Yes. Completely wrong. Not even close.
Why don’t you just go and read about it instead of guessing? Seriously, the point of my comment was that discussion with people who are just guessing is worthless.
I’m not making people guess. I explained directly what I wanted people to know very, very plainly.
You are replying now as if the discussion we are having is whether it’s a good system or not. That is not the discussion we are having.
This is the point I was making:
> instead of reading about how it actually worked, huge amounts of people just guessed incorrectly about how it worked and the conversation was dominated by uninformed outrage about things that weren’t happening.
The discussion is about the ignorance, not about the system itself. If you knew how it worked and disagreed with it, then I would completely support that. I’m not 100% convinced myself! But you don’t know how it works, you just assumed – and you got it very wrong. So did a lot of other people. And collectively, that drowned out any discussion of how it actually worked, because you were all mad about something imaginary.
You are perfectly capable of reading how it worked. You do not need me to waste a lot of time re-writing Apple’s materials on a complex system in this small text box on Hacker News so you can then post a one sentence shallow dismissal. There is no value in doing that at all, it just places an asymmetric burden on me to continue the conversation.
> Yes. Completely wrong. Not even close.
Per Apple:
Instead of scanning images in the cloud, the system performs on-device
matching using a database of known CSAM image hashes
known hashes would be stored on devices
and images would be scanned against that.
the system performs on-device
matching using a database of known hashes
Well, okay then.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250905063000/https://www.apple...
That said, I think this is mostly immaterial to the problem? As the comment you’re responding to says, the main problem they have with the system is mission creep, that governments will expand the system to cover more types of photos, etc. since the software is already present to scan through people’s photos on device. Which could happen regardless of how fancy the matching algorithm was.