Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM

Because it isn't about CSAM, IMO. You see this with plenty of social issues, notably firearms ownership. The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc)

The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.

The CSAM issue is both very real and abused by politicians. When I did some work with a police agency, it was explained to me that there’s a pattern of escalation with people and they tend to accumulate collections and many escalate to actual behavior.

The detectives assigned to this work tend to not last long, and the horrific nature of the crime affects them.

Like all rape, it’s a combo of control and dopamine. The church and Boy Scout leaders leveraged their societial influence and power to compel compliance and even loyalty from their victims. Boy Scouts as an organization inserted itself into existing power structures like church, police and other institutions. It’s difficult for a 11 year old victim to make an accusation about a beloved community figure. They also tend to find ways to make their victims feel complicit. Even if people come forward, they are hard cases to try and exposes young victims to public shame. Many of these people plea to lesser crimes to protect the victim.

I wasn’t a victim thank god, but a Boy Scout leader at my parish was a serial molester who abused dozens or hundreds of children. I learned about it years later and realized that some of my friends were almost certainly victims — in his case everyone in authority just blew it off

CSAM is the perfect trojan horse to undermine privacy everywhere. No politician and no company can oppose it on the grounds of protecting privacy before having the reputation ruined.

Meanwhile the real pedos are rich people vacationing in well known places.

To play devil's advocate: child abuse is usually a crime without direct evidence. CSAM is child abuse but the perpetrator films their crime as evidence. Everyone else who obtains and keeps this material also holds evidence against themselves as the possession of it is the crime.

Now for real: People often do not care a lot about child abuse. It does not affect them as it happens in private where they do not see it. CSAM however does affect them as it makes the abuse visible and shows something deemed reprehensible. In a lot of ways people see themselves being witness (even indirect by purely hearing about it) to CSAM as the victim rather than the children who are harmed in the making and by redistribution.

My cynical opinion is that it is a lot more about social norms and feelings arising from the violation of these norms rather than the harm done through the violation of children.

> I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.

You might want to look up if that's actually true. It might be. It might also be a lie to hide the real reason why they are registered.

In Sweden we're going to literally have Minority Report style pre-crime registries for potential child molesters. We already have one for potential domestic abusers. Fuck this country. I need to get out of here before it gets worse.

The lowest of the low hanging political points scoring fruit will be picked.

I make this point on HN each time it comes up: Dealing with actual CSA requires actual people going to investigate actual reports of children's living conditions out in the real world, not "scanning digital files". Seems obvious when you say it like that, but the alternative seems to still score heavily on the political scale. Ironically, spending more money on "scanning digital files" takes away from resources that could prevent those digital files from being created in the first place, so all the additional time, money, and effort towards combatting CSAM is time, money, and effort specifically _not_ working against stopping CSA. It's categorically _not_ protecting the children.

Teachers, in Australia at least, have mandatory reporting where any kind of abuse is suspected. The heart-breaking irony is that the resources to investigate the reports are so scarce that they can only respond to reports where the child's life is in immediate danger.

Caveat: the above was true a few years ago, I genuinely don't know if it's still true. What I do know is that 'social work' isn't suddenly a high paying job, so I doubt resource availability has changed much.

There is no easy answer to this. It's entirely nuance.

CSA doesn't neatly fit into a narrative.

If there's a person committing abuse against a child, usually a family member in their own household, there's no story there. They (hopefully) get arrested, get a minor mention in the media if that, and life moves on.

If, on the other hand, they send CSAM using a platform, device or protocol, then clearly the makers of that technology failed to uphold their sacred duty to protect the child. If most CSAM cases happen using a few major technologies (and they will, because societies tend to standardize on what technologies they use for communication), the technologies get blamed for the problem they supposedly enable.

If you dislike the technology for other reasons (the distrust of corporations from left-leaning politicians, censorship allegations on the right, a moral panic about the impact of smartphones on children's mental health), you can use people's misunderstanding of statistics to exaggerate the CSAM problem, blame the tech, and gain some notion of control over it in a way that is politically palatable to citizens.

It's worth saying explicitly that centralization doesn't have much to do with this. We've seen similar stories play out with bicycles, Walkmans, pagers, AI, heavy metal and Uber rapes. They were different moral panics, but the mechanic was roughly the same. I think the situation wouldn't change much if we all used PGP-encrypted email over personal mail servers to communicate.

An exception that proves the rule is the moral panic over CSA in primarily-catholic countries, notably relating to abuse committed by catholic priests, which are statistically no more likely to commit it than anybody else. As the influence of the Church on government policy is a hotly-debated topic in those countries, CSA is suddenly an issue that people can use to further their political causes.

I think it's similar with other liability issues, e.g., when a company happens to "lose" customer data through a breach. They will be on the hook for not having certain audits and certifications at regular intervals. Practically never will anyone be feeling any pain due to absolute disregard for basic common sense precautions to prevent issues in the first place. So usually, the pattern is that issues that can be outsourced to insurance will be handled by compliance departments - which don't care about the actual problems, just that the fallout from them is "managed" accordingly.

My thought is that many different stakeholders have reasons to focus on CSAM:

- Prosecutors want to go after it because it is much easier to prove than CSA.

- Authoritarians want to go after it because it gives them a chance to get things like ID checks accepted by the public.

- People who genuinely want to prevent CSA focus on it because a large amount of CSAM is made by serial abusers - so capturing producers can prevent future abuse. Additionally, they believe (with good reasons) that CSAM consumption is a gateway to CSA and CSAM production for many people. Further, finding CSAM can be a way to identify and rescue children from abusive situations.

- CSA survivors may advocate for it often feel traumatized not just by the abuse, but by the fact that people might be continuously viewing that abuse.

- Going after it winds up creating digital forensics specialists and task forces, which creates a special interest group within police departments which wants to continue focusing on CSAM but is not set up to do anything about CSA.

I would recommend the podcast Hunting Warhead to anyone interested in learning more about this.

    > yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA

    > On the CSA side, ... [t]here doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens.

This is a mighty wide brush you are painting with. When I was growing up, from very early (elementary school), we had "health class" where the teacher would teach you things about your body and health. This also included who is allowed to see you naked and/or touch your private parts. They also explained how to get help if someone what touching you inappropriately. That effort seems pretty active to me.

    > I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.

Urinating in public late at night is an interesting category of inprobably CSA-labeled behaviour. It should be treated with kid gloves -- the context matters.

CSAM laws in many jurisdictions include computer generated or hand crafted media that do not pre-require CSA at all. The idea is that deviance leads to CSA, and by cracking down on CSAM, we are preventing CSA.

> On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM).

Because it is nearly always someone we know. Someone who we just cannot imagine would ever do such a thing, even when the evidence is glaringly obvious. And I suspect that the fraction of the population diddling kids in real life is breathtaking, and nobody really wants to face that head on. Too uncomfortable.

I could just be overly cynical today. But given my own experiences and other people I've known throughout my life, I really believe it is very common.

> There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens.

Before abstinence and birth control, CSA prevention should be the primary goal of sex ed in schools, especially before high school. (Though on birth control [1] and probably STIs as well the US is not doing well.)

[1] https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/sex-education...

>if that gets extended to

If you provide the government a platform to do So, they'll do Y if you wait long enough

One is far easier to prove. If the government could continuously monitor our actions "Is this CSA?" they might very well be pushing for that, too.

I'd like to know the link between availability of csam and CSA. There seems to be an assumption that the former causes the latter.

That's not to say it's acceptable if illegally produced.

We have issues in the UK. So far they've banned 'rape' porn. And now they're talking about 'barely legal'

None of this seems to be based on any statistics showing this is actually harmful in any way.

> yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA.

for the UK, there has been a massive shift to prevent this kind of stuff.

anyone who even volunteers with children or vulnerable adults needs to be screened. Charities are required to have policies for dealing with vulnerable people safely.

but to the point, Apple halfarse CSAM reporting.

Whatsapp which doesn't do "CSAM scanning" reports in one hour more CSAM than apple does in a year. From memory meta (instgram, facebook and whatsapp) reported millions of cases of CSAM for 2021, compared to apple's ~250 (not thousand, just 250)

for facebook its automated scanning, but for whatsapp, its just design. its really obvious how to report a message/image. in imessage, its impossible, there is no mechanism to long press/select/other a message.

Now, Facebook are bastards in virtually every way, but for whatsapp at least, they have made GUI changes that have real positive impact on CSAM protection.

Apple has not.

They made some noise about hashing, but thats invasive and ironically noisier than having user reports.

> This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures.

Peripheral to your comment, there is an argument against AI generated CSAM that no one seems to be making so allow me. AI will do the same for CSAM as it has already done for copyright laundering. That is, it will enable its distributors to train their models on real CSAM while obscuring the training material. A legal regime that permits unrestricted distribution of AI generated CSAM incentivizes actual abuse as a source of training material. If one opposes legal prohibitions on free speech grounds, then at a minimum there should be an audit requirement incumbent on AI generated CSAM distributors to document their process in sufficient detail as to establish that they haven't used actual CSAM for training, similarly to the way porn distributors are required to document that their models are of legal age.

Theory besides what others have said: remove the supply and you affect the demand. That's the theory anyway, I'm not sure it works like that; to make a parallel, punishing drug users didn't affect dealers/supply networks.

I don't know how to say this and not sound like a CSAM or CSA offender but CSAM policing sounds too much thought policing to me, if you wanna police CSA just go and do it, don't police what people have in their mind.

It is not about CSAM, it's about scanning our data. If it were about kids safety there would be lots of people in jail

>yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA.

>that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA

So there are, or there aren't arrests?

Also you hear about CSA arrests all the damn time. If anything it's underplayed in the media somewhat when they're a specific people.

It’s nothing to do with CSAM and all about surveilling who has which files and when, and who they send them to.

Even ADP in iCloud sends the hashes of the plaintext to Apple, non-e2ee. This allows them to see who has unique files, and when, and the networks of users to which they spread, and when.

These laws are a pretext to remove anonymity on the internet and insert backdoors into everything.

First, I think it’s likely that you hear more about one than the other because you read websites like Hacker News and are not (I assume) an FBI agent or someone else who works on this stuff. A public defender I know would say that child abuse of all sorts is ever-present and relevant to their work, unfortunately.

Second, detecting CSAM leads to its producers who are by definition abusers. Here’s a nice article in Wired about the digital forensics of cracking down on a CSAM ring with some interesting details about the role played by crypto, and abusers’ misconceptions about it: https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...

With that said, I agree that a lot of political concern for this is a smokescreen for a creating more surveillance. “think of the children!” has the flavor of a rhetorical trump card.

The problem is, the things that would actually prevent CSA require things like "giving children rights", "widely mandating effective age-appropriate sex education even for young children", and "admitting that it's mostly not scary strangers doing it."

These are utterly anathema to huge chunks of society, especially American society. It's more and more clear, from the scope of the Epstein Files, just how much of American society and government has been influenced specifically to enable easy access to children by rich white men. Even beyond that, the entire right wing would instantly catch fire if we actually required effective sex education. Especially age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten (yes, kindergarten: the better children that age understand what's normal and safe, the better they can communicate when someone is doing things to them that are not that...and I only stop at kindergarten because AFAIK that's the earliest mandated schooling still). Similarly, the right wing desperately wants to have absolute control over their children—treat them as property—so giving children rights that even parents have to respect will get them to oppose absolutely everything.

Plus, as other sibling comments have already noted, the real desire here is for ubiquitous surveillance. CSAM is just the excuse they use.

It's not about children. It was never about children. How many politicians have gotten caught in Epstein's island by now?

It's all about surveilling the masses and keeping them under control. Children are merely one of the political weapons they use to make the masses accept any proposed solution, no matter how Orwellian. You're not against protecting children from drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorists, are you?

There is a pretty simple yet disappointing reason. CSAM is much easier to investigate and prosecute. You got evidence, you prosecute. Almost guaranteed conviction. You can even enforce big tech to implement proactive monitoring systems.

Compared to this, CSA is much harder. Every case is different. You have to do due diligence. And it is extremely hard to proactively detect them. Careful criminals will destroy all evidence. The number of case itself is smaller. And there is a good chance to lose in the court and for prosecutors this is a clearly risky move. Good ol' criminal investigation is expensive. There is a structural reason not to prioritize them.

The whole incentive structure is broken. The only thing to fix this is external pressure, but even it does not work these days. Exposing CSA is a rare event but media needs constant, sensitive headlines so they tend to treat CSA and CSAM like the same thing. Hence external pressures do not work, and even worse those work in a wrong way. This creates a bad feedback loop.

> ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc)

And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools which do a lot less training and enforcement of youth protection policies.

Children are still safer in Scouts and churches than in schools.

Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of.

I work with kids, and I've had to take the Scouts and Catholic Church's youth protection training. They are both free to take online if anyone wants to check it out.

Yeah DUH. its a trojan horse to eliminate any privacy in the populace, except for the government and elites, of course. They get privacy. You dont. How else are they going to maintain control over the populace?

Arresting for CSAM is easy and brings in a lot of money. It’s a slam dunk case for just possession. Investigating and prosecuting people for CSA takes a lot of manpower and time for single case and not nearly as profitable. As usual, follow the money.

> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy.

> It also ensured pressure from governments and plaintiffs, including CSAM victims, who preferred Apple’s more interventionist approaches, which Apple had voluntarily demonstrated it was willing to do.

I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning. It proved that it was technically feasible, and was "privacy preserving". I use scare quotes there because I don't think that political or religious dissidents would find that the same or similar technology used to discover and persecute them is "privacy preserving". And that's really the problem with Apple here. They provided a model for scanning for any kind of message or material while purportedly maintaining privacy.

Apple is on the side of privacy if it serves their marketing. Which is why they would rather build and normalize CLIENT SIDE CONTENT SCANNING so they can continue to market iCloud as "secure and private".

If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. I'll take it. But don't attribute to this ~5 trillion dollar company some kind of altruism.

Apple is very much like WhatsApp. Yes you cant perfectly trust their E2EE against state actors, but both in fact put some effort into making world have little bit more privacy.

At least on Desktop we have usable Linux, but on the phones there is literally nothing usable because thanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months.

Yes its possible to make Andoid spy on you a little less, but even for tech savvy person its damn inconvinient and Google making platform worse with every single release.

Thanks to Google "security" I can use my banking apps on 9 years old device with 6 years outdated firmware, but not on GrapheneOS.

I was an engineer at both MS and Apple. At Apple, privacy was baked into every new feature from the start. At MS, the privacy component was glued on at the very end, if ever.

Like OP said, Apple isn't perfect nor will they ever be, but they do prioritize privacy better than most.

Apple is on the side of privacy, except when you want privacy from Apple:

Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)

161 points by Logans_Run on Feb 14, 2025 | 69 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952

Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com)

170 points by ingve on Nov 1, 2024 | 127 comments

And whenever your privacy contradicts their control over "your" device, you are also out of luck, e.g., you can't have Ublock Origin on an iPhone. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921

Apple has degraded privacy online through Safari's cookie-preferential storage partitioning (i.e. site capabilities are penalized for using private localStorage instead of cookies), requiring sites to occasionally leak data over the network for multi-subdomain same-site web applications. These applications can privately share local state offline in Firefox and Chrome but usually serve the lowest common denominator, so many webapps use cookies to support Safari.

They're pro-privacy when it serves them financially.

Indeed.

But they are until they are actually defeated. I would rather plan for failure. We are in a global climate where court rulings can be ignored.

They aren't. They're on the side of making money and using backroom deals with the DOJ to avoid antitrust regulation. This is how a broken image hashing tool was surreptitiously installed on every iPhone.

To me it is crazy people go out of their way to defend apple in this area.

They might be slightly better than some others (horray!) but given their ecosystem it is still the worst platform if you value any form of freedom. Depending on apple for your privacy is ignorance at best.

I agree but sadly that's eroding. They're starting to let advertisers into the walled garden and it's becoming too big for them to ignore it. That will only get worse and then one day Uncle Sam will walk in with a big check and things will change.

> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy.

Look up the "iCloud Keychain" API:

For years Apple has let and helped Facebook, TikTok, Tinder etc. track users even after you delete an app, even ACROSS DEVICES and DEVICE RESETS.

There's no way to even SEE what data the apps have stored on your device & iCloud account on iOS, only through the macOS Keychain Access app. Even then you can't be sure that that's all that being stored.

They temporarily changed course and wiped iCloud Keychain data when deleting apps, but only during a single beta of iOS some years ago, and then reverted to the way it is now.

This scores so many points in favor of privacy intruding corporations that it puts Apple far from being the paragon of privacy they pretend to parade as.

Their level is set where it best feeds their revenue. Their security plays equally as well into their walled garden.

I said this in another thread a while ago, and one of these people who thinks Apple isn’t on the side of privacy cited a lawsuit they settled around Siri listened to conversations: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apple-settles-cla...

People understood this settlement to mean Apple was spying on their conversations and selling them to advertisers, when it seems to have more to do with people accidentally triggering Siri. But people don’t care about this kind of nuance or actually tallying up all the ways Apple is pro privacy against rare issues like this one. It’s all just tribalism at the end of the day.

Privacy is a natural fit for Apple in that they make money on discrete devices, but services have grown tremendously. That’s where the erosion of privacy happens.

So once there’s a profit motive for violating your privacy, the justification for eroding your privacy will proceed. It’s really the inertia of Apple starting out as privacy-compatible that makes them hesitant to throw that away.

Apple may be on the side of privacy, but since they are competing everybody out of the market with their slick consumer products they actually form a threat to privacy since now the government has to only implement a backdoor at one vendor.

It is crazy that I do not trust a multi-trillion dollar company who has forced labor in their supply chain to have my best interests in mind? It is crazy to me you would think they do not understand the concept of lip service.

These companies are liars. I do not trust liars. It has served me well.

> It is crazy people think apple isnt on the side of privacy.

Apple is on the side of making money, and the privacy claims are mostly marketing. The entire stack is closed source, which means it is difficult and expensive to independently verify any of the claims made. What's more, the "auto update" universal backdoor means that Apple can forcibly push a user-hostile "feature" like client-side scanning when it wants or is compelled to by a state actor.

> one can be convicted of CSAM-related crimes related to paintings/drawings/created_art of fictional people.

This isn't necessarily the case in the US, though I believe only for drawings. AI-generated CSAM probably wouldn't fly in a court of law.

Regardless, it's a naive conception of a system of law to think of it as a utilitarian system of restitution in contexts of "this individual harmed this individual". In fact, that would fall under the category of a "tort" rather than a "crime". The law is just as much about enforcing social mores and norms as it is about dealing with individuals harming each other. Hence why locales like Canada outlaw all forms CSAM, even fictional ones. The victim taken is to be society itself. The possession of this material, implicitly entailing enjoyment of it, is so gross a violation of society's norms and mores that it becomes elevated to a legal matter.

Our society is pretty aligned that distribution is another kind of harm. Non-consented distribution of sexual images (eg: revenge porn) is also a crime. Children don’t need to be the ones to press charges in child porn unlike with adults. That’s a good thing.

> CSAM (“see-sam”) refers to any visual content—photos, videos, livestreams, or AI-generated images—that shows a child being sexually abused or exploited. Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse [1]

I can't wrap my head around how AI-generated imagery is evidence of child sexual abuse (CAS). How are you abusing a real child by generating an image of a fake one?

[1] https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...

No. In short, in US law, CSAM is a visual depiction of a real-world act of child sexual abuse. Visual depictions like you're describing are covered under a different law, and I'm not aware of it having a short name. There's a good expert thread on this with links to the relevant federal laws here: https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3lbt7zkvlq...

I don't think these are the same. Outlawing CSAM gives law enforcement the ability to shutdown markets and prevent commercial distribution of CSAM. Sexually abusing children is heinous, but sexually abusing children for financial gain is even worse.

At least in the US, fictional content is legal even if it depicts minors sexually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...

There have been a handful of convictions based on fictional content, but usually the defendants also possessed real CSAM so there wasn't much point in contesting the charges over fictional images.

It's even worse than that. If you make withdrawals with the intent of evading currency reporting requirements you've committed a crime even if the withdrawals don't constitute structuring.

Also, in regard to the fictional CSAM depictions that stuff is still wending its way through the courts.

a 17 year old can take a nude selfie and be charged as an adult in possession of CSAM

A: cyber crimes or other digital crimes. probably applies to many of the other crimes you mentioned too. B: privacy

I don't think there's a particular connection between indirect enforcement mechanisms and inability to detect the crime, though:

- Structured transactions are illegal because we put a minimum on the amount of cash that has to move before government financial surveillance applies. The alternative (at least, one acceptable to the state) would be that the government knows every transaction you make[0] no matter the size. Since we don't want that, it has to be illegal to lie about the size of a transaction. Furthermore, the harder it is to get away with structuring your transactions, the more legible the financial system becomes and the easier it is to catch drug dealers.

- Pedophiles have not stopped possessing or distributing CSAM to reduce their legal liability. Actually, this argument ignores the main reason why pedophiles store and trade CSAM around in the first place: it's specifically to scare victims into silence and revictimize those who tell the cops. In fact, this is why we stopped calling it "child porn" and started calling it "child sexual abuse material" - because it is specifically material designed to sexually abuse children by way of it's mere existence.

If you're a "no touch" pedophile (they do exist!) that's still trading real CSAM around, well... Congratulations, Nobuhiro Watsuki, award-winning author of the hit samurai manga Rurouni Kenshin, you're still doing the dirty work for the full-contact pedo who recorded the damned thing.

As for drawn child porn, involving fictional characters (i.e. not CSAM), it is legal in certain jurisdictions. Notably, America, where the 1st Amendment errs on the side of creative expression[1]; and Japan, the thinking man's Epstein Island, where... I actually don't know why the fuck Japan is so weirdly tolerant of all this sick lolicon trash. Hell, Watsuki didn't even get cancelled when it came out he had 100 DVDs worth of actual CSAM.

There's an additional layer to this, though, in that for all the crimes you brought up, there's been a history of active state complicity in the crime:

- The CIA is a drug trafficking gang that happens to moonlight as a government intelligence agency

- A good chunk of elected officials and heads of state in multiple countries were compromised by notorious child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein

- The government doesn't pay taxes. I mean, obviously, they're the ones levying them.

We like to think of law enforcement as a cat-and-mouse game: criminals do a thing and law enforcement tries to hunt them down within the bounds of 4A/5A. The reality is more complicated. There are cases in which governments actively collaborate with organized crime, either because the government is corrupt as sin, or because the criminals are offering the state a way out.

[0] Fun fact: if you use Bitcoin, you're automatically opting into this.

[1] To be clear, while I agree with the American argument, you still shouldn't actually expose yourself to this kind of porn, because you're training yourself to get horny around kids. I shouldn't have to say this, but just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's safe to use.

Beyond the privacy marketing angle, e2e allows companies with global exposure to sidestep any unpleasantness when they get a subpoena from Bumfuck, Nowhere.

Sure, the NSA, GCHQ and Mossad have a way to exfiltrate the unencrypted data but proprietary e2e is a good thing for most people IMO. Shifts the risk from "my messages are theoretically available to most law enforcement in the globe" to "YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD’ED UPON"[0]. This is specially good for me because I know the equivalent to the FBI where is live is too cheap to buy a Cellebrite [1] license.

[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/leaker-reveals-which...

EDIT: I suppose someone could ask about Meta. The reason behind their support for scanning (and removing e2e in facebook msg) is simply regulatory capture. The zucc wishes to have a letter of marque to "protect" your children and remove the "unsafe" competitors.

EDIT2: Used the wrong term, I mixed up exfiltration channel with sidechannel attack.

This is based on a faulty understanding of the underlying systems. The risk with this sort of E2E encryption is not that the service provider pinky promises not to decrypt what they have, it's that they promise they will not insert a new key into your circle of trust to subsequently start decrypting things.

Only if the company misleads and adds a backdoor to the front-end app (thus this entire discussion).

If the company is misleading, any encryption technology is irrelevant anyway.

There's no issue with mega. There are third party apps and as long as you don't login to mega.nz with their website you're fine. And they also have SDK you can use that they'll not be able to control/manipulate without your knowledge.

> IMO "end-to-end encryption" simply isn't possible

In a technical sense it's absolutely possible. Owning the servers != transferring keys to the servers. Most E2E apps run both client and servers, it's about if they ever had key access.

People can also distribute heinous things through snail mail, but we are not yet at the point where the government reads all letters looking for wrongthink.

Just because we technically can make a privacy destroying drag net does not mean we should. Had phones existed 250 years ago, I have no doubt the founders would have thought it obvious that a cellphone’s contents were your personal papers which could not be freely searched.

Children are often used as a weapon to erode freedoms, like privacy and speech. Those pushing it rarely actually care about the children.

I wonder if the judge would be in favor of companies proactively going into people's houses at random to check on their belongings, if they don't have inappropriate photos somewhere, or whatever.

It's harder to do, but conceptually the same. So sad it's not being done. Very disturbing.

They could do it when people are not at home. There'd no problem, nobody would even notice.

The judge's comments are extremely disturbing, as she seems to want legislation passed that requires companies to violate user privacy.

And client side scanning is just as bad as encryption backdoors. There's a good reason Apple was attacked for even considering it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450

Truly being honest, I think CSAM scanning of private comms is ineffective in the long term anyways. Pedophiles aren't stupid, you'll drag a bunch at first but the networks will be reestablished and sharing will be done via sneakernet.

The primary focus should always in preventing the creation of CSAM.

- Comprehensive Sex Ed starting young so kids can identify grooming and seek help from a trusted adult, even if abuse comes from a family member.

- Fixing schools in general so homeschooling isn't as attractive for parents. Keep a tab on home schooled children and identify social isolation.

- Bigger resources for actual honest to god on the ground investigations.

To be clear I'm not saying that homeschooling = child abuse, simply there's a lack of the mechanisms to detect it in homeschooling settings.

> end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning

Not true. There is the option of scanning on the device.

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> As sad as this is, end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning.

I think it depends on your definition of e2ee and where the "end"s are.

If the locally running application can decrypt the data, it could always do whatever it wanted. Is that really how you define e2ee?

Indeed. And a rare one at that.

Also, Apple's E2E iCloud encryption vastly predated the NeuralHash efforts.

A mandatory client side scanning system with an opaque database filled with unverifiable entries would render many of the protections provided by ADP meaningless. Its was insane that Apple was even considering such an idea in the first place.

It's still a shade of gray to me. If I offered some homegrown cloud storage to my friends, and one of them uploaded CSAM to it, you can bet your ass that I would be arrested for it.

Don't worry, we'll get there soon enough.

> most people don't need cloud backups

What world do you live in?

Everybody needs cloud backups for their photos at least.

Most people don’t have computers, those who do, do not regularly backup their photos on them.

In both family and extended family many a cry would be avoided if people paid the 5 bucks it costs to backup their photos before your phone gets stolen or lost.

I gotta say handling my ever growing photo collection is a pain in the ass but I'm just not okay with uploading it to some server I don't control.

I think you’re right, but from another angle. In the state where I lived way back when, a state representative put forth a bill to explicitly make e-CSAM illegal. I guess it was already illegal for print media and this covered a gap in the law about cell phone pics, etc. Thing is, it had no allowance for the age of the picture taker, or even whether the picture taker was the photo subject. If a 16 year old girl took a nude selfie and sent it to her boyfriend, she was a felon.

I wrote to the rep and explained my concerns. I wholeheartedly agreed with the intent of the law, but the code was buggy. To my surprise, he wrote back in horror to say he hadn’t considered that and pulled the bill immediately. I’m proud of having done that.

I’m 100% pro yeeting child pornographers into the sun. I still don’t want to throw kids in prison or remove all traces of a right to privacy in our haste to sun-yeet them.

Are there statistics backing up the "VAST" majority claim?

While on statistics, I wonder, are there reliable statistics about child abuse of different types? Studying correlations with other social metrics, like sex education, liberal/conservative, policies regarding prostitution, and others can provide support for/against decisions.

Not that I hope these will impact people's and governments' choices, but I want to challenge my intuitions.

The proposed CSAM scanning used perceptual hashing to try to identify CSAM material known to law enforcement.

It was not a tool to identify private images as being underage. That’s an impossible task.

I completely agree with you, but I do think that these teens do not have good opsec around these photos. It’s like the revenge porn problem but way worse. A teenager sending a nude selfie to a friend who then later shared these images non-consensually is a much bigger problem than if the same thing happened to adults.

I don’t have any ideas for a solution, but I suspect that the heightened focus on CSAM is really compensating for the fact that we don’t have solutions for revenge porn.

I won't pretend to be so knowledgeable about how so much CSAM is being created, but keep in mind, there are laws against distribution & mere possession, too. Revenge porn is an obvious thing to be mindful of in this context in addition to other types of distribution. Consent to create doesn't imply consent to distribute (probably even to cloud storage) & is completely immaterial to issues of possession if it ends up in some 3rd party's hands. So the scope goes way wider than you're letting on. If you're saying all of these these laws are being abused, like they exist primarily to punish a state senator's daughter's ex-boyfriend, I would ask for something to back that up.

Yes, poor and unprivileged children can't really defend themselves here, but this is the system working to find some legal mechanism to do what it can, as a more powerful force. Protecting people from exploitation is a good use of government. If this was shot down for legal reasons, OK, the system is working and I hope there is a way to expand protections that fits into our system.

Children cannot legally consent to most things in most places, especially until near the end of their teen years.

Do you have a citation for that? Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it stated that way in any of the related media reports on CSAM efforts.

Just by casually glancing at KMP or VoL, you'd find that even the darknet pedo community itself strongly vilifies actual child abuse (known as "hurtcore"). There's truly no place for people who rape children. They are scum of the earth even in the eyes of the scum of the earth itself.

Because companies love turning things like this on by default.

Cloud storage is practically the default these days, and most users have no clue where their files are.

You're conflating "what's illegal" with "what a private entity doesn't want". I don't like it any more than you do, but the first is very clear, the second is a bit harder to "solve".

Section 230 doesn't provide as much immunity as people think. A platform can still be liable for the choice to amplify something.