entire "Apple won't protect children" narrative pivots around Apple's decision to back away from their earlier misguided plan to monitor iCloud accounts for CSAM and alert the authorities to offenders.
Privacy advocates correctly pointed out that if Apple can scan your iCloud account for CSAM on behalf of the government, Apple can scan your iCloud account for anything on behalf of the government. Given Apple's privacy-centered marketing, the entire plan was dead-in-the-water from a customer trust perspective.
But a small subset of mostly right-wing reactionaries have decided that this is another moral failure of big tech, and are demanding that Apple "stand up to pedophiles" by tearing down user privacy.
It's a complete non-issue, because people who deal in CSAM are generally never going to store their contraband on cloud services, and even if they are careless enough to do so, iCloud isn't really the service to use if you intend to distribute this material.
At the end of the day, people are demanding that their own right to privacy be torn down just so that we can expose a small subset of harmful people that were never meaningfully enabled or empowered by Apple in the commission of their crimes. And the loudest voices here are coming from a deep bias against "big tech", where they paradoxically demand that these companies be held accountable, not by restricting them, but by demanding that they exert authority against their user base...
In this case, maybe not. The wiki page for the money one layer deeper:
>The Hopewell Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization managed by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting company that advises left-leaning donors and nonprofits about where to give money and serves as the hub of a politically liberal "dark money" network in the United States
Oak Foundation seems to be similar and has a history of funding this kind of anti-privacy group.
If you look at the photo of the protestors in the article or research the groups stated to be involved, it seems pretty unlikely that these individuals are "right-wing". There is a contingent in support of this that is likely more conservative by way of being law enforcement aligned, but there are also other segments in support of these measures that have very different motivations.
I am not one of these people FWIW—I think opaque on-device scanning is a clear and unacceptable invasion of personal privacy.
In the United States at least, the MAGA right tends to be rather obsessed with pedophilia and child sex abuse, and use it as a cudgel to attack any politician, business, or group of people they don't like.
They call Joe Biden a pedophile, and use photoshopped images to suggest that he has a penchant for touching children. It's not true, and his dishonest accusers are the ones photoshopping children into implied sexual situations, but the lie persists because it is useful
They call Transgender people pedophiles and "groomers", and suggest that they should be forced from public life and treated like criminals, being denied any job that might put them in contact with a child. There is no evidence that queer people are any more likely than the general public to engage in child sex abuse, but the lie persists because it is useful.
They even managed to stir themselves into a frenzy with the claim that a pizza restaurant in D.C. that was popular with members of the Obama administration was actually a front for a child sex trafficking ring masterminded by Hillary Clinton. There's absolutely zero evidence for any of that, but the lie persists because it is useful.
While there are definitely people that fall for this propaganda that aren't right-wing, right-wingers make the perfect useful idiot for this kind of cause.
The people at the top of the chain. The people who made those professional looking signs. The people who run the OSEAC. They are predominately right-wing, and have political goals that are far divorced from any notion of "protecting children".
As a general rule of thumb, in America, if there is any group of people trying to convince you to give up your rights and freedoms because children are in danger, if you follow the breadcrumbs, you'll find Republicans in charge.
On a side note, for an or that wants to fight back against the exploitation of children, the Heat Initiative having a website covered with AI-generated images of children is horrible optics, given how Generative AI has become a focus on CSAM creation.