[HN Gopher] One Bad Apple
___________________________________________________________________
One Bad Apple
Author : cwmartin
Score : 1391 points
Date : 2021-08-08 21:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hackerfactor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hackerfactor.com)
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Apple claims that there is a "one in one trillion chance per
| year of incorrectly flagging a given account". I'm calling
| bullshit on this.
|
| Why? You can get any false positive rate you want if you don't
| care about the false negative rate.
|
| It seems likely that that was a design criterion and they just
| tweaked the thresholds and number of hits required until they got
| it.
|
| The last analysis on HN about this made the exact same mistake,
| and it's a pretty obvious one so I'm skeptical about the rest of
| their analyses.
|
| It is nice to have some actual numbers from this article though
| about how much CP they report, the usefulness of MD5 hashes, etc.
|
| Edit: reading on, it seems like he just misread - it sounds like
| he thinks they're saying there's a 1 in a trillion chance of a
| false positive on a _photo_ but Apple are talking about an
| _account_ which requires multiple photo hits. The false positive
| rate per photo might be 1 in 1000 but if you need 10 hits then it
| 's fine.
| a-dub wrote:
| so maybe i'm confused, but i thought it worked like this:
|
| pre this thing:
|
| * before syncing photos to icloud, the device encrypts them with
| a device local key, so they sit on apple's servers encrypted at
| rest and apple cannot look at them unless they push an update to
| your device that sends them your key or uploads your photos
| unencrypted somewhere else
|
| after this thing:
|
| * before syncing photos to icloud, the device encrypts them, but
| there are essentially two keys. one on your device, and one that
| can be derived on their servers under special circumstances. the
| device also hashes the image, but using one of these fancy hashes
| that are invariant to crops, rotations, translations and noise
| (like shazam, but for pictures)
|
| * the encrypted photo is uploaded along with the hash (in a
| special crypto container)
|
| * their service scans all the hashes, but uses crypto magic that
| does the following:
|
| 1) it does some homeomorphic encryption thing where they don't
| actually see the hash, but they get something like a zero
| knowledge proof if the image's hash (uploaded along with the
| image in the "special crypto container") is in their list of bad
| stuff
|
| 2) if enough of these hit, then there's a key that pops out of
| this process that lets them decrypt the images that were hits
|
| 3) the images get added to a list where a room full of
| unfortunate human beings look at them and confirm that there's
| nothing good going on in those photos
|
| 4) they alert law enforcement
|
| a couple points of confusion to me:
|
| 1) i'm assuming they get their "one in a trillion" thing based on
| two factors. one being the known false positive rate of their
| perceptual hashing method and the other being their tunable
| number of hits necessary to trigger decryption. so they regularly
| benchmark their perceptual hash thing and compute a false
| positive rate, and then adjust the threshold to keep their
| overall system false positive probability where they want it?
|
| 2) all the user's photos are stored encrypted at rest, it seems
| that this thing isn't client side scanning, but rather assistance
| for server side scanning of end to end encrypted content put on
| their servers.
|
| first off i think it's actually pretty cool that a consumer
| products company offers end to end encrypted cloud backup of your
| photos. i don't think google does this, or anyone else. they can
| just scan images on the server. second off, this is some pretty
| cool engineering (if i understand it correctly). they're
| providing more privacy than their competition aaand they've given
| themselves a way to ensure that they're not in violation of the
| law by hosting CSAM for their customers.
|
| but i guess the big question is, if people don't like this, can't
| they just disable icloud?
| upbeat_general wrote:
| They do _not_ provide e2e for iCloud photos (or iCloud backups,
| etc.) and did not specify that they were planning to.
|
| They do not provide more privacy than the competition (in this
| regard at least), and yes, people can just disable iCloud
| services. That argument that "you can just not use it" is a
| pretty weak one for defending poor privacy practices. The same
| could be said for any website or server with poor privacy
| practices and given the prevalence of iCloud photos, this
| change affects lots of people.
| a-dub wrote:
| i dunno, reading this thing sure does make it sound like it's
| only for photos stored in icloud. and the existence of such
| an elaborate system sure does seem to indicate that photos
| are end to end encrypted on their servers, otherwise they
| could just hash them there.
|
| it does the matching client side, so the hashes never leave
| the client. what it does send with the photos is this
| threshold thing where if enough of them are hits, it reveals
| them, otherwise they see nothing.
|
| it seems pretty unequivocal that this is all a system to
| support scanning of e2e encrypted images on icloud. there
| would be no need for such an elaborate system if they could
| scan the images on the server. as far as i know, google does
| not e2e encrypt images, and for all we know, they actually do
| engage in server side scanning.
|
| to quote their statement https://www.apple.com/child-safety/:
|
| > To help address this, new technology in iOS and iPadOS*
| will allow Apple to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud
| Photos. This will enable Apple to report these instances to
| the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
| (NCMEC). NCMEC acts as a comprehensive reporting center for
| CSAM and works in collaboration with law enforcement agencies
| across the United States.
|
| > Apple's method of detecting known CSAM is designed with
| user privacy in mind. Instead of scanning images in the
| cloud, the system performs on-device matching using a
| database of known CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and
| other child safety organizations. Apple further transforms
| this database into an unreadable set of hashes that is
| securely stored on users' devices.
|
| > Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device
| matching process is performed for that image against the
| known CSAM hashes. This matching process is powered by a
| cryptographic technology called private set intersection,
| which determines if there is a match without revealing the
| result. The device creates a cryptographic safety voucher
| that encodes the match result along with additional encrypted
| data about the image. This voucher is uploaded to iCloud
| Photos along with the image.
|
| > Using another technology called threshold secret sharing,
| the system ensures the contents of the safety vouchers cannot
| be interpreted by Apple unless the iCloud Photos account
| crosses a threshold of known CSAM content. The threshold is
| set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and
| ensures less than a one in one trillion chance per year of
| incorrectly flagging a given account.
|
| > Only when the threshold is exceeded does the cryptographic
| technology allow Apple to interpret the contents of the
| safety vouchers associated with the matching CSAM images.
| Apple then manually reviews each report to confirm there is a
| match, disables the user's account, and sends a report to
| NCMEC. If a user feels their account has been mistakenly
| flagged they can file an appeal to have their account
| reinstated.
| a-dub wrote:
| okay, so according to this [1], icloud photos are not e2e
| encrypted. point still stands, this is a system that is
| designed to flag the images without looking at them server
| side. assuming that it is successful, it paves the way for
| when they could turn on e2e encryption for icloud photos.
|
| [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
| robertwt7 wrote:
| > Apple then manually reviews each report to confirm there is a
| match,
|
| This is always the terrifying part for me. They will access your
| personal photos or data without telling you. I'm surprised how is
| that even legal given all the law that are already available. Are
| they immune to those laws stated in thd blog?
|
| Also what happens when they launch this in EU, AU, etc with
| different privacy laws?
| robertoandred wrote:
| They do tell you. If your account is flagged, you are notified
| and have the opportunity to challenge it.
| FabHK wrote:
| I think the article got that wrong. Apple does manually review
| tagged images, but does not access the original image, but the
| security voucher containing metadata, including the NeuralHash
| and a "visual derivative" of it (see Apple's spec [1]).
|
| Also, this only applies to pictures you upload to iCloud. So,
| it's not like they're accessing your personal photos without
| telling you.
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/child-
| safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Most iPhones have icloud backups enabled, which will trigger
| this detection automatically. Most iPhones are set up to
| upload every photo to icloud in case you lose your phone.
| starchild_3001 wrote:
| Bad Apple it is. Also hypocrite Apple, with their fake (at the
| very least misleading) privacy stance against internet
| advertising.
| ksec wrote:
| >Think of it this way: Your landlord owns your property, but in
| the United States, he cannot enter any time he wants. In order to
| enter, the landlord must have permission, give prior notice, or
| have cause. Any other reason is trespassing. Moreover, if the
| landlord takes anything, then it's theft. Apple's license
| agreement says that they own the operating system, but that
| doesn't give them permission to search whenever they want or to
| take content.
|
| Yes. That is an analogy only with Apple's software but not
| hardware. In Apple's view they are selling you the experience. So
| they are more like Hotels, You dont own the hotel room, the bed,
| the TV or anything inside that room. And in a Hotel, they can do
| Room Cleaning anytime they want.
| charles_f wrote:
| > So where else could they get 1 trillion pictures?
|
| That's a real kicker in my opinion. Unless they get training data
| from NCMEC I struggle to understand how they're training their
| model? Unless it's entirely algorithmic and not based on ML?
| netr0ute wrote:
| To help fight back against false positives, why not just
| repeatedly trigger the code that sends the data to NCMEC (per the
| article's claimed legal requirements) and create a DoS attack?
| [deleted]
| cmsj wrote:
| That code is not accessible to us. The report to NCMEC would be
| generated by Apple after they have manually reviewed the
| derived images included in the security vouchers your device
| submitted after it analysed your photos.
| netr0ute wrote:
| > That code is not accessible to us.
|
| Not to tools like IDA and Ghidra
| kelnos wrote:
| No, the tool that reports to NCMEC is on Apple employee
| workstations (or a private server). The stuff running in
| the iPhone essentially just flags things as possibly-CSAM,
| after which someone at _Apple_ verifies it.
|
| Now, I suppose you could DDoS _Apple 's_ verification
| process.
|
| Either way, though, it's not like anyone who would do
| either of these things would win any points in the court of
| popular opinion. I can see the headlines now: "Hackers
| Disable Apple's CSAM Reporting Tools; Legitimate CSAM
| Reports Get Lost".
| netr0ute wrote:
| > "Hackers Disable Apple's CSAM Reporting Tools;
| Legitimate CSAM Reports Get Lost"
|
| What website are we on?
| blunte wrote:
| Somewhat tangential, but people like this author amaze me in
| their deep knowledge AND ability to communicate it well.
|
| Also, none of this topic is something I would want to deal with.
| mistermarcus wrote:
| You believe CP is evil. You believe privacy is sacred. You are
| Tim Cook. What do you do?
|
| If this is a sincere effort, clearly Apple has failed to thread
| the needle. This announcement could also be a fumbled attempt to
| reframe what is already a common practice at the company, to get
| ahead of a leak. I heard from a friend who's related to an Apple
| employee that Apple scans the mountains of data on its servers,
| already, for "market research". The claims otherwise... marketing
| gambits.
| jolux wrote:
| > To reiterate: scanning your device is not a privacy risk, but
| copying files from your device without any notice is definitely a
| privacy issue.
|
| Not a lawyer, but I believe this part about legality is
| inaccurate, because they aren't copying your photos without
| notice. The feature is not harvesting suspect photos from a
| device, it is attaching data to _all_ photos before they are
| uploaded to Apple's servers. If you're not using iCloud Photos,
| the feature will not be activated. Furthermore, they're not
| _knowingly_ transferring CSAM, because the system is designed
| only to notify them when a certain "threshold" of suspect images
| has been crossed.
|
| In this way it's identical in practice to what Google and
| Facebook are already doing with photos that end up on their
| servers, they just run the check before the upload instead of
| after. I certainly have reservations about their technique here,
| but this argument doesn't add up to me.
| eivarv wrote:
| Legality aside - how is this not a privacy risk? Privileged
| users of the infrastructure can gain information about users
| (whether they possess CSAM that's in the hash-database... for
| now).
| tehnub wrote:
| Presumably the reviewers would not know the identity of the
| user whose photos are under review, as they have no need to.
| eivarv wrote:
| ... but the link between user and photo obviously exists
| somewhere in Apple's system.
| avnigo wrote:
| Unless you're a public figure or celebrity. If I were, I
| wouldn't use iCloud photos, but that's not exactly how
| Apple markets their photo service.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| > they're not knowingly transferring CSAM, because the system
| is designed only to notify them when a certain "threshold" of
| suspect images has been crossed
|
| And when they're notified, Apple manually checks (a modified
| but legible version of) the images.
| websites2023 wrote:
| This basic implementation fact has been misrepresented over and
| over and over again. Does anyone read anymore? I'm starting to
| get really concerned. The hacker community is where I've turned
| to be more informed, away from the clickbait. But I'm being let
| down.
| dmitriid wrote:
| What does "manual review" mean then and how are those images
| reported?
| shuckles wrote:
| Before: you would upload images to iCloud Photos. Apple can
| access your images in iCloud Photos, but it does not.
|
| Now: You upload images to iCloud Photos. When doing so,
| your device also uploads a separate safety voucher for the
| image. If there are enough vouchers for CSAM matched images
| in your library, Apple gains the ability to access the data
| in the vouchers for images matching CSAM. One of the data
| elements in the voucher is an "image derivative" (probably
| a thumbnail) which is manually reviewed. If the image
| derivative also looks like CSAM, Apple files a report with
| NCMEC's CyberTip line. Apple can (for now) access the image
| you stored in iCloud, but it does not. All the data it
| needs is in the safety voucher.
|
| Lot of words spilled on this topic, yet I'd be surprised if
| a majority of people are even aware of these basic facts
| about the system operation.
| munchler wrote:
| Thank you for this explanation. Much more helpful than
| any of the lengthy articles I've read to date.
|
| I think Apple has botched the rollout of this change by
| failing to explain clearly how it works. As a result,
| rumors and misunderstandings have proliferated instead.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > access the data in the vouchers for images matching
| CSAM. One of the data elements in the voucher is an
| "image derivative" (probably a thumbnail)
|
| So the author of the article is technically correct:
| Apple intentionally uploads CP to their servers for
| manual review which is explicitly forbidden by law.
|
| He even describes the issue with thumbnails
| shuckles wrote:
| It is exceedingly unlikely that a system developed with
| NCMEC's support and a Fortune 5 legal team somehow fails
| to comply with the most obviously relevant laws.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I'd say: A trillion-dollar company and a government
| agency can do whatever they feel like, and laws be damned
| :)
| matwood wrote:
| Not sure your before is entirely correct. Apple has
| admitted to scanning iCloud photos, so they are already
| accessing them at some point.
|
| https://digit.fyi/apple-admits-scanning-photos-uploaded-
| to-i...
| shuckles wrote:
| The before is entirely correct. Only iCloud Mail was
| previously scanned for CSAM. As a sanity check: it's not
| plausible that Apple only generated O(100) referrals to
| CyberTip annually if it were scanning all iCloud Photos.
| Other services of similar scale generate O(1M) referrals.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| As I understand it:
|
| When you choose to upload your images to iCloud (which
| currently happens without end-to-end encryption), your
| phone generates some form of encrypted ticket. In the
| future, the images will be encrypted, with a backdoor key
| encoded in the tickets.
|
| If Apple receives enough images that were considered a
| match, the tickets become decryptable (I think I saw
| Shamir's Secret Sharing mentioned for this step). Right
| now, Apple doesn't need that because they have unencrypted
| images, in a future scheme, decrypting these tickets will
| allow them to decrypt your images.
|
| (I've simplified a bit, I believe there's a second layer
| that they claim will only give them access to the offending
| images. I have not studied their approach deeply.)
| shuckles wrote:
| These are not "claims." The process by which they get
| access to only the safety vouchers for images matching
| CSAM is private set intersection and comes with a
| cryptographic proof.
|
| In no step of the proposal does Apple access the images
| you store in iCloud. All access is through the associated
| data in the safety voucher. This design allows Apple to
| switch iCloud storage to end to end encrypted with no
| protocol changes.
| nullc wrote:
| The private set intersection is part of the protocol to
| shield Apple (and their database providers) from
| accountability, not to protect the users privacy.
|
| They could instead send the list of hashes to the device
| (which they already must trust is faithfully computing
| the local hash) and just let the device report when there
| are hits. It would be much more CPU and bandwidth
| efficient, too.
|
| The PSI serves the purpose that if Apple starts sending
| out hashes for popular lawful images connected to
| particular religions, ethnicity, or political ideologies
| that it is information theoretically impossible for
| anyone to detect the abuse. It also makes it impossible
| to tell if different users are being tested against
| different lists, e.g. if Thai users were being tested
| against political cartoons that insult the king.
| shuckles wrote:
| The list of hashes is confidential. Good luck getting
| NCMEC to sign off on an implementation which lets clients
| infer which photos are matching their database.
|
| The database is embedded into iOS. There are at least
| three primary sources which say that users will not
| receive different databases, and it should be easily
| confirmed.
| nullc wrote:
| I am well aware but that is exactly the point. If Apple
| can't provide an accountable implementation they should
| not implement this at all. This should be table stakes
| that all users should demand, at a minimum.
|
| Otherwise there is no way to detect if the system is
| abused to target lawful activities.
|
| The fancy crypto in the system isn't there to protect the
| user, it's to guard the system's implementer(s) against
| accountability. It protects Apple's privacy, not yours.
| jtc331 wrote:
| What good is end to end encryption if the OS is prebuilt
| with a method of breaking that encryption? This is
| definitional backdooring, and you're back to trusting
| Apple's goodwill (and/or willingness to resist
| governments) to keep your data safe (I.e., not add new
| decryptable triggers).
|
| Not having backdoors is a hard requirement for end to end
| encryption offering privacy guarantees.
| shuckles wrote:
| This is taking the discussion into the realm of
| hypothetical. If we end up in a world where there are
| reliable public cloud providers that offer end to end
| encryption with no content scanning whatsoever, I'll be
| glad to give them my money.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| There's a weird meme I the hacker community that law
| enforcement has no right to use any means to enforce the law,
| and can only bust people who turn themselves in.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| Agreed - so dissapointing.
|
| The idea that standard moderation steps are a felony is such
| a stretch. Almost all the major players have folks doing
| content screening and management - and yes, this may invovle
| the provider transmitting / copying etc images that are then
| flagged and moderated away.
|
| The idea that this is a felony is rediculous.
|
| The other piece is that folks are making a lot of assumptions
| about how this works, then claiming things are felonies.
|
| Does it not strain credibility slightly that apple, with it's
| team of lawyers, has decided to instead of blocking CASM to
| commit CASM felonies? And the govt is going to bust them for
| this? Really? They are doing what govt wants and using
| automation to drive down the number of images someone will
| look at and what even might get transferred to apple's
| servers in the first place.
| msandford wrote:
| Does the law have a moderation carve out? There are plenty
| of laws that have what's called 'strict liability' where
| your intent doesn't matter.
|
| I'm not suggesting that this is absolutely positively a
| situation where strict liability exists and that moderation
| isn't allowed. But the idea that "hey we're trying to do
| the right thing here" will be honored in court is....not
| obvious.
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| If we investigated this author if they do in fact run a
| photo service we would inevitably find that unless they
| are incompetent they have to moderate content, either
| blind or based on flags.
|
| So if apple is going to jail for child porn because they
| moderate / report content after flagging (this is
| normally actually required to do - report it), then this
| article writer should be going to jail as well - I
| guarantee his services stores, forwards and otherwise
| handles CASM content.
|
| My complaint is just - HN used to focus on stuff where
| folks didn't just always jump to worst case arguments
| (ie, apple is guilty of child porn and is committing
| felonies) without at least allowing that apple MAY have
| given this a tiny bit of thought.
|
| It's just tiresome to wade through. It's a mashup of they
| are blocking too much, are the evil govt henchperson to
| they are breaking the law and going to jail for felony
| child porn charges.
|
| I get that it generates interaction (here I am), but it's
| annoying after a while. Clickbait sells though no
| question so things like "One Bad Apple" are probably
| going to keep on coming at us.
| buraktamturk wrote:
| Well there is a difference as stated on the article that
| they don't expect to see CP or CSAM and says "We are not
| 'knowingly' seeing it since it makes up less than 0.06%
| of the uploads ... We do not intentionally look for CP."
|
| Whereas Apple is moderating the suspected images so they
| intentionally look for CP (which, according to the author
| and his lawyer, is a crime).
| whoknowswhat11 wrote:
| This is such a pathetic interpretation. All flagging
| systems (which is how moderation work - facebook does not
| manually review every photo posted) alert the company
| that there may be a problem. Moderators do their thing.
| They EXPECT to see bad content based on these flags.
| Smaller places may act on complaints.
|
| The idea that this makes them guilty of felony child porn
| charges is so ridiculous and offensive.
|
| Facebook (with Insta) alone is dealing with 20 million
| photos a year -
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-instagram-
| report-20...
|
| This lawyer is an absolute idiot.
|
| How about we ask the actual folks involved in this
| (NCMEC) what they think about apples "felonies". Maybe
| they have some experts?
|
| Oh wait, the folks actually dealing with this, the people
| who have to handle all this crap - are writing letters
| THANKING apple for helping reduce the spread of this
| crap.
|
| So - we have a big company like Apple (with a ton of
| folks looking at this sort of thing). We have the
| National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
| looking at this. And we are being told - by some guy who
| will not even name the attorney and law firm reaching
| this opinion, that apple is committing child porn
| felonies.
|
| Does no one see how making these types of horribly
| supported explosive claims just trashes discourse? Apple
| are child pornographers! So and so is horrible for X.
|
| Can folks dial it back a TINY bit - or is the outrage
| factory the only thing running these days?
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Yeah, as usual I'm worried the people who claim that
| others don't read are the ones not reading (or being able
| to comprehend) what the author is trying to say. To me it
| seems like moderation in general is fine. What Apple is
| doing here is that after they receive a flag that a
| certain threshold is crossed, they manually review the
| material. The author states that no one should do that
| i.e., the law explicitly prohibits anyone even trying to
| verify. If you suspect CP, you got to forward it to NCMEC
| and be done with that.
|
| I 100% understand why Apple doesn't want to do that -
| automatic forwarding - they're clearly worried about
| false positives. I also think Apple has competent
| lawyers. It's entirely possible that the author and their
| lawyers' interpretation could be wrong (a possibility).
|
| Point is - the author isn't trying to say moderation is
| illegal.
| jolux wrote:
| The whole thing rests on whether Apple knows that the
| content is CSAM or not. And they don't. The author gets
| this fundamentally wrong. _They_ do not know whether it
| is a match or not when the voucher is created. The
| process does, but they don't. They know when the system
| detects a threshold number of matches in the account, and
| they can then verify the matches.
|
| Additionally, we already know they consulted with NCMEC
| on this because of the internal memos that leaked the
| other day, both from Apple leadership and a letter NCMEC
| sent congratulating them on their new system. If you
| think they haven't evaluated the legality of what they're
| doing, you're just wrong.
| lizardmancan wrote:
| in theory we could accomplish great things by spying on everyone
| but even a small amount of abuse of such tools is unacceptable. I
| dont think we can stop the mass spying indefinetly which makes me
| think the corrupt governments and dictators are increasingly
| viable low hanging fruits. there will be a point where we have no
| other choice but to dethrone them. if we fail there we will all
| be like the chinese captures in a panopticon of cameras driving
| large behavrioal datacenters.
| mlindner wrote:
| That PhotoDNA is reversible is ridiculously shocking to me...
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Why? It's ancient, and hasn't been subject to open scrutiny
| from academics and researchers like open-source systems.
| mistermarcus wrote:
| You believe CP is evil. You believe privacy is sacred. You are
| Tim Cook. What do you do?
|
| If this is a sincere effort, clearly Apple has failed to thread
| the needle. This announcement could also be a fumbled attempt to
| reframe what is already a common practice at the company, to get
| ahead of a leak. I heard from a friend who's related to an Apple
| employee that Apple scans the mountains of data on its servers,
| already, for "market research". The claims otherwise... marketing
| gambits
| max_entropy wrote:
| Imagine being a victim of CP, knowing that all over the world
| people hold in their hands devices storing artifacts of your
| terror.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| Given that the weights for the NeuralHash algorithm are being
| shipped to every iOS device and neural network adversarial
| attacks are pretty well studied in literature, it should be
| trivial to make a website or Android camera app that tweaks a few
| pixels of an image to make it have a hash collision with apple's
| CSAM database. If anyone seriously wants to kill this initiative,
| widely distributing a few memes with hash collisions could go a
| long way.
| Vorh wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210808233609/https://www.hacke...
| (I can't seem to access archive.is, so archive.org)
| antman wrote:
| There are a lot of articles about Apples hadh algorithm and for
| me they are mostly irrelevant to the main problem.
|
| The main problem is that Apple has backdoored my device.
|
| More types of bad images or other files will be scanned since now
| apple does not have plausible deniablity to defend any of ghe
| government'x requests.
|
| In the future a false? positive that happened? to be of a
| political file that crept in the list can pin point people to the
| future dictator wannabe.
|
| It's always about the children or terrorism.
| zepto wrote:
| > More types of bad images or other files will be scanned since
| now apple does not have plausible deniablity to defend any of
| ghe government'x requests.
|
| The mechanism doesn't scan anything except images, and won't
| trigger on a single bad image - only a set.
|
| Yes, that set could be something other than child porn,
| assuming Apple and NCMEC conspire, but this is not a general
| purpose backdoor.
| lazide wrote:
| Literally Apple could just add a different set to the set of
| hashes they push? That seems very naive.
| zepto wrote:
| What seems naive? Adding hashes will only match images, not
| other files, and even then only if a group is matched, not
| just one.
| lazide wrote:
| Because people take and store images of huge numbers of
| different things? Like the things mentioned upthread,
| memes, documents? along with screenshots of a huge number
| of other things.
|
| And the details around matching (and groups, etc) are
| trivial to change in a later update.
| zepto wrote:
| > or other files will be scanned since now
|
| Ok, so not other files at all then. Just photos of
| documents.
|
| > And the details around matching (and groups, etc) are
| trivial to change in a later update.
|
| Ok, so this mechanism can't do more than us claimed, but
| they could add a new mechanism later?
| lazide wrote:
| As I said, incredibly naive.
| zepto wrote:
| You said it, but then you failed to back it up with
| anything other than your fears.
| mikeyjk wrote:
| What reason do we have to trust that the NSA won't knock
| on the door of apple and ask for a small expansion, as a
| matter of national security + here is your NDA outlining
| that any canary tampering will result in jail time? It's
| a closed system so we would have no way of knowing.
| zepto wrote:
| Sure, but that has nothing to do with this mechanism or
| this discussion.
|
| They could have done that at any time in the past, and
| could do so in future.
|
| 'NSA could force Apple to do something in secret' is an
| evergreen fear just like 'think of the children'. Such
| comments get added to every thread about Apple and
| privacy or security.
| lazide wrote:
| It's one thing to have a company build and keep secret
| such a system from everyone, from the ground up.
|
| It's a different thing entirely to do a minor extension
| to a system that they rolled out publicly that already
| essentially does this!
|
| The first one will almost certainly be noticed, and will
| be clearly illegal/violate contracts, and can therefore
| be identified and rooted out.
|
| The second one you could do for groups of people or
| targeted individuals trivially and would be under the
| radar and probably never noticed - and could be denied
| unless truly rock solid evidence existed. Which would be
| easy to avoid existing if you used the same mechanisms
| (but different types of matches) you were public about -
| in a closed ecosystem with a Secure Enclave, for
| instance. It's not like anyone is going to be able to do
| step-by-step instruction debugging on the code running on
| their iPhone!
|
| There is a long history of this happening. Not everyone
| is as blatant as the stasi - and even then, no one knew
| who was working for them or what was tapped until the
| whole system collapsed and their records became public.
| It still took a long time to unravel.
| zepto wrote:
| > The first one will almost certainly be noticed, and
| will be clearly illegal/violate contracts, and can
| therefore be identified and rooted out.
|
| Well since they have made very detailed public statements
| about the limits of this system and. not letting it be
| misused, they would certainly be in violation of
| contracts if they did start misusing it.
|
| > if you used the same mechanisms (but different types of
| matches)
|
| What kinds of 'different matches' do you think this
| mechanism can be used to make?
| katbyte wrote:
| It also only scans images uploaded to icloud
| ok123456 wrote:
| "Don't worry this malware is only triggered if you double
| click it. -- signed the author"
| hef19898 wrote:
| It does that on the device. All it takes is enabling it by
| default, instead of triggering the scan prior to upload,
| and add more hashes to flag. The result would be a total
| loss of privacy, basically Apple is privatising mass
| surveillance with that. Without oversight, no matter how
| small, or accountability.
| zepto wrote:
| How would this let them scan the text of your signal
| messages or even your iMessages?
|
| How would this let them search for a subversive PDF?
|
| It wouldn't. This is just fearmongering.
|
| > The result would be a total loss of privacy, basically
| Apple is privatising mass surveillance with that. Without
| oversight, no matter how small, or accountability.
|
| You are talking about an imagined system someone could
| build in the future, not the system Apple has put in
| place.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > The main problem is that Apple has backdoored my device.
|
| Isn't that the shtick with Apple though? That they own the
| devices you rent and you don't have to worry too much about it.
| They always had the backdoor in place, they used it for
| software updates. Now they will also use it for another thing.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > That they own the devices you rent and you don't have to
| worry too much about it.
|
| You didn't need to worry about it because they did a
| sufficiently good job at making the choices for you. This is
| a sign that they stopped doing so.
|
| An appropriate metaphor might be a secretary. They can handle
| a lot of busy work for you so you don't have to worry about
| it, but they need access to your calendar, mails etc. to do
| so. This is not an intrusion as long as they work on your
| favor. If you suddenly find your mails on the desk of your
| competitor, though, you might reconsider. That, however, does
| not mean that the whole idea of a secretary is flawed.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| I agree. I am just saying that Apple has always had massive
| backdoors in place. People were always pointing it out as a
| huge plus for iDevices. So no, the parent's main problem is
| not the backdoor. Otherwise they would have complained long
| ago.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Exactly. The issue is that the iPhone is now a snitch AI for
| whatever purpose Apple deems fit.
| sooheon wrote:
| Drug dogs have a 50~80% false positive rate, because after
| they've been certified as capable of detecting drugs, they
| get that trained out of them the field to instead indicate
| whatever the handler wants indicated.
| kfprt wrote:
| Drug dogs are "probable cause on four legs".
|
| https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/563889510/preventing-
| police-b...
| ziml77 wrote:
| They could have done all that without telling you. And as long
| as the traffic was combined with normal traffic no one would
| ever notice (and in this case it would end up mixed with normal
| traffic since it only applies to images being uploaded to
| iCloud, so communication with Apples servers would be
| expected).
|
| What it looks like to me is that Apple is planning on releasing
| end-to-end encryption for iCloud. But they know that whenever
| E2EE comes up, people get mad that terrorists, child molesters,
| and mass shooters can hide their data and communications. Hell,
| they've been painted as the villain when they say they can't
| unlock iPhones for the FBI. This heads off those concerns for
| the most common out of those crimes.
| antman wrote:
| They might be able to do it without anyone ever knowing, but
| at a business level they can't they do it better with
| everyone knowing and children safety as an excuse?
| nullc wrote:
| > They could have done all that without telling you.
|
| But in that case it would much more likely be a crime, it
| would certainly cost them a tremendous amount of good will.
|
| Your personal computing device is a trusted agent. You cannot
| use the internet without it, and esp. in lockdown you likely
| can't realistically live your life without use of the
| internet. You share with it your most private information,
| more so even than you do with your other trusted agents like
| your doctor or lawyers (whom you likely communicate with
| using the device). Its operation is opaque to you: you're
| just forced to trust it. As such your device ethically owes
| you a duty to act in your best interest, to the greatest
| extent allowed by the law. -- not unlike your lawyers
| obligation to act in your interest.
|
| Apple is reprogramming customer devices, against the will of
| many users (presumably at the cost of receiving necessary
| fixes and security updates if you decline) to make it betray
| that trust and compromise the confidentiality of the device's
| user/owner.
|
| The fact that Apple is doing it openly makes it worse in the
| sense that it undermines your legal recourse for the
| betrayal. The only recourse people have is the one you see
| them exercising in this thread: Complaining about it in
| public and encouraging people to abandon apple products.
|
| E2EE should have been standard a decade ago, certainly since
| the Snowden revelations. No doubt apple seeks to gain a
| commercial advantage by simultaneously improving their
| service while providing some pretextual dismissal of child
| abuse concerns. But this gain comes at the cost of deploying
| and normalizing an automated surveillance infrastructure, one
| which undermines their product's ethical duty to their
| customers, and one that could be undetectable retasked to
| enable genocide by being switched to match on images
| associated with various religions, ethniticities, or
| political ideologies.
| noptd wrote:
| Sticking to the apt analogy from the article, >To reiterate:
| scanning your device is not a privacy risk, but copying files
| from your device without any notice is definitely a privacy
| issue.
|
| > Think of it this way: Your landlord owns your property, but
| in the United States, he cannot enter any time he wants. In
| order to enter, the landlord must have permission, give prior
| notice, or have cause. Any other reason is trespassing.
| Moreover, if the landlord takes anything, then it's theft.
| Apple's license agreement says that they own the operating
| system, but that doesn't give them permission to search
| whenever they want or to take content.
|
| This viewpoint is like thanking your landlord for warning you
| that they are going to enter your home and root through your
| private items, all in the name of some greater good. Let's
| not spin it as if the landlord is doing us a favor in this
| scenario.
| ziml77 wrote:
| That first line of the quote is misrepresenting what Apple
| is doing. They are not copying files from your device. You
| are sending them the files. As it stands the only images
| that will be scanned are the ones you are uploading to
| iCloud. And I'd be shocked if they weren't already
| analyzing those images on the server side.
|
| When it comes to governments being able to pressure them
| into being more invasive, nothing has changed with this
| update. If a government wanted to poison the CSAM database,
| they could have already. You'd end up reported when the
| server does the scanning. If the government wanted to
| expand scanning to include things that you're not
| uploading, they already could have asked Apple to do that.
| It would have been possible to silently add a much simpler
| scanning mechanism or data exfiltration into an update.
|
| This isn't a spin to say anyone is doing us a favor. iCloud
| should be end-to-end encrypted and there shouldn't be any
| scanning at all. But why should that opinion on how we
| should treat privacy be taken as the only valid opinion?
| The people who do want the scanning are not simply asking
| for it because they are stupid or uninformed. Instead they
| put different weights into what they value.
| cageface wrote:
| If this is a prelude to E2E encryption for iCloud they are
| going to be under TREMENDOUS pressure from law enforcement to
| expand the list of bad material way beyond just CSAM.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Not if it's only E2EE for photos
| sooheon wrote:
| > What it looks like to me is that Apple is planning on
| releasing end-to-end encryption for iCloud
|
| This is Gruber's optimistic take on it as well. If so, why
| not make both changes at once? Given that they've walked back
| E2EE on iCloud before, I'm not holding my breath.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Apple has front-doored your device from Day 1.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| This is mainly where I come down on this. I care about what
| they're doing not why they're doing it. What they are doing is
| examining my private files, and that is simply unacceptable.
| gscott wrote:
| Kim Dotcom did this and it lead to Riaa saying it obligated the
| file sharing service to look for all copyrighted materials. This
| opens pandoras box for Apple.
| judge2020 wrote:
| No, it didn't, at least not legally. There is no federal
| requirement to scan for copyrighted content (which is an
| impossible task without $MM in capital and a media library of
| copyrighted content) - YouTube only does it with Content ID to
| appease the rights holders and not have them remove all their
| content from YT outright. The only requirement is to respond to
| DMCA takedown notices, which they were obligated to do before
| Kim started scanning for CSAM (which I can't find a story for).
| [deleted]
| zmmmmm wrote:
| There is so much focus on the technical aspects such as
| probability of mismatch etc.
|
| For me the risk is much more that through some mechanism outside
| my control real CSAM material becomes present on my device.
| Whether its a dodgy web site, a spam email, a successful hack
| attempt or something else like that, I feel like there's a
| significant chance some day I'll end up with this stuff injected
| onto my phone without me knowing. So I'm not at all concerned
| about the technical capacity to accurately match to CP etc. In
| fact I'm even more worried if its really accurate because then I
| know when this unfortunate event happens I face a huge risk of
| being immediately flagged before I even know about the content
| and then spending years extricating myself from a ruined
| reputation and a legal system that treats evidence like this with
| far more trust than it should have.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The reason everyone is focusing on the technical aspects is
| because most people will evaluate it as it is planned to be,
| and not as what it could become. This is probably because, at
| any time, users can switch from Apple to Android in an upgrade
| cycle - so while perhaps 99% of users are fine with this CSAM
| scanner in its current state, if they expand its usage to
| something bad then those 99% that stayed can once again
| evaluate if they still value the hardware enough to keep it
| with the new status quo; therefore, evaluating it as it is in
| its current state will help people reading make the best
| personal decisions and the details will help with context
| if/when they do expand usage of this system.
| rovr138 wrote:
| I still have WhatsApp on my phone and I have had issues in the
| past with backups so I have it set to save the media directly
| to my photos app.
|
| I also have notifications off on it and check it when I need
| to.
|
| All this needs is someone forwarding me something that's in the
| DB.
| randyrand wrote:
| right? Phones are not at all secure. Dozens (hundreds?) of
| click-less exploits exist today that can do anything they want
| with "your" phone at the push of a button.
|
| My phone is not mine. nor is the data on it. nor is yours.
| That's the real state of computer security today.
|
| all of this is ill conceived.
|
| The day someone chooses to mass release their worms on iPhone
| will be a wake up call.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Here's the gist of a post I made a couple of days ago (I removed
| one sentence that someone considered inflammatory):
|
| Having known _many_ victims of sexual violence and trafficking
| (Seriously. I deal with them, several times a week, and have, for
| decades), I feel for the folks that honestly want _that
| particular_ kind of crime to stop. Humans can be complete scum.
| Most folks in this community may think they know how low we can
| go, but you are likely being optimistic.
|
| That said, law enforcement has a nasty habit of having a rather
| "binary" worldview. People are either cops, or uncaught
| criminals.
|
| With that worldview, it can be quite easy to "blur the line"
| between child sex traffickers, and traffic ticket violators. I
| remember reading a _The Register_ article, about how anti-
| terrorism tools were being abused by local town councils to do
| things like find zoning violations (for example, pools with no
| CO).
|
| Misapplied laws can be _much_ worse than letting some criminals
| go. This could easily become a nightmare, if we cede too much to
| AI.
|
| And that isn't even talking about totalitarian regimes, run by
| people of the same ilk as child sex traffickers (only wearing
| Gucci, and living in palaces).
|
| _"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much
| attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in
| question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider
| the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular
| piece of legislation, whatever it might be." -Lyndon B. Johnson_
|
| _[EDITED TO ADD]:_ And I 100% agree that, if we _really_ want to
| help children, and victims of other crimes, then we need to start
| working on the _root causes_ of the issues.
|
| Poverty is, arguably, the #1 human problem on Earth, today. It
| causes levels of desperation that ignore things like climate
| change, resource shortages, and pollution. People are so
| desperate to get out of the living hell that 90% of the world
| experiences, daily, that they will do _anything_ (like sell
| children for sex), or are angry enough to cause great harm.
|
| If we _really_ want to solve a significant number of world
| problems, we need to deal with poverty; and that is not simple at
| all. I have members of my family that have been working on that,
| for decades. I have heard all the "yeah...but" arguments that
| expose supposedly simple solutions as... _not simple_.
|
| Of course, the biggest issue, is that the folks in the 0.0001%
| need to loosen their hands on their stashes, and that ain't
| happening, anytime soon. I don't know if the demographic
| represented by the Tech scene is up for that, since the 0.0001%
| are our heroes.
| g5095 wrote:
| I've been a FOSS dev for 25 years and I remember when everyone
| else I worked with were avid linux/freeBSD users because 'we
| didn't trust the big end of town'.. over the years I've watched
| the vast majority of devs move to apple devices for all sorts of
| 'just works', 'shinier' reasons that just boil down to
| 'convenience is more important than privacy'.
|
| Perhaps this is just the benefit of longevity but from my POV it
| was engineer early adoption and advocacy that made Apple, Google
| Search etc what they are, and it will be engineer early adoption
| and advocacy that dethrones these problematic companies from
| controlling the ecosystem..
|
| Back 20 years ago, before the community filled with $_$ dollars-
| struck startup founders, software was built by people who wanted
| to use it.. rather than sell it. There are still some people
| doing this now, Look at Matrix network for instance.
|
| What will it take for a grass-roots software industry to start
| building privacy-first apps and systems that don't suck, based on
| decentralised, distributed principles? We have the skills to
| build highly polished alternatives to these things, but it takes
| a determination to step away from convenience for a period of
| time for the sake of privacy.
|
| How bad does it have to get before the dev community realise
| this? or are we in a frog boiling slowly scenario and it's
| hopeless?
| chris_wot wrote:
| If they file even one false claim, then it ruins lives.
| cromwellian wrote:
| I don't see many people pushing back on the child pornography
| laws themselves that are the cause of this. I'm stepping into a
| hornets nest by even bringing this up, because any criticism of
| the laws on the books makes one look they're a pedo, so I'll
| preface by saying, child pornography (filmed with actual kids) is
| vile and disgusting, but it is the production of it that is evil
| to be fought and suppressed, not the possession of it. Remember
| in the 90s, we had to deal with the Communications Decency Act I
| & II, because every time they want to crack down on the internet,
| the excuse is always "it's for the children!" And pedophilia is
| the go-to excuse in a lot of circumstances.
|
| The CPPA had bans on virtual child porn (e.g. using look-alike
| adult actresses or CGI), that was overturned by SCOTUS, and then
| Congress responded with the PROTECT act which tightened up those
| provisions. These laws on possession are practically
| unenforceable with modern technology, peer to peer file sharing,
| onion routing, and encrypted hard drives.
|
| Thus, in order to make them enforcement, the government has to
| put surveillance at all egress and ingress points of our
| private/secure enclaves, whether it's at the point of storing it
| locally, or the point of uploading it to the cloud.
|
| While I agree with the goal of eliminating child porn, should it
| come at the cost of an omnipresent government surveillance system
| everywhere? One that could be used for future laws that restrict
| other forms of content? How about anti-vax imagery? Anti-Semitic
| imagery? And with other governments of the world watching,
| especially authoritarian governments, how long until China, which
| had a similar system with Jingwang Weishi
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingwang_Weishi) starts asking:
| hey, can you extend this to Falun Gong, Islamic, Hong Kong
| resistance, and Tiananmen square imagery? What if Thailand passes
| a law that requires Apple to scan for images insulting to the
| Thai Monarch, does Apple comply?
|
| This is a very bad precedent. I liked the Apple that said no to
| the FBI instead of installing backdoors. I'd prefer if Apple get
| fined, and battle all the way to the Supreme Court to resist
| this.
| zionic wrote:
| This. Everything that is happening now is downstream of some
| terrible laws.
| throwaway15773 wrote:
| Relatedly, I don't see much discussion around the nuances of
| what counts as cp. In my experience, the vast majority of cp
| people are likely to come into contact with is "consensual"
| (the definition of consent gets weird here) images taken by
| teenagers of themselves, not old men raping little kids. So
| what happens if a 17 year old girl takes pictures of herself,
| sends them to her partner, they break up, he posts them online
| as revenge porn, and a site moderator reports it as cp and its
| hash ends up in the db? Now police come after her because she
| has 25 similar images in her icloud and she gets treated like a
| criminal? She definitely did break the law I suppose, but
| there's so much more nuance there. I really feel like these are
| the kinds of people who are most likely to get flagged. I
| (hopefully) don't know anyone who keeps swaths of abusive cp on
| their iPhones, but I certainly have known a lot of underage
| kids with intimate pictures of themselves and their
| friends/partners.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Sure there's probably orders of magnitudes more of that
| content. But that's not what most people are targeting I
| think with these laws and tech. I believe when I read some of
| NYT (Gabriel J.X. Dance?) on this a while back it was
| explicitly about child abuse not "oops older teens".
| unethical_ban wrote:
| My understanding of the problem is that you are entirely
| wrong as to the ratio of "accidental" underage photos vs.
| "evil" photos. CSAM is "Child Sexual Abuse Material" and the
| abuse part is apparently more widespread than the public
| knows or wants to know.
|
| I have objections to this tool and have many of the same
| concerns expressed in these comments, but your example seems
| like a bit of a corner case compared to the broader
| "government panopticon" problem.
| kfprt wrote:
| The police already have an incentive to not investigate rape
| because it makes their numbers look bad which affects funding.
| Now extend that to children who can't file a police report and
| you can get an idea of how little the 'think of the children'
| crowd actually cares about stopping CSA. Pure hypocrisy. They
| expect us to surrender our fundamental rights while they look
| the other way (Sophie Long)on CSA.
| casefields wrote:
| There's a reason they always promote the most extreme cases to
| restrict liberty:
|
| "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends
| most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against
| scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression
| must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at
| all." -- HL Mencken
| api wrote:
| Something else I haven't heard anyone bring up: when child
| abusers are caught, sentences are often a joke. They often
| spend less time in prison than low to mid level drug offenders.
|
| CP is rape porn. People who produce or knowingly distribute
| actual rape porn (of children or adults) should be going to
| jail for 25+ years. I would not rule out life for extreme cases
| that also involve other forms of abuse.
|
| Yet as far as I know this isn't what is being pushed for.
| Instead we get a dragnet to try to catch low level offenders
| who will probably barely see prison because sex crimes are just
| not punished much in our society.
|
| Secondly... look into some of the people who have set up fake
| CP honey pots. These have included both vigilantes and security
| researchers trying to get a sense of how much CP is on Tor.
| Turns out most of these people are imbeciles and catching them
| is easy. Why don't police do this more? Because... well... as I
| said sex crimes are just not a priority.
|
| I really feel like the whole argument is in bad faith. If they
| really cared about the children there are so many other things
| that would be both easier and more effective.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Indeed. A case in particular was Benjamin Levin who was the
| Minister of Education in Ontario
|
| > Levin was ultimately nabbed conversing with police officers
| posing as single moms. He encouraged them to sexually abuse
| their kids and in some cases shared photos. [1]
|
| > In one case, Levin sent photographs to a New Zealand police
| officer, one showing a "close-up of the face of a crying
| child, her face smeared with black makeup." Levin suggested
| to her the image was "hot," according to parole board
| documents. Another photo he sent showed a young female bound
| and leashed, with a gag in her mouth and Levin commented,
| "Mmm, so hot to imagine a mother doing that to her girl to
| please her lover." [1]
|
| > On May 29, 2015, he was sentenced to three years in prison.
| He only spent 3 months of his sentence in jail before being
| paroled [2]
|
| [1] https://torontosun.com/2017/10/07/ex-deputy-education-
| minist... [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Levin_(academic)
| api wrote:
| There are loads and loads of cases like that. If they have
| good lawyers they don't even see prison, at least in the
| US. But we must backdoor everything to catch them so we can
| slap them on the wrist...?
| randyrand wrote:
| I think you're mistaken.
|
| Lots of rape porn is produced by women, for women. Typically
| novels, and sometimes graphic novels.
|
| It's legal, and definitely not something that takes with it a
| 25+ year sentence.
|
| You can literally find rape porn on Amazon bookshelves.
| Literally.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| Clearly they were talking about non-fictitious rape.
| [deleted]
| otterley wrote:
| The reason possession is illegal is to try to prevent further
| production of it and to eliminate continuing abuse to children.
| The theory is that allowing even mere possession perpetuates a
| market of "buyers" that would further stimulate production.
| This is well covered in the Congressional findings associated
| with 18 U.S.C. 2251. See e.g.
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2251 (click the
| notes tab).
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| This reasoning is working well in the War on Drugs, so let's
| not only employ it, but embrace and extend it, as well.
| borland wrote:
| The "legal" section talks about local scanning, and possible
| transmission of CSAM from devices to Apple, in pursuit of
| verification, however Apple have made clear that the scanning
| happens only for files that have been uploaded to iCloud Photo
| Library -- in which case they are not deliberately transmitting
| the CSAM but rather flagging something which the user already
| sent them.
|
| Likewise the copyright issue; The user has already sent these
| files to Apple themselves by enabling iCloud photo library, and
| Apple are not making any additional copies that I am aware of.
|
| It also says "The problem is that you don't know which pictures
| will be sent to Apple." - but we do know exactly which pictures
| will and will not be sent to apple; the ones that are already
| sent by iCloud Photo library.
|
| [To be clear, I don't like the precedent/slippery slope that this
| kind of technique might lead towards in the future, but it
| doesn't seem like all the criticisms of it today are valid]
| zionic wrote:
| This is a short sighted and naive viewpoint.
|
| Apple did not build this entire system to only scan uploads
| hah.
|
| This was built to scan the entire file system.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| I haven't read all the details, articles, and comments. My
| personal thoughts on the whole situation are the following.
|
| If you are a parent and lose a child then you would want every
| possible avenue taken to find your child. You would be going mad
| wanting to find them. If there is a way to match photos to known
| missing children then I say it should be at least tried.
|
| I equate this to Ring cameras. They are everywhere. You cannot go
| for a walk without showing up on dozens of cameras, which we know
| Amazon (god mode) and law enforcement abuse their access
| privileges. However, if a crime happened to you and a Ring camera
| captured it, then I know almost everyone would certainly want
| that footage reviewed. Would you ignore the Ring footage
| possibility just because you despise Ring cameras? Probably not.
|
| It's all an invasion of privacy until you're sitting on the other
| side of the table where you have a vested interest in getting
| access to the information.
| vageli wrote:
| > It's all an invasion of privacy until you're sitting on the
| other side of the table where you have a vested interest in
| getting access to the information.
|
| It is still an invasion of privacy regardless of the side on
| which you sit. This situation is unlike a ring camera capturing
| footage in a public space where individuals already have no
| expecation of privacy.
| shrewduser wrote:
| > If you are a parent and lose a child then you would want
| every possible avenue taken to find your child. You would be
| going mad wanting to find them. If there is a way to match
| photos to known missing children then I say it should be at
| least tried.
|
| the problem with this argument is that you can use it to
| justify basically anything.
| chrismcb wrote:
| And this is exactly why we have things like the fourth
| amendment in the US.
| fragmede wrote:
| If I lost my child, I would do anything and everything to get
| them back. I would shoot _anyone_ who got in the way. This is
| fine because I am not the police and they won 't give me guns.
|
| Kinda unrelated to _that_ , is the 4th amendment, which
| protects the rights of the people to be secure in their
| persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
| searches and seizures by the government.
| brandon272 wrote:
| If I were a parent and my child went missing, something much
| higher on my priority list than matching photos in some
| national database would be having the police search every home
| in a 2 mile radius of my home.
|
| It seems just as rational to argue that the people who live in
| those homes should be willing to give up their right to not
| have their home searched if it means potentially finding a
| missing child in a potential criminal's home.
|
| We can come up with all kinds of hypothetical situations. I am
| empathetic to parents going through the hell of a missing
| child, and to the children themselves. But the protection of
| children and victims must be balanced with the preservation of
| rights and freedoms considered deeply sacrosanct.
| truetraveller wrote:
| "It's all an invasion of privacy until you're sitting on the
| other side of the table"
|
| This is very insightful. It's also depressing, because it's a
| great point for those who oppose privacy. I even find myself
| swayed by this reasoning.
| headShrinker wrote:
| The government believes you might have information about a
| missing child and are withholding it. They are about to
| restrain you against your will and search your rectum without
| your consent.
|
| The reason this violation was able to take place is
| because...
|
| > It's all an invasion of privacy until you're sitting on the
| other side of the table
|
| The thing about privacy and the government is you must always
| envision yourself on the wrong side of the table, because you
| are. Right up to the point they are inside you. [1] Your
| right to privacy is your strength and without it you are a
| slave to forces you don't understand, can't see, hear, taste,
| or smell.
|
| Privacy or lack there of changes who you are and how you act.
| It changes what you say and why.
|
| Be very careful how you submit to surveillance. The privacy
| you forfeit can never be recaptured.
|
| [1] https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-man-sues-over-repeated-
| anal-pr...
| new299 wrote:
| > I equate this to Ring cameras.
|
| But it's just a totally different situation isn't it? I'm not
| personally opposed to the general concept of security cameras
| in public spaces. If you choose to install one on your property
| that doesn't seem unreasonable. If you choose to share that
| footage with the police that doesn't seem unreasonable.
|
| The problem with Apple's system isn't even the current
| implementation (which is on device, but iCloud only). It's that
| the system can be trivially expanded to all on device content,
| and report the user of the phone for any unacceptable
| behaviour.
|
| It's more like a camera in your home that reports you to the
| police if you do anything unacceptable. Would anyone choose to
| have that?
|
| But the bigger problem is that Apple have been selling products
| based on "privacy first" marketing. By reporting on their users
| off-line content they break that trust. And there are really
| few viable options in smartphones so you can't really just move
| to another provider.
| jrockway wrote:
| > It's all an invasion of privacy until you're sitting on the
| other side of the table where you have a vested interest in
| getting access to the information.
|
| That's why it's so insidious. People keep making it about
| children, which are a very worthy cause. Nobody wants child
| abuse. But the problem is that the technology can be used for
| anything. Wouldn't it be nice to read all of the internal Slack
| messages at a company you're about to acquire? Wouldn't it be
| nice for Apple to have a copy of Google's source code? Wouldn't
| it be nice for a political candidate to cause their opponent
| some legal trouble? Spying on other people is always very
| valuable and governments (and corporations, probably) spend
| billions of dollars a year on it.
|
| If we want to make this just about detecting abuse of children,
| I'm totally on board. Pass a law that says using this
| technology to steal corporate secrets or to gain a political
| advantage is punishable by death. Then maybe it can be taken
| seriously as something very narrow in scope. That, of course,
| would never happen. (Death penalty arguments aside; I'm
| exaggerating for effect.)
|
| I can't believe that once this technology is out, it's only
| going to be used for good. (I imagine politicians will love
| this. Look at the recent Andrew Cuomo abuse allegations -- he
| abuses women, and then his staff try to cover it up by leaking
| documents, to discredit the abused. Sure would be nice to see
| what sort of things they have on their phone, right? Will
| someone like Cuomo NEVER have a friend that can add detection
| hashes to the set and review the results? I would say it's a
| certainty that a powerful politician will have loyal insiders
| in the government, and that if this system is rolled out, we're
| going to see colossal abuse -- flat-out facilitation of crime,
| lives ruined -- over the next 20 years.)
|
| I have to wonder what Apple's angle is here. It would cost them
| less money to do nothing. They could be paying these
| researchers to work on something that makes Apple money, and
| banning users from their platform (or having them hauled off to
| prison) doesn't help them make money. I really don't want to be
| the conspiracy theory guy, but doesn't it seem weird that the
| Department of Justice wants to investigate Apple's 30% app
| store cut, and right about that time, Apple comes up with a new
| way to surveil the population for the Department of Justice?
| Maybe I read too much HN.
| headShrinker wrote:
| > It's all an invasion of privacy until you're sitting on the
| other side of the table where you have a vested interest in
| getting access to the information.
|
| That's the thing about privacy that so many don't want to
| admit. "Everyone deserves it, until they don't". All of
| society's privacy is more important than your single child,
| sorry.
|
| Meanwhile I created this great new technology. It runs in the
| background super efficiently on your phone. It immediately
| detects housefires and alerts you. It uses a combination of
| sensors to literally detect the spark of flame and there's only
| one in 1 trillion false positives.
|
| Simply download the app and give it permission to sample your
| microphones, cameras, accelerometers and historical gps data to
| build a profile, then flick a lighter anywhere in your house
| and sure enough your phone alarm goes off.
|
| How it works is incredible, an algorithm listens for supersonic
| soundwaves created by the chemical reaction during combustion.
| Video and sound samples are then reviewed by one of our
| technical representatives.
|
| Housefires and house fire deaths will be a thing of the past.
| The only compromise is that our algorithms listen to all of
| your video and audio and occasionally monitored by a human
| technician, which might include audio of you making love to
| your wife.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _All of society's privacy is more important than your
| single child, sorry._ " " _which might include audio of you
| making love to your wife._ "
|
| You and your wife bumping uglies just isn't that special,
| your embarassment about it is way out of proportion to the
| amount necessary. The fact that you would rather _people die
| in house fires_ than _a small chance that a stranger hears
| you breathing heavily and talking dirty_ should cause you a
| lot more concern than it seems to be causing you.
| upbeat_general wrote:
| Just to be clear, you're saying that it's unreasonable to
| prefer everyone having private bedroom conversations over
| the elimination of spontaneous house fires?
|
| That it's worth having a random human being able to listen
| to all said conversations?
|
| To me at least it's _incredibly_ reasonable to make that
| tradeoff. As a society we make tradeoffs all the time and
| people die as a result. Some of those tradeoffs are
| arguably unreasonable but this hypothetical seems very
| clear...
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Just to be clear, you're saying "I would not undergo
| temporary embarrassment to avert mass agonising death"
| and you think that's _incredibly_ reasonable?
| twoodfin wrote:
| The author of this article purports to have done a ton of
| research into this system, but appears to have missed basic
| information that I've acquired from a few podcasts.
|
| Namely the "1-in-a-trillion" false positives per account per year
| is based on the likelihood of _multiple_ photos matching the
| database (Apple doesn't say how many are required to trip their
| manual screening threshold).
| judge2020 wrote:
| Well, 3 photos or more are what puts you over the line for an
| affirmative defense against CSAM possession[0]. It's probably
| above that.
|
| 0:
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2252A#:~:text=(d)...
| not2b wrote:
| So they are assuming that the photos are independent. Common
| error with probabilistic reasoning. What if the same photo (or
| photos of the same scene taken seconds apart) gets uploaded
| more than once? The likelihood no longer multiplies. I don't
| believe the "one in a trillion" claim.
| tehnub wrote:
| They say that they address this issue through a mechanism
| outside of the cryptographic protocol, but don't say
| specifically how. The quote from the paper:
|
| A user might store multiple variants or near-duplicates of
| the same image on their client. In our language, this means
| that a single client could hold two triples (y,id,ad) and
| (y,id',ad) that have same hash y, but different identifiers.
| This causes an issue that is addressed outside of the
| cryptographic protocol. Suppose a user copies a single image
| from a USB drive onto his or her device. The image will be
| assigned an identifier id. Later the user copies the same
| image from the USB drive onto a different client device. The
| new copy of the image will be assigned a new identifier id'
| which is likely to be different from id. Because the two
| copies have different identifiers they will count twice
| towards the tPSI-AD threshold. In particular, the two triples
| will cause two distinct Shamir shares to be sent to the
| sever, even though they correspond to the same semantic
| image. Several solutions to this were considered, but
| ultimately, this issue is addressed by a mechanism outside of
| the cryptographic protocol. [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.apple.com/child-
| safety/pdf/Apple_PSI_System_Secu...
| cratermoon wrote:
| Question: who is or will be making money on this deal? Answer
| that ("follow the money") and then I think we'll have a handle on
| what's really going on.
| NonContro wrote:
| Apple gets to maintain its 30% commission and monopoly abuse of
| the app store (which is becoming the de-facto place where all
| consumer software downloads and payments occur), in return for
| feeding the iCloud data of all users worldwide to US
| intelligence agencies.
|
| Presumably the quid pro quo outcome is that Apple is allowed to
| win the Epic vs Apple lawsuit.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Ah! This and the other comment suggest a method: Apple
| implements something for "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" in exchange
| for government calling off the regulation dogs. Cynical.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| My guess: Apple is doing this to get regulators of its back
| while implementing end-to-end encryption.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I appreciate just about everything about this post, but this part
| keeps getting lost in everything I see written about it:
|
| >As noted, Apple says that they will scan your Apple device for
| CSAM material. If they find something that they think matches,
| then they will send it to Apple. The problem is that you don't
| know which pictures will be sent to Apple.
|
| It's iCloud Photos. Apple has _explicitly_ said it 's iCloud
| photos. If it's being synced to iCloud Photos, you know it's
| getting scanned one way or another (server side, currently, or
| client side, going forward).
|
| It notes privacy issues, but... iCloud syncs by default. You
| wouldn't do the kind of work they're talking about (e.g,
| investigation) and store that kind of material where it could be
| synced to a server to begin with.
|
| Everyone keeps proclaiming that Apple is scanning your entire
| device, but that's not what's happening with this change. It's
| not even comparable to A/V in this respect - it would be a very
| different story if that was the case. The wording and explanation
| matters.
| Renaud wrote:
| The use of the detection algorithm is for iCloud only _today_.
|
| Now that the technology is on-board the device, how many lines
| of codes do you think it will take to scan the full photo-roll?
|
| Do you think that this ability will not tempt LEA, law makers,
| governments, to push for that ever-so-small change to the code,
| either for blanket monitoring (see if China is not tempted,
| using their own database of "illegal" content) or for targetted
| monitoring (some specific users, with or without valid court
| orders).
|
| The main issue is that the wall has been breached: monitoring
| data that was otherwise only on-device is now possible with
| little to no change as the feature is now embedded in the OS.
|
| You can argue we're not there yet and can trust Apple to do-
| the-right-thing and that the Rule of Law will protect citizen
| against abuse, but that's a big step into a worrying trend, and
| not all countries follow the Rule of Law and have checks and
| balances to avoid misuse. Don't forget that Apple abides by the
| laws of countries where it sells its devices. That means they
| will -forced or not- do what they are told.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Based on this article (and my first rebuttal[0]) I actually
| think the whole "only photos syncing to icloud photos" part
| of it is the defining factor making it legal - if Apple
| specifically only sent themselves photos that were detected
| as CSAM, it would likely be a felony, while the planned
| system can use the reasoning I laid out to likely not be
| charged with such felony.
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28112312
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Is the problem here, as so many commenters complain, that
| _Apple_ won 't resist the corrupt government, or is that that
| _society as whole_ won 't overthrow the corrupt government?
| Klonoar wrote:
| >The use of the detection algorithm is for iCloud only
| _today_.
|
| Yes, which is what I was saying in my comment. If or when it
| comes to Apple changing this then I would agree it's a battle
| worth fighting, but that is _not_ what is happening here and
| that is _not_ what I was correcting in this article itself.
|
| >The main issue is that the wall has been breached:
|
| The wall was breached when we opted to run proprietary OS
| systems. You have _zero clue_ what is going on in that OS and
| whether it 's reporting; you _have_ to trust the vendor on
| some level and Apple is being fairly transparent here. I
| would be far more worried if they did this without saying
| anything at all.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _Yes, which is what I was saying in my comment. If or when
| it comes to Apple changing this then I would agree it 's a
| battle worth fighting, but that is not what is happening
| here and that is not what I was correcting in this article
| itself._
|
| Isn't it too late to fight the battle then? They've already
| built the infrastructure to make it trivial to scan any
| file on your device.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| It's their operating system! Files are already "scanned"
| by their processes, how do you think they get from the
| camera to the hard drive?
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I'd imagine that they do that by writing the bits to the
| hard drive without creating a fuzzy hash used to match
| your picture with those in some organization's list?
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Sorry, perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by
| "infrastructure".
|
| Apple have always had the ability to do great evil to a
| lot of people, this update doesn't change that. They
| haven't gained any power they didn't already have.
|
| The government, for example, do _not_ currently have the
| infrastructure to push updates to iPhone. If they passed
| laws, built servers etc to allow this then that would be
| a meaningful change that would be worth all this chatter.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _The government, for example, do not currently have the
| infrastructure to push updates to iPhone_
|
| That's the point, this is a slippery slope -- without
| this system, governments have no way to compel Apple to
| scan for objectionable photos, Apple could claim, rightly
| so, that due to encryption technology and privacy, they
| have no way to do it. But now they've removed both the
| technological and privacy hurdle, and it's just a matter
| of logistics.
|
| Now governments know that all they need is a database of
| banned photos and they can go to Apple and say "In our
| country, it's illegal to share photos that put our
| government in a bad light. Here's a database of banned
| photos. If you don't comply, you can't sell your phones
| to our 1.4 billion citizens".
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| I only disagree that Apple could have previously
| "rightly" said it was impossible.
|
| If China had previously demanded they scan users photos
| for certain material, then Apple could always have done
| so.
|
| Sure, it would involve pushing an update to all phones,
| but so would the change you are talking about (to check
| more hashes).
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| The entire technical infrastructure to scan your entire device
| for arbitrary content is being built and deployed.
|
| The only change necessary to scan other files is changing a
| path and that's configuration that could even be silently done
| per-device.
| zionic wrote:
| I love that this is the (correct) response here. /r/Apple is
| full of morons that read the press release and honestly
| believe making this system scan the whole file system is
| impossible.
| Klonoar wrote:
| >The entire technical infrastructure to scan your entire
| device for arbitrary content is being built and deployed.
|
| It's a proprietary OS. This literally could exist already and
| you would have zero clue.
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| The difference between open and closed source is not lost
| to anyone on this site. There is a grand canyon sized gap
| between 'could already exist and you have no clue' and 'we
| have built and are deploying this system'.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| > However, nothing in the iCloud terms of service grants Apple
| access to your pictures for use in research projects, such as
| developing a CSAM scanner. (Apple can deploy new beta features,
| but Apple cannot arbitrarily use your data.) In effect, they
| don't have access to your content for testing their CSAM system.
|
| > If Apple wants to crack down on CSAM, then they have to do it
| on your Apple device.
|
| I don't understand... Apple can't change their TOS but they can
| install this scanning service on your device?
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > Apple can't change their TOS
|
| Why not... has anyone actually successfully sued a company for
| changing their ToS from under them?
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| That's what I don't understand about that paragraph.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Yes, see Douglas v. Talk America.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Thanks for the link.
|
| ... but I'm not sure that would apply here, especially if
| Apple has a pop-up that the user dismissed a long time ago.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| It's unclear what the legal limits are, but I've seen
| some sites do a bold print summary of the changes.
| Certainly if one wants to be sure their TOS change is
| enforceable they'll make sure a judge and jury will agree
| the changes were prominently advertised.
| jandrese wrote:
| Doesn't every TOS include that clause about the customer
| automatically accepting any change the company makes to the
| TOS at any time and without notification?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| German banks just fell on their face with this one. They
| tried to implement fee increases this way (often turning
| free into paid accounts), but the courts nixed this.
|
| Unfortunately not fast enough, so some banks got away with
| the first year or two worth of loot due to statutes of
| limitations, but it's now clear that companies can't just
| change material parts of the ToS without explicit, active
| consent (it's not enough to notify customers and consider
| it agreement if they don't do anything).
| jandorn wrote:
| Apple said it is coming in iOS 15 and when you install it, you
| will need to accept TOS. It might change at that point.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Really nice explanation from someone who knows a thing or two
| about images/photos (Dr. Neal Krawetz is the creator of
| https://fotoforensics.com and specializes in computer forensics).
| valparaiso wrote:
| He wrongly interpreted CSAM scanning. He said that Apple will
| scan your photos and if finds something, it will send photo to
| Apple. Which is absolutely not how it works. Photo is only
| scanned before uploading to iCloud Photos. Apple already
| confirmed it to iMore and it's clearly stated in Apple papers
| from press-release.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| You're very clearly missing the forest for the trees. Right
| before uploading to icloud, "Apple will scan your photos and
| if finds something, it will send photo to Apple."
|
| This process is automated and turned on on most iPhones. Most
| iPhones will have automatic photo upload to icloud enabled,
| and that's when this scanning takes place.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Most iPhones will have automatic photo upload to icloud
| enabled,
|
| I highly doubt that with how each photo is 10+MB and Apple
| only gives an abysmal 5GB of free iCloud storage, which
| includes everything else. My iphone 6s backups got to 4.5gb
| on their own years ago, turning off photo storage was the
| only way to avoid paying for iCloud storage outright.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| "The problem with AI is that you don't know what attributes
| it finds important.... It determined that ... a guy with
| long hair is female."
|
| Lots of people had this problem back in the 60s. Funny -
| except that some guys were jailed or worse because of it.
| zionic wrote:
| Please stop spreading misinformation.
|
| Apple has built the system to scan your entire phone, their
| claims about its limited scope are suspect.
| judge2020 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28112982
| [deleted]
| ikhanhmai wrote:
| cool
| ikhanhmai wrote:
| awesome product!
| Little_John wrote:
| I hear a Siren Outside Someone has a serious problem. Don't just
| shine it on.
| jscipione wrote:
| What assurances do we have that this system will not be used to
| flag "extremist content" i.e. memes and to send that information
| to law-enforcement in the future?
| IronWolve wrote:
| There was parents arrested over bath time and playing in the yard
| sprinklers, photos being processed at photo mats, will the same
| thing happen by apple mistakenly reporting parents?
|
| When I worked telecom, we had md5sum database to check for this
| type of content. If you emailed/sms/uploaded a file with the same
| md5sum, your account was flagged and sent to legal to confirm it.
|
| Also if a police was involved, the account was burned to dvd in
| the datacenter, and only a police officer would touch the dvd, no
| engineer touched or saw the evidence. (Chain of Evidence
| maintained)
|
| Prob changed since I haven't worked in telecom in 15 years, but
| one thing I've read for years, is the feds knew who these people
| are, where they hang out online, even ran the some of the
| honeypots. The problem is they leave these sites up to catch the
| ring leaders, the feds are aware, they have busts almost every
| month of rings of criminals. Twitter has had accounts reported,
| and they stay up for years.
|
| I dont think finding the criminals are the problem, seems like
| every time this happens, theres been people of interest for
| years, just not enough law enforcement dedicated to investigating
| this.
|
| All the defund the police, I think moving some police from
| traffic duty to Internet crimes would be more of an impact on
| actual cases being closed. Those crimes lead to racketeering and
| other organized crime anyways.
| prawn wrote:
| You can read a bit more about how it would work here:
|
| https://daringfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia...
|
| (No, not arresting parents over bath time.)
| vmladenov wrote:
| I want to draw attention to one point in this
|
| > Will Apple actually flatly refuse any and all such demands?
| If they do, it's all good. If they don't, and these features
| creep into surveillance for things like political dissent,
| copyright infringement, LGBT imagery, or adult pornography --
| anything at all beyond irrefutable CSAM -- it'll prove
| disastrous to Apple's reputation for privacy protection. The
| EFF seems to see such slipping down the slope as inevitable.
|
| What seems to be missing from this discussion is that Apple
| is _already_ doing these scans on the iCloud photos they
| store. Therefore, the slippery slope scenario is already a
| threat today. What's stopping Apple from acquiescing to a
| government request to scan for political content right now,
| or in any of the past years iCloud photos has existed? The
| answer is they claim not to and their customers believe them.
| Nothing changes when the scanning moves on device, though, as
| the blog mentions, I suspect this is a precursor to allowing
| more private data in iCloud backups that Apple cannot decrypt
| even when ordered to.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The slippery slope has already been slid down for every
| iCloud user in China.
| jolux wrote:
| > There was parents arrested over bath time and playing in the
| yard sprinklers, photos being processed at photo mats, will the
| same thing happen by apple mistakenly reporting parents?
|
| No, because they're not identifying content, they're matching
| it against a set of already-known CSAM that NCMEC maintains. As
| you go on to say, telecoms and other companies already do this.
| Apple just advanced the state of the art when it comes to the
| security and privacy guarantees involved.
| XorNot wrote:
| It's a lossy hash match though. If it wasn't, then subtly re-
| encoding the image would hide it. So they're definitely going
| to be mistakingly matching images.
| robertoandred wrote:
| And any mistakes would be caught by the manual review.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| So now Apple gets to paw through your images without a
| warrant or consent?
| jolux wrote:
| You consent in the terms of service for iCloud Photos.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Try that on your next date and let me know how it goes
| for you.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The date will probably leave, so why would people "on a
| date" with iCloud Photos stay?
| jolux wrote:
| I don't tend to sign contracts with people I date.
| seaofmars wrote:
| Entering a legally sound contract is a far cry from rape,
| don't you think?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Which will have its own rate of false positives. Manual
| review is not a panacea, especially if the original net
| is cast widely.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| A set of unverified hashes that you hope only came from
| NCMEC. Telecoms do this on their own devices - not yours.
|
| Apple just opened the door for constant searches of your
| digital devices. If you think it will stop at CSAM you have
| never read a history book - the single biggest user of UKs
| camera system originally intended for serious crimes are
| housing councils checking to see who didn't clean up after
| their dog.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| > the single biggest user of UKs camera system originally
| intended for serious crimes are housing councils checking
| to see who didn't clean up after their dog.
|
| Which camera system? Do you have a citation for that?
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| That's absolute nonsense but it's one of those things
| where I'd be interested to try and unpick the provenance
| of how someone could believe something so ridiculous.
| dijit wrote:
| You guys are so dismissive. How dare you look down on
| some random person without even taking 10 seconds to look
| it up.
|
| https://www.thewestmorlandgazette.co.uk/news/17327294.cct
| v-c...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-22792013
|
| Anecdotally my Mum works for Coventry City Council
| (though she is in events planning) but has noted
| complaints from colleagues about "busy work" from "fussy
| old people who keep asking for camera footage" -- though
| Coventry often declines.
|
| Information on those cameras:
| https://www.coventry.gov.uk/cctv
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| One or two news reports of local councils maybe using
| CCTV, doesn't back up your claim.
|
| The UK doesn't have a super camera system used for minor
| crimes like you insinuate.
|
| The high camera counts in the UK come from including
| private CCTV cameras in the data which privately owned
| and are not linked together, hence the government is not
| using a network of cameras to monitor dog poo clean up as
| you claim.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| The UK government explicitly lays out a strategy for
| provate cameras to be bought and operated with mandatory
| rules for police access to footage. [1]
|
| This is on top of the cameras that ARE owned by
| government entities - 18+ city councils [2]. And it's
| expanding [3].
|
| Why do you think it matters if they are linked together?
| Retaining footage and handing it over to police on
| request (not warrant) is a requirement. The IPA allows
| collecting this information in bulk (eg from cctv
| providers) with warrants. [4]
|
| [1] - PDF Warning https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u
| k/government/uploads/...
|
| [2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-17116526
|
| [3] - https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/uk-
| funds-stre...
|
| [4] - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/25/conten
| ts/enacte...
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| I don't think any of your links remotely substantiate
| what you claimed ( _" the single biggest user of UKs
| camera system originally intended for serious crimes are
| housing councils checking to see who didn't clean up
| after their dog."_).
|
| What even is the "camera system originally intended for
| serious crimes"?
| cryptonym wrote:
| Don't know about UK but in France they are now using CCTV
| to fine not well parked delivery guys for a 2 minutes
| stop. While I agree vehicle parked anywhere can be a big
| inconvenience and deserve a fine, I don't think that's a
| big crime justifying deployment of such a surveillance
| system.
|
| This totally makes sense, having one cop checking 100+
| CCTV is far more efficient than a full team walking in
| the streets. Once you justified the cost on privacy and
| managed to deploy such system, it's so easy and
| convenient to use it for something else.
| jolux wrote:
| > A set of unverified hashes that you hope only came from
| NCMEC. Telecoms do this on their own devices - not yours.
|
| Yes, those are the main things we're concerned about.
|
| > Apple just opened the door for constant searches of your
| digital devices.
|
| Specifically, it opens the door to them scanning content
| which is then end-to-end encrypted, which is the main
| problem.
|
| I think the jury is out on whether this capability will be
| abused. Apple has said they will reject requests to use it
| for other purposes, but who really knows whether they will
| end up being forced to add hashes that aren't CSAM?
|
| I agree that both of these are potential problems.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Apple gave up in the face of China. Why not the US too?
| jolux wrote:
| Because they have legal avenues in the US that they don't
| have in China? Easy.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| They had a legal avenue in China called leaving. That was
| not profitable though, so they compromised their ethics
| in exchange for money.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm concerned about personal security risks of this move by Apple
| (e.g., Swatting-like attacks).
|
| Just wasted the weekend on this, and now asking for options:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111995
| cletus wrote:
| I'm honestly shocked that Apple is buying into this because it's
| one of those well-intentioned ideas that is just incredibly bad.
| It also goes to show you can justify pretty much anything by
| saying it fights terrorism or child exploitation.
|
| We went through this 20+ years ago when US companies then
| couldn't export "strong" encryption (being stronger than 40 bits
| if you can believe that). Even at the time that was ridiculously
| low.
|
| We then moved onto cryptographic back doors, which seem like a
| good idea but aren't for the obvious reason that if a backdoor
| exists, it will be exploited by someone you didn't intend or used
| by an authorized party in an unintended way (parallel
| construction anyone?).
|
| So these photos exist on Apple servers but what they're
| proposing, if I understand it correctly, is that that data will
| no longer be protected on their servers. That is, human review
| will be required in some cases. By definition that means the data
| can be decrypted. Of course it'll be by (or intended to be by)
| authorized individuals using a secured, audited system.
|
| But a backdoor now exists.
|
| Also, what controls exist on those who have to review the
| material? What if it's a nude photo of an adult celebrity? How
| confident are we that someone can't take a snap of that on their
| own phone and sell it or distribute it online? It doesn't have to
| be a celebrity either of course.
|
| Here's another issue: in some jurisdictions it's technically a
| case of distributing CSAM to have a naked photo of yourself (if
| you're underage) on your own phone. It's just another overly
| broad, badly written statute thrown together in the hysteria of
| "won't anybody think of the children?" but it's still a problem.
|
| Will Apple's system identify such photos and lead to people
| getting prosecuted for their own photos?
|
| What's next after this? Uploading your browsing history to see if
| you visit any known CSAM trafficking sites or view any such
| material?
|
| This needs to be killed.
| fuzzybassoon wrote:
| I don't know how I feel about all of this yet (still trying to
| understand better), but your post implies that you've made a
| lot of incorrect assumptions about how this system works.
|
| For example, the main system in discussion never sends the
| image to Apple, only a "visual proxy", and furthermore, it only
| aims to identify known (previously cataloged) CSAM.
|
| There's a [good primer of this on Daring Fireball](https://dari
| ngfireball.net/2021/08/apple_child_safety_initia...)
| upbeat_general wrote:
| If the visual proxy is enough to determine CSAM from non-
| CSAM, it's a significant invasion of privacy. Sure a
| thumbnail is less information than full-res but not that much
| less.
| fuzzybassoon wrote:
| FWIW I'm not defending this, but it's important to get the
| facts correct.
|
| 1) Someone can't just randomly review one of your images.
| The implementation is built on threshold secret sharing, so
| the visual derivative can't be reviewed (is
| cryptographically secure) unless you hit the threshold of
| matched content.
|
| 2) You're uploading these files to iCloud, which is
| currently _not_ end-to-end encrypted. So these photos can
| be reviewed in the current iCloud regime.
| upbeat_general wrote:
| Yeah aware of this.
|
| 1) Still, I'm unable to audit this protocol which has a
| threshold I'm not allowed to know. It also always comes
| back to control over the "hash" DB. If you can add
| anything to it (as apple could), then the threshold part
| becomes more trivial.
|
| 2) My understanding was that they currently don't but
| perhaps I'm incorrect. I know for a fact that they give
| access to law enforcement if there's a subpoena however.
| Also, there is a difference in terms of building in local
| scanning functionality. When it's done on their server,
| they can only ever access what I have sent. Otherwise,
| the line is much fuzzier (even if the feature promises to
| only scan iCloud photos).
| zionic wrote:
| Legally, a visual proxy of CP is CP
| fuzzybassoon wrote:
| And?
|
| My point about visual proxies was in reference to the OP's
| point:
|
| > Also, what controls exist on those who have to review the
| material? What if it's a nude photo of an adult celebrity?
| How confident are we that someone can't take a snap of that
| on their own phone and sell it or distribute it online? It
| doesn't have to be a celebrity either of course.
|
| I never said that a visual proxy/derivitive wasn't CSAM.
|
| I assume your point had something to do with the legality
| of sending this data to Apple for review?
|
| I'm not a lawyer, and I have read that NCMEC is the only
| entity with a legal carve out for possessing CSAM, but if
| FB and Google already have teams of reviewers for this type
| of material and other abuse images, I imagine there must be
| a legal way for this type of review to take place. I mean,
| these were all images that were being uploaded to iCloud
| anyway.
| robertoandred wrote:
| > Will Apple's system identify such photos and lead to people
| getting prosecuted for their own photos?
|
| No, no, no. As has been said a billion times by now, this
| system matches copies of specific CSAM photographs in the
| NCMEC's database.
| missingrib wrote:
| >So these photos exist on Apple servers but what they're
| proposing, if I understand it correctly, is that that data will
| no longer be protected on their servers. That is, human review
| will be required in some cases. By definition that means the
| data can be decrypted. Of course it'll be by (or intended to be
| by) authorized individuals using a secured, audited system.
|
| Apple has always had the decryption keys for encrypted photos
| stored in iCloud, so this isn't new. They never claimed that
| your photos were end-to-end encrypted. I'm not sure how this is
| a "backdoor" unless you think there's a risk of either
| something like AES getting broken or Apple storing the keys in
| a way that's insecure, both of which seem unlikely to me.
|
| >Also, what controls exist on those who have to review the
| material? What if it's a nude photo of an adult celebrity? How
| confident are we that someone can't take a snap of that on
| their own phone and sell it or distribute it online? It doesn't
| have to be a celebrity either of course.
|
| I'm equally interested in the review process. But while
| perceptual hash collisions are possible, it seems unlikely that
| multiple random nude photos on the same device would almost
| exactly match known CSAM content, which is the threshold for
| Apple reviewing the content.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| OPs article cites the number of NCMEC reports from Apple vs.
| other tech giants (200 something vs 20 million something at
| Facebook). It is all a bit confusing and I expect most of us
| are learning more about iCloud than we ever planned on; Apple
| has been able to decrypt our iCloud photos all along but
| those reporting figures make it pretty clear that they
| haven't been doing so en masse. This is a big shift.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| NCMEC has essentially shows that they have zero regard for
| privacy and called all privacy activists "screeching voices of
| the minority". At the same time, they're at the center point of a
| highly opaque, entrenched (often legally mandated) censorhip
| infrastructure that can and will get accounts shut down
| irrecoverably and possibly people's homes raided, on questionable
| data:
|
| In one of the previous discussions, I've seen claims about the
| NCMEC database containing a lot of harmless pictures
| misclassified as CSAM. This post confirms this again (ctrl-f
| "macaque")
|
| It also seems like the PhotoDNA hash algorithm is problematic (to
| the point where it may be possible to trigger false matches).
|
| Now NCMEC seem to be pushing for the development of a technology
| that would implant an informant in every single of our devices
| (mandating the inclusion of this technology is the logical next
| step that seems inevitable if Apple launches this).
|
| I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author seems
| to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper. The
| NCMEC seems to have decided to position itself directly alongside
| other Enemies of the Internet, and while I can imagine that
| they're also doing a lot of important and good work, at this
| point, I don't think they're salvageable would like to see them
| disbanded.
|
| Really curious how this will play out. I expect attacks either
| sabotaging these scanning systems by flooding them with false
| positives, or exploiting them to get the accounts of your enemies
| shut down permanently by sending them a picture of a macaque.
| axaxs wrote:
| Scary to admit this, but whatever. In my younger years, which
| coincidentally were also the younger years of the internet, I
| used to come across... let's say...bad things all the time.
|
| Being a decent enough human, I made many reports to NCMEC.
| Human verified(me) reports.
|
| Never once did I hear back. Not even some weird auto-reply.
| Needless to say, I have zero faith in that agency. Fitting
| they'd get others to do the work.
| babesh wrote:
| I think there is a trend across the world of power centers
| becoming more authoritarian and punitive. It is en vogue to see
| it in China and point them out for it.
|
| It is harder to look in the mirror and see something similar
| happening in the US. In the US, we superficially see government
| doing it (Snowden disclosures) and then we see corporations
| doing it separately (Facebook, Google ad tracking, etc...).
| However, I think government and tech giants are working closely
| together to act like China. This feels like another bud of this
| trend.
|
| - Social credit system
|
| - Loss of financial services (PayPal)
|
| - Loss of access to social media (Facebook, Google, Apple,
| YouTube)
|
| - Loss of access to travel related services (AirBnB, travel
| ban)
|
| - Banning of material (Amazon)
|
| - Control of media (owned by just a few major corporations who
| don't have to make money from the media... Comcast basically
| has a monopoly on land line Internet, AT&T has a very strong
| position on mobile, Disney has a strong position in films...
| they own CNN, NBC, and ABC)... EDIT: And let's not forget Fox
|
| You can say all you want about freedom of association, but the
| effect is similar in China and the US. You are ostracized from
| the system.
|
| Tech has lost its neutral carrier status and now is connected
| into a system that enforces consent. I wonder why? Are we being
| prepared for an economic war? Is this the natural evolution of
| power seeking power? Is this just a cycle of authoritarianism
| and liberalism?
|
| P.S. I don't think groundswell upcry leading to cancellation
| means much. I am much more concerned when corporations do it. I
| just think they are much, much more powerful.
| lilSebastian wrote:
| > It also seems like the PhotoDNA hash algorithm is problematic
| (to the point where it may be possible to trigger false matches
|
| A post here some days ago (since removed) linked to a google
| drive containing generated images (which displayed nonsense),
| the hashes of which matched those of genuine problems images.
| [deleted]
| hackerfactor1 wrote:
| > I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author
| seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper.
|
| I'm the author.
|
| I've worked with different parts of NCMEC for years. (I built
| the initial FotoForensics service in a few days. Before I wrote
| the first line of code, I was in phone calls with NCMEC about
| my reporting requirements.) Over time, this relationship grew.
| Some years, I was in face-to-face development discussions,
| other times it have been remote communications. To me, there
| are different independent parts working inside NCMEC.
|
| The CyberTipline and their internal case staff are absolutely
| incredible. They see the worst of people in the media and
| reports that they process. They deal with victims and families.
| And they remain the kindest and most sincere people I've ever
| encountered. When possible, I will do anything needed to make
| their job easier.
|
| The IT group has gone through different iterations, but they
| are always friendly and responsive. When I can help them, I
| help them.
|
| When I interact with their legal staff, they are very polite.
| But I rarely interact with them directly. On occasion, they
| have also given me some very bad advice. (It might be good for
| them. But, as my own attorney pointed out, it is generally
| over-reaching in the requested scope.)
|
| The upper management that I have interacted with are a pain in
| the ass. If it wasn't for the CyberTipline, related
| investigators, and the IT staff, I would have walked away (or
| minimized my interactions) long ago.
|
| Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my
| view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid detection
| and it will help malcontents manufacture false-positives. The
| paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law enforcement. It
| won't help victims.
|
| About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the
| kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not
| seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There
| is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP
| and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just
| one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually
| abused before the age of 18.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think
| about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the
| scope of this problem or the long term impact.
|
| What you are saying here kind of sidetracks the actual
| problem those critics have though, doesn't it? The problem is
| not the acknowledgement of how bad child abuse is. The
| problem is whether we can trust the people who claim that
| everything they do, they do it for the children. The problem
| is damaged trust.
|
| And I think your last paragraph illustrates why child abuse
| is such an effective excuse, if someone criticizes your plan,
| just avoid and go into how bad child abuse really is.
|
| I'm not accusing you of anything here by the way, I like the
| article and your insight. I just see a huge danger in the
| critics and those who _actually_ want to help with this
| problem being pitted against each other by people who see the
| topic of child abuse as nothing but a convenient carrier for
| their goals, the ones that have actually heavily damaged a
| lot of trust.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| What are the main instances where these claims were made
| fraudulently?
| fsflover wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infoca
| lyp...
| dijit wrote:
| Snoopers Charter in the UK springs to mind.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| The snoopers charter was always fairly broad though. It
| was never about child abuse, it covers collecting phone
| records etc which is used in most police investigations.
| Unless you are referring to some particular aspect of it
| I'm not aware of?
|
| I understand very broad stuff might be _sold_ as
| "helping to fight child abuse" while avoiding talking
| about the full scope, but that isn't what Apple/NCMEC are
| doing here. They are making quite explicit claims about
| the scope.
|
| That's why I'm wondering if there is precedent for claims
| about "we will ONLY use this for CSAM" which were later
| backtracked.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| One example I quote from EFF's post _Apple 's Plan to
| "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to
| Your Private Life_ [1] on the topic:
|
| _We've already seen this mission creep in action. One of
| the technologies originally built to scan and hash child
| sexual abuse imagery has been repurposed to create a
| database of "terrorist" content [2] that companies can
| contribute to and access for the purpose of banning such
| content. The database, managed by the Global Internet
| Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) [3], is troublingly
| without external oversight, despite calls from civil
| society [4]. While it's therefore impossible to know
| whether the database has overreached, we do know that
| platforms regularly flag critical content [5] as
| "terrorism," including documentation of violence and
| repression, counterspeech, art, and satire._
|
| [1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-
| think-diff...
|
| [2]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/08/one-database-
| rule-them...
|
| [3]: https://gifct.org/
|
| [4]: https://cdt.org/insights/human-rights-ngos-in-
| coalition-lett...
|
| [5]: https://www.eff.org/wp/caught-net-impact-extremist-
| speech-re...
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Thanks, I think I see what you mean. Essentially another
| organisation has used file hashes to scan for extremist
| material, by their definition of extreme.
|
| I agree that has potential for abuse but it doesn't seem
| to explain what the actual link is to NCMEC. It just says
| _" One of the technologies originally built to scan and
| hash child sexual abuse imagery has been repurposed..."_
| but doesn't name this "technology". Is it talking about
| PhotoDNA?
| ElFitz wrote:
| Here in France, law enforcement & probably some
| intelligence agencies used to monitor P2P networks for
| child pornography & content terrorists like to share with
| one another.
|
| Now we have the expensive and pretty much useless
| "HADOPI" paying a private company to do the same for
| copyright infringement.
|
| Ironically enough, it seems the interior and defence
| ministries cried out when our lawmakers decided to expand
| it to copyright infringement on the request of copyright
| holders. They were afraid some geeks, either out of
| principle or simply to keep torrenting movies, would
| democratise already existing means to hide one's self
| online, and create new ones.
|
| Today, everyone knows to look for a VPN or a seedbox.
| Some even accept payments in crypto or gift cards.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| hvidgaard wrote:
| I'm not the one you reply to, but I have some relevant
| thoughts on the process. I'm value my fundamental right
| to privacy. I understand that technology can be used to
| stop bad things from happening if we accept a little less
| privacy.
|
| I am okay with giving up some privacy under certain
| conditions, that is directly related to democracy. In
| essence a database and tech of any kind that
| systematically violates privacy we need the power
| distributed and "fair" trials. I.e. legislative branch,
| executive branch and judiciary branch.
|
| * Only the legislative branch, the politicians, should be
| able to enable violation of privacy, i.e. by law. Then
| and only then can companies be allowed to do it.
|
| * The executive have oversight of the process and tech,
| they would in essence be responsible to saying go/no-go
| to a specific implementation. They would also be
| responsible to perform a yearly review. All according to
| the law. This also includes the police.
|
| * The judiciary branch, the justice system, is
| responsible for looking at "positive" hits and grant the
| executive branch case by case powers to use the
| information.
|
| If we miss any of those three, I am not okay with
| systematically violation of privacy.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out, I have updated my comment
| to provide the links from the quote, which were
| hyperlinks in the EFF post.
|
| > it doesn't seem to explain what the actual link is to
| NCMEC
|
| The problem I see is the focus that is put onto the CSAM
| database. I quote from Apples FAQ on the topic [1]:
|
| _Apple only learns about accounts that are storing
| collections of known CSAM images, and only the images
| that match to known CSAM_
|
| and
|
| _Our process is designed to prevent that from happening.
| CSAM detection for iCloud Photos is built so that the
| system only works with CSAM image hashes provided by
| NCMEC and other child safety organizations. This set of
| image hashes is based on images acquired and validated to
| be CSAM by child safety organizations._
|
| Which is already dishonest in my opinion. Here lie the
| main problems and my reasons to find the implementation
| highly problematic derived from how I personally
| understand things:
|
| - Nothing would actually prevent Apple from adding
| different database sources. The only thing the "it's only
| CSAM" part hinges on is Apple choosing to only use image
| hashes provided by NCMEC. It's not a system built
| "specifically for CSAM images provided by NCMEC". It's
| ultimately a system to scan for arbitrary image hashes,
| and Apple chooses to limit those to one specific source
| with the promise to keep the usage limited to that.
|
| - The second large attack vector comes from outside, what
| if countries decide to fuse their official CSAM databases
| with additional uses? Let's say Apple does actually mean
| it and they uphold their promise: There isn't anything
| Apple can do to guarantee that the scope stays limited to
| child abuse material since they don't have control over
| the sources. I find it hard to believe that certain
| figures are not already rubbing their hands about this in
| a "just think about all the possibilites" kind of way.
|
| In short: The limited scope only rests on two promises:
| That Apple won't expand it and that the source won't be
| merged with other topics (like terrorism) in the future.
|
| The red flag for me here is that Apple acts as if there
| was some technological factor that ties this system only
| to CSAM material.
|
| Oh and of course the fact that the fine people at Apple
| think (or at least agree) that Electronic Frontier
| Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the
| Open Privacy Research Center, Johns Hopkins, Harvard's
| Cyberlaw Clinic and more are "the screeching voices of
| the minority". Doesn't quite inspire confidence.
|
| [1]: https://www.apple.com/child-
| safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_...
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| > About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about
| the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have
| not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact.
| There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal
| in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely
| victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US
| will be sexually abused before the age of 18.
|
| Maybe it's the fact that I don't have kids, or that I spend
| most of my life online with various devices and services. But
| I would much rather drop the NCMEC, drop any requirement to
| monitor private messages or photos, reinstate strong privacy
| guarantees, and instead massively step up monitoring
| requirements for families. This argument seems like we're
| using CSAM as a crutch to get at child abusers. If the
| relationship is really nearly 1:1, it seems more efficient to
| more closely monitor the groups most likely to be abusers
| instead.
|
| It even seems to me that going after a database of existing
| CSAM is counterproductive. With that material, the damage is
| already done. In a perverse sense, we want as many pedos as
| possible to buy old CSAM, since this reduces the market for
| new abuse. It seems to me that initiatives like this do the
| opposite.
|
| I am not defending CSAM here. But CSAM and child abuse are
| connected problems, and istm child abuse is the immensely
| greater one. We should confront child abuse as the first
| priority, even at the expense of CSAM enforcement, even at
| the expense of familial privacy. With a rate of 1 in 10, I
| don't see how not doing so can be ethically defended.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "and instead massively step up monitoring requirements for
| families"
|
| Pls have a family first and then see if you ask for more
| state governence into your life?
|
| It is true, most abuse happens in the family, but there is
| also schools, churches, sports clubs, ...
|
| But the thing is, if the schools for example would have the
| stuff, with enough time (and empathy) to care about the
| actual children and talk with them and interact with them
| (and not mainly the paperwork about them) - then you could
| easily spot abuse everywhere and take action.
|
| But they usually don't, so you have traumatized children
| coming into another hostile and cold environment called
| public school, where they just stonewall again and learn to
| hide their wounds and scars.
|
| Child abuse is a complex problem, with no simple solution.
| But I prefer a more human focused solution amd not just
| another surveillance stepup.
|
| Child abuseres also do not fall from the sky. If you pay
| more attention to them while they are young - you can spot
| it and help them, while they need help, before they turn
| into creepy monsters.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Honestly, if we take the ratio of 1 in 10 seriously, I
| think the time for human focus and caution has passed.
| That's an epidemic. To be clear, I'm not letting schools,
| churches, sports clubs etc off here; all those places
| clearly need massively increased external oversight as
| well. But at a 10% rate, we cannot exclude the family; it
| must be considered an institution in a state of failure.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well, there are still lots of people who take the bible
| literal:
|
| "Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one
| who loves their children is careful to discipline them."
|
| https://www.bibleref.com/Proverbs/13/Proverbs-13-24.html
|
| This is the ideological base for it, in my opinion.
| Unchecked authoritive power tpgether with physical
| violence. The thing is, the state institutions have not
| really a clean record on abuse either.
|
| And I did not say anything about excluding the family
| from monitoring of abuse. I said I see no reason to
| increase the monitoring. With the meassure in place right
| now, you could spot plenty of abuse already everywhere -
| if it would be really about the children.
|
| No easy problem, no easy solution.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > talk with them and interact with them (and not mainly
| the paperwork about them) - then you could easily spot
| abuse everywhere and take action
|
| My impression is that the abuse _is_ easily spotted, and
| paperwork done, but that often not much comes of it. We
| (USA) don 't actually seem to have very good systems for
| handling things once they're discovered, partly
| (largely?) due to lack of resources.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I mean there is improvement in some regards, that for
| example priests or teacher molesters do not silently get
| moved to a different place in the same job anymore, but
| yeah - we can easily spot the actual problems on the
| ground now. One more reason to reject dystopian
| technological solutions that also do not solve the real
| problems: children in need of a real protected home.
| Grustaf wrote:
| You ask how they can know that their false positive rate is 1
| in a trillion, without testing trillions of images. Simple,
| they require more than on hit. If each hit has a false
| positive rate of 1 in 100, which is very testable, you can
| simply require six hits.
| [deleted]
| Arathorn wrote:
| Hey - thanks for writing the OP. I may be missing something
| obvious, but how does fotoforensics actually identify all the
| CSAM content it reports to NCMEC?
| zug_zug wrote:
| >> There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who
| deal in CP and people who abuse children
|
| Can you give a source for this please? Also by "deal in" do
| you mean create or view?
| zionic wrote:
| > There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who
| deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely
| victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US
| will be sexually abused before the age of 18.
|
| These are clearly propaganda statistics. There is absolutely
| no way 10% of the US child population is molested.
|
| The fact that you not only believe this, but repeat it
| publicly calls into question your judgement and gullibility.
|
| You've been recruited to undermine the privacy and security
| of hundreds of millions (billions?) of people and
| indoctrinated with utterly ridiculous statistics. Your
| argument is essentially "the ends justify the means", and it
| could not be any more ethically hollow.
| tux3 wrote:
| I'd lament that using 'thinking of the children' as an excuse
| for genuine overreach, when that's what it is, puts us in a
| worse situation.
|
| There is incredible second-order harm in overreach, because
| the reaction to it hurts the original cause, too.
|
| If you try to overcorrect, people will overcorrect in
| response.
|
| The sort of zeal that leads to thoughts like "screeching
| minority", I think shows carelessness and shortsightedness in
| the face of very important decisions.
|
| I have no informed opinion on Apple's CSAM tool, beyond
| deferring to the FotoForensics expert.
| eecc wrote:
| How feasible is it to change the algorithm to flag police
| uniforms? The Tank Man?
| SXX wrote:
| No need to change anything. It's supported by design.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I have no idea whether this statistic is true or not, but
| "nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused"
| is an incredibly high number.
|
| I have no doubt that some cases of sexually abused children
| must have also existed in the environment where I have grown
| up as a child, in Europe, but I am quite certain that such
| cases could not have been significantly more than 1 per
| thousand children.
|
| If the numbers would be really so high in USA, then something
| should definitely be done to change this, but spying on all
| people is certainly not the right solution.
| tonyhb wrote:
| Of my female friends, I know at least 5 who are victims.
| They're the majority. It is way more commonplace than you
| would like to think.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| What makes you quite certain about your 1-1000 number? It's
| really easy to mistake our experience for something
| generalizable.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| It's hard to say without data, but the number is so
| astonishingly high that, really, the first reaction is to
| call it into question.
|
| It also seems to be the kind of thing that is hard to
| measure.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I dunno, seems reasonable to me. Crimes of this nature
| are underreported, so I tend to assume I'm only aware of
| a very small percentage of these situations. I'm not
| saying you're wrong - just that I had the reaction that
| it seemed within the general ballpark. For example, most
| of the apparently normal women I have known well have
| shared stories of abuse and trauma.
|
| What makes you say it's hard to measure? The definitions
| are pretty clear cut.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Thank you for those insights.
|
| I've long held a grudge against Microsoft and NCMEC for not
| providing this technology, because I live in a country where
| reporting CSAM is ill-advised if you're not a commercial
| entity and law enforcement seizes first and asks questions
| later (_months_ later), so you end up just closing down a
| service if it turns out to be a problem.
|
| This puts it into perspective. PhotoDNA seems fundamentally
| broken as a hashing technology, but it works just well enough
| with a huge NDA to keep people from looking too closely at
| it.
|
| NCMEC needs a new technology partner. It's a shame they
| picked Apple, who are likely not going to open up this tech.
|
| Without it, it's only a matter of time until small indie web
| services (think of the Fediverse) just can't exist in a lot
| of places anymore.
| d110af5ccf wrote:
| > it's only a matter of time until small indie web services
| (think of the Fediverse) just can't exist in a lot of
| places anymore
|
| I expect they will simply become P2P E2EE darknets
| eventually, meaning there won't really be a "service"
| anymore. Matrix already has E2EE and is actively working
| towards P2P.
| Kalium wrote:
| > About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about
| the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have
| not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact.
|
| The exploitation of children is a real and heartbreaking
| ongoing tragedy that forever harms millions of those we most
| owe protection.
|
| It's _because_ this is so tragic that we in the world of
| privacy have grown skeptical. The Four Horsemen, invoked
| consistently around the world to mount assaults against
| privacy, are child abuse, terrorism, drugs, and money
| laundering.
|
| Once privacy is defeated, none of those real, compelling,
| pressing problems get better (well, except money laundering).
| Lives are not improved. People are not rescued. Well-meaning
| advocates just move on to the next thing the foes of privacy
| point them at. Surely it will work this time!
|
| Your heart is in the right place. You have devoted no small
| part of your time and energy to a deep and genuine blooming
| of compassion and empathy. It's just perhaps worth
| considering that others of us might have good reason to be
| skeptical.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think
| about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the
| scope of this problem or the long term impact.
|
| This is making it worse : because people with an agenda use
| CP as an excuse to force immoral behavior into us, now child
| suffering is always associated with bullshit. Those action
| are hurting the children by supressong the social will to
| take it seriously.
|
| Stop hurting the children!
| brailsafe wrote:
| > I built the initial FotoForensics service in a few days.
|
| Why did you specify "In a few days"?
| coryrc wrote:
| My guess is to establish the approximate amount of
| collaboration. He didn't work there full time for years,
| that collaboration has been small and limited.
| sk5t wrote:
| It does make one wonder--careless work, trivial problem,
| reuse of existing projects, writer portrays self as
| extremely productive, or some combination?
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| I think you're assuming bad faith from someone who has
| proven very competent, technical, and coherent.
|
| It might simply be truthful. And if the author is proud
| of that, it is both irrelevant and perfectly okay. Let's
| focus on the facts and arguments relevant to the article,
| not personal attacks.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Ya, it's hard to interpret it differently, so was
| curious. Don't know why I'm being downvoted for a
| question about rhetorical intention.
| bigyikes wrote:
| I didn't downvote, but it comes across as a nitpick on a
| thoughtful and reasonable piece.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In
| my view, who would it help?
|
| Would it help activists push for more accurate technology and
| better management for NCMEC? Would it help technologists come
| up with better algorithms? I see all kinds of benefits to
| more openess and accountability here.
| ace_of_spades wrote:
| Hey, first of all kudos to you for all your hard work and
| having the heart in the right place.
|
| I don't really want to take any specific position on this
| issue as I don't have enough context to make a fair
| assessment of the situation. However, I do want to point out
| one thing:
|
| By supporting a specific approach to solve a problem, you
| generally remove some incentives to solve the problem in some
| other way.
|
| Minted to this situation, I think it would be interesting to
| ask what are other potential solutions to the problem of
| child abuse and how effective may they be compared to things
| like PhotoDNA? Is it the biggest net benefit you could habe
| or maybe even a net cost to work on this to solve the problem
| of child abuse?
|
| I don't have the answer but I think it's important to look at
| the really big picture once in a while. What is it that you
| want to achieve and is what you are doing really the most
| effective way of getting that or just something that is
| ,,convenient" or ,,familiar" given a set of predefined
| talking points you didn't really question?
|
| All the best to you :)
| loriverkutya wrote:
| > Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In
| my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid
| detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-
| positives. The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law
| enforcement. It won't help victims.
|
| It would help those victims who are falsely accused of having
| child porn on the phone because of a bug.
|
| It would also help those people who is going to be detained
| because PhotoDNA will be used by dictatorial states to find
| incriminating material on their phone just as they used
| Pegasus to spy on journalists, political opponents, etc.
| Siira wrote:
| 1. Your claims about CP and child abuse need substantial
| evidence.
|
| 2. Assuming all that as true, opaque surveillance and the
| destruction of free, general computing is much worse than
| child abuse.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Not that I particularly care one way or the other, but
| doesn't writing a 'whitepaper' (or calling your notes such)
| indicate an intention to release it?
| howaboutnope wrote:
| > About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about
| the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have
| not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact.
|
| I'd say it's the other way around. If freedom dies this time,
| it might die for good, followed by an "eternity" of
| totalitarianism. All violence that occured in human history
| so far combined is nothing compared to what is at stake.
|
| > Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free
| technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read,
| to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of
| our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die.
| Because if we don't, something else will die. Something so
| precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave
| their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood
| it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.
|
| -- Eben Moglen
| seaofmars wrote:
| >Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In
| my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid
| detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-
| positives.
|
| I would suggest that the people NCMEC are most enthusiastic
| to catch know better than to post CSAM in places using
| PhotoDNA, particularly in a manner that may implicate them.
| Perhaps I overestimate them.
| jes wrote:
| > _Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused
| before the age of 18._
|
| If you include non-therapeutic infant circumcision, which
| many believe to be medical battery and (infant) male genital
| mutilation, this number would be much higher.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Half of baby boys in the US are sexually assaulted and
| disfigured right after being born. We need a lot more people
| fighting against this, it shouldn't be so hard to stop.
| [deleted]
| michaelt wrote:
| It's somewhat off-topic for the article, but I'm curious as
| to why you retain images uploaded for analysis after the
| analysis is completed?
|
| After all, surely 99% of uploaders don't hold the copyright
| for the image they're uploading, so retaining them is on
| shaky legal grounds to begin with, if you're the kind of
| person who wants to be in strict compliance with the law -
| and at the same time, it forces you and your moderators to
| handle child porn several times a day (not a job I'd envy)
| and you say you risk a felony conviction.
|
| Wouldn't it be far simpler, and less legally risky, if you
| didn't retain the images?
| [deleted]
| nixnax wrote:
| >Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused
| before the age of 18.
|
| That explains the rise in LGBT
| nappy wrote:
| No - but this comment is abhorrent.
| dcow wrote:
| > Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In
| my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid
| detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-
| positives. The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law
| enforcement. It won't help victims.
|
| Making it public would allow the public to scrutinize it,
| attack it, if you will, so that we can get to the bottom of
| how bad this technology is. Ultimately my sincere guess is
| that we'd end up with better technology to do this not some
| crap system that essentially matches on blurry images. Our
| government is supposed to be open source, there's really no
| reason we can't as a society figure this out better than some
| anti CP cabal with outdated crufty image tech.
| pvarangot wrote:
| PhotoDNA is a very simple algorithm. Reproducing what OP
| did to "reverse engineer" is not hard. If you really have
| the guts to try this go ahead and you'll be surprised. I'm
| living in the US with a greencard so I'm not touching the
| problem even with a laser pointer.
|
| The techno-legal framework is worse than just "reversing
| the hashes is possible". You could brute force creation of
| matching images using a cloud service or online chat as an
| "oracle".
| atq2119 wrote:
| > someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think
| about the kids."
|
| Yes, let's think about the kids, please.
|
| I certainly don't want my children to grow up in an
| authoritarian surveillance state...
| zionic wrote:
| Exactly, we can't save the children by giving them a
| dystopia to grow up in.
| kortilla wrote:
| > The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law
| enforcement. It won't help victims.
|
| But it will help all of society by preventing a backdoor from
| gaining a foothold. If the technology is shown to be
| ineffective it will help pressure Apple to remove this super
| dangerous tool.
|
| Once a technical capability is there, governments will force
| Apple to use it for compliance. It won't be long before
| pictures of Winnie the Pooh will be flagged in China.
| zionic wrote:
| OP knows that, and is acting accordingly.
|
| They enjoy being "unquestionable"/above being audited.
| mlindner wrote:
| > Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused
| before the age of 18.
|
| Please lets not invent distorted statistics or quote
| mouthpieces who has it in their own interest to scare people
| as much as possible into rash actions just like Apple has
| done.
| xunn0026 wrote:
| > Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused
| before the age of 18.
|
| This can only be hyperbole. How are you defining sexual
| abuse?
| weinzierl wrote:
| Thanks for the write-up and putting all the work into this
| important issue.
|
| > _" There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who
| deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely
| victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US
| will be sexually abused before the age of 18."_
|
| One thing I wondered and have not seen brought up in the
| discussion so far is this: As far as I understand the
| perceptual hash solutions work based on existing corpora of
| abuse material. So, if we improve our detection ability of
| this existing content, doesn't that increase the pressure on
| the abusers to produce new content and in consequence hurt
| even more children? If so, an AI solution that also flags
| previously unknown abuse material and a lot of human review
| are probably our only chance. What is your take on this?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > doesn't that increase the pressure on the abusers to
| produce new content and in consequence hurt even more
| children?
|
| Not really. Two points:
|
| 1) Many / all CP boards these days ask applicants to
| provide CSAM (as police in almost all jurisdictions except
| for IIRC US and Australia are banned from bringing CSAM
| into circulation). And to keep police where allowed from
| simply re-uploading stuff, they (as well as the "client
| base") demand new, yet-unseen stuff, and so no matter what
| the police is doing there will always be pressure for new
| content.
|
| 2) The CSAM detection on popular sites only hits people
| dumb enough to upload CSAM to Instagram, Facebook and the
| likes. Granted, the consumer masses _are_ dumb and
| incompetent at basic data security, but ... uhh, for lack
| of a better word, _experienced_ CSAM consumers know after
| decades of busts that they need to keep their stashes
| secure - aka encrypted disks.
|
| > If so, an AI solution that also flags previously unknown
| abuse material and a lot of human review are probably our
| only chance. What is your take on this?
|
| There are _other_ chances to prevent CSA that _don 't_ risk
| damaging privacy, and all of them aim at the early stages -
| preventing abuse from happening:
|
| 1) teach children already in early school years about their
| body and about consent. This one is crucial - children who
| haven't learned that it is _not_ normal that Uncle Billy
| touches their willy won 't report it! - but unfortunately,
| conservatives and religious fundamentalists tend to blast
| any such efforts as "early sexualization", "gay propaganda"
| and whatnot.
|
| 2) provide resources for (potential) committers of abuse.
| In Germany, we have the "Kein Tater werden" network that
| provides help, but many other countries don't have anything
| even remotely similar.
|
| 3) Screening of staff and volunteers in trust / authority
| positions dealing with children (priests and other clergy,
| school and pre-school/kindergarten teachers, sports club
| trainers) against CSA convictions. Unfortunately, this is
| ... not followed thoroughly very often and in some cases (
| _cough_ Catholic Church) the institutions actively attempt
| to cover up CSA cases, protect perps and simply shuffle
| staff around the country or in some cases across the world.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Thanks, that was very insightful.
| slg wrote:
| >About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about
| the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have
| not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact.
| There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal
| in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely
| victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US
| will be sexually abused before the age of 18.
|
| I think we have seen "think of the kids" used as an excuse
| for so many things over the years that the pendulum has now
| swung so far that some of the tech community has begun to
| think we should do absolutely nothing about this problem. I
| have even seen people on HN in the last week that are so
| upset by the privacy implications of this that they start
| arguing that these images of abuse should be legal since
| trying to crack down is used as a motive to invade people's
| privacy.
|
| I don't know what the way forward is here, but we really
| shouldn't lose sight that there are real kids being hurt in
| all this. That is incredibly motivating for a lot of people.
| Too often the tech community's response is that the
| intangible concept of privacy is more important than the
| tangible issue of child abuse. That isn't going to be a
| winning argument among mainstream audiences. We need
| something better or it is only a matter of time until these
| type of systems are implemented everywhere.
| zug_zug wrote:
| > Too often the tech community's response is that the
| intangible concept of privacy is more important than the
| tangible issue of child abuse.
|
| Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone.
| That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child
| abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other
| authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced.
|
| I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the
| CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any
| conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and
| assaulting children.
|
| * Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics
| report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of
| children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of
| rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure
| you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any
| bearing here, right?
| zepto wrote:
| You can't seriously be suffering that Apple not
| implementing these measures will somehow be good for
| privacy in China?
| cvwright wrote:
| The implication -- and I think it's a valid one -- is
| that this client-side mechanism will be very quickly co-
| opted to also alert on non-CSAM material. For example,
| Winnie the Pooh memes in China.
| zepto wrote:
| I think it's not valid to claim that it _will_ be quickly
| used for that purpose.
|
| However I absolutely agree that it could be used to
| detect non-CSAM images if Apple colludes with that use
| case.
|
| My point is that this is immaterial to what is going on
| in China. China is already an authoritarian surveillance
| state. Even without this, the state has access to the
| iCloud photo servers in China, so who knows what they are
| doing, with or without Apple's cooperation.
| Maakuth wrote:
| You can label it collusion, but when Apple does it, it's
| going to call it _complying with local regulation_.
| zepto wrote:
| It doesn't matter what you label it. Hand wringing over
| making things worse in China is not a valid concern.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember when the revelation that NSA
| is spying on everyone was a shock.
|
| Now people are seriously arguing that continuous
| searching through your entire life without any warrant or
| justification by opaque algorithms is fine.
|
| It only took what, 10 years?
| zepto wrote:
| > Now people are seriously arguing that continuous
| searching through your entire life without any warrant or
| justification by opaque algorithms is fine.
|
| Where is anyone arguing that?
| cvwright wrote:
| Fine, then let's talk about other countries.
|
| Does anyone seriously doubt that Germany will use this
| mechanism to ban Nazi imagery?
|
| Then from there, it's not a big leap to talk about
| controlling far right (or far left) memes in France or
| the UK.
|
| More insidiously, suppose some politician in a western
| liberal democracy was caught with underage kids, and
| there were blackmail photos that leaked. Do you think
| those hashes wouldn't instantly make their way onto this
| ban list?
| zepto wrote:
| > Fine, then let's talk about other countries.
|
| I'll let you change the subject, but let's note that
| every time someone realizes privacy in China as a
| concern, it's just bullshit.
|
| > Does anyone seriously doubt that Germany will use this
| mechanism to ban Nazi imagery?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Then from there, it's not a big leap to talk about
| controlling far right (or far left) memes in France or
| the UK.
|
| This one is harder for me to argue against. Those
| countries could order such a mechanism, whether Apple had
| built this or not. _Because those countries have hate
| speech laws and no constitutional mechanism protecting
| freedom of speech_.
|
| This is a real problem, but banning certain kinds of
| speech is popular in these societies. It is disturbingly
| popular in the US too. That is not Apple's doing.
| cvwright wrote:
| It's just sad how things have shifted.
|
| During the Cold War, the West in general and the US in
| particular were proud of spreading freedom and democracy.
| Rock & roll and Levi's played a big role in bringing down
| the USSR.
|
| Then in the 90s, the internet had this same ethos. People
| fought against filters on computers in libraries and
| schools.
|
| Now that rich westerners have their porn and their video
| games, apparently many are happy to let the rest of the
| world rot.
|
| I guess I just expected more.
| zepto wrote:
| I actually feel the same way. I miss those earlier eras.
|
| I just think that exaggerating scares is part of the
| problem, not the solution, regardless of which side of a
| debate is doing it.
| cvwright wrote:
| Agreed in principle. But in this particular case, I think
| it's difficult to exaggerate the badness of this scare.
| This strikes me as one of the "Those who forget their
| history are doomed to repeat it" kind of things.
|
| Like with the TSA and the no-fly list. Civil liberties
| groups said it was going to be abused, and they said so
| well before any actual abuse had occurred. But they
| weren't overreacting, and they weren't exaggerating. They
| were right. Senator Ted Kennedy even wound up on that
| list at one point.
| zepto wrote:
| I don't think the scare is warranted.
|
| This really is a narrowly targeted solution that only
| works with image collections, and requires two factors to
| verify, and two organizations to cooperate, one of which
| is Apple who has unequivocally staked their reputation on
| it not being used for other purposes, and the other is
| NCMEC which is a non-profit staffed with people dedicated
| to preventing child abuse.
|
| People who are equating this with a general purpose
| hashing or file scanning mechanism are just wrong at
| best.
|
| It's not like the no-fly list at all.
| slg wrote:
| >Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone.
| That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of
| child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as
| other authoritarian countries get more technologically
| advanced.
|
| You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would
| this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer
| that without a slippery slope argument?
|
| >I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the
| CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any
| conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and
| assaulting children.
|
| Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough
| that cracking down on this content will result in less
| abusers on the streets.
|
| >* Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics
| report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of
| children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of
| rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure
| you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any
| bearing here, right?
|
| I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an
| incomplete number since it excludes younger children.
| Teever wrote:
| > How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can
| you answer that without a slippery slope argument?
|
| "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first
| speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first
| freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. The first time
| any man's freedom is trodden on we're all damaged...."
| zepto wrote:
| That seems like a 'no' then.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It's also
| silly - there has obviously been a case where the first
| speech was censured. It happened before civilizations.
| Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that?
|
| Look, speech is important. So is protecting the public
| good. But if one believes in absolutes, rather than
| takeoffs, they are IMO getting too high on their own
| supply.
|
| Let's talk about the trade offs that we have already
| made.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| > This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It's also
| silly - there has obviously been a case where the first
| speech was censured. It happened before civilizations.
| Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that?
|
| Frankly, yes.
| mikeyjk wrote:
| Does the fact that the NSA can comb your personal files
| and look at people's nude photographs not concern you?
| That's a present day reality brought to light by Snowden.
| Showing a colleague a 'good find' was considered a perk
| of the job.
|
| We're lying to ourselves if we think this couldn't be
| abused and can implicitly be trusted. We should generally
| be sceptical of closed source at the best of times, let
| alone when it's inherently designed to report on us.
|
| To your point of 'as a layman end user what is the cost
| to me?': more code running on your computer doing
| potentially anything which you have no way to audit ->
| compromising the security of whatever is on your
| computer, and an uptick in cpu/disk/network utilisation
| (although it remains to be seen if it's anything other
| than negligible).
|
| My defeated mentality is partly - 'well they're already
| spying on us anyway'...
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument?
|
| So far any defense of this whole fiasco can be boiled
| down to what you are trying to imply in part. When you
| say "The possibility of abusing this system is a slippery
| slope argument", as if identifying a (possible) slippery
| slope element in an argument would somehow automatically
| make it invalid?
|
| The other way around if all that can be said in defense
| is that the dangers are part of slippery slope thinking,
| then you are effectively saying that the only defense is
| "trust them, let's wait and see, they might not do
| something bad with it" or "it sure doesn't affect me"
| (sounds pretty similar to "I've got nothing to hide").
| This might work for other areas, not so much when it
| comes to backdooring your device/backups for arbitrary
| database checks.
|
| And since "oh the children" or "but the terrorists" has
| become the vanilla excuse for many many things I'm unsure
| why we are supposed to believe in a truly noble intent
| down the road here. "No no this time it's REALLY about
| the kids, the people at work here mean it" just doesn't
| cut it anymore. So no, I'm not convinced the people at
| Apple working on this actually do it because they care.
|
| When "but the children" becomes a favourite excuse to
| push whatever, the problem are very much the people
| abusing this very excuse to this level, not the ones
| becoming wary of it.
|
| > some of the tech community has begun to think we should
| do absolutely nothing about this problem
|
| I don't believe that people think that, I believe that
| people rather think that the ones in power simply aren't
| actually mainly interested in this problem. The trust is
| (rightfully) heavily damaged.
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| > So no, I'm not convinced the people at Apple working on
| this actually do it because they care.
|
| I think this is the hardest part to steelman.
|
| If you believe that Apple employees are doing this not
| because they care, then you need to explain the true
| motive you think they have, otherwise that would be
| assuming bad faith.
|
| Apple has smart and reasonable people, they must have a
| reason that can be explained, beyond not caring.
| zug_zug wrote:
| >> You didn't mention any tangible results here. How
| would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you
| answer that without a slippery slope argument?
|
| That's a weird goal-post.
|
| >> Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough
| that cracking down on this content will result in less
| abusers on the streets.
|
| Obviously of the people who look at cp, a higher
| percentage of those will be actual child abusers. The
| question for everybody is -- does giving those people a
| fantasy outlet increase or actually _reduce_ the number
| of kids who get assaulted. At the end of the day that 's
| what matters.
|
| >> I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing
| an incomplete number since it excludes younger children.
|
| [EDIT: Mistake] Well you didn't cite anything at all, and
| were off by a shockingly large number. Please cite
| something or explain why you made up a number.
| slg wrote:
| >Well you didn't cite anything at all, and were off by a
| shockingly large number.
|
| Sorry, I am just baffled by your last point here. How can
| I be off by a shockingly large number when I didn't even
| cite a number?
| zug_zug wrote:
| My B, I see now that was in a section where you were
| quoting hackerfactor. I guess I should direct that
| question to him.
| mlac wrote:
| > I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the
| CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any
| conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and
| assaulting children.
|
| "Think of the Kids" damn well applies to the consumers of
| this content - by definition, there is a kid (or baby in
| some instances) involved in the CP. As a society, the
| United States draws the line at age 18 as the age of
| consent [the line has to be drawn somewhere and this is a
| fairly settled argument]. So by definition, in the United
| States, these are not consenting victims in the pictures.
|
| Demand drives creation. Getting rid of it on one of the
| largest potential viewing and sharing platforms is a move
| in the right direction in addressing the problem.
|
| What I haven't seen from the tech community is the idea
| that this will be shut down if it goes too far or beyond
| this limited scope. Which I think it would be - people
| would get rid of iPhones if some of the other cases
| privacy advocates are talking about occur. And at that
| point they would have to scrap the program - so Apple is
| motivated to keep it limited in scope to something
| everyone can agree is abhorrent.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Demand drives creation. Getting rid of it on one of the
| largest potential viewing and sharing platforms is a move
| in the right direction in addressing the problem.
|
| Yeah, that focus has worked really well in the "war on
| some drugs," hasn't it?
|
| I don't pretend to have all (or any good ones for that
| matter) the answers, but we _know_ interdiction doesn 't
| work.
|
| Those who are going to engage in non-consensual behavior
| (with _anyone_ , not just children) are going to do so
| whether or not they can view and share records of their
| abuse.
|
| The current legal regime (in the US at least) creates a
| gaping hole where even if you don't know what you have
| (e.g., if someone sends you a child abuse photo without
| your knowledge or consent) you are guilty, as possession
| of child abuse images is a felony.
|
| That's wrong. I don't know what the right way is, but
| adding software to millions of devices searching locally
| for such stuff creates an environment where literally
| _anyone_ can be thrown in jail for receiving an
| _unsolicited_ email or text message. That 's not the kind
| of world in which I want to live.
|
| Many years ago, I was visiting my brother and was taking
| photos of his two sons, at that time aged ~4.5 and ~2.
|
| I took an entire roll of my brother, his wife and their
| kids. In one photo, the two boys are sitting on a
| staircase, and the younger one (none of us noticed, as he
| wasn't potty trained and _hated_ pants) wasn 't wearing
| any pants.
|
| I took the _film_ to a processor and got my prints in a
| couple of days. We all had a good laugh looking at the
| photos and realizing that my nephew wasn 't wearing any
| pants.
|
| There wasn't, when the photos were taken, nor when they
| were viewed, any abuse or sexual motives involved.
|
| Were that to happen today, I would be sitting in a jail
| cell, looking at a lengthy prison sentence. And when done
| "repaying my debt to society" I'd be forced to register
| as a sex offender for the rest of my life.
|
| Which is ridiculous on its face.
|
| Unless and until we reform these insane and inane laws, I
| can't support such programs.
|
| N.B.: I strongly believe that consent is _never_ optional
| and those under the age of consent cannot do so. As such,
| there should absolutely be accountability and
| consequences for those who abuse others, including
| children.
| mlac wrote:
| Random pictures aren't going to be in the CSAM database
| and trigger review. And to have multiple CSAM hash
| matches on your phone is incredibly unlikely.
|
| An unsolicited email / having photos planted on your
| phone or equipment is a problem today as much as it will
| be then, but I think people over-estimate the probability
| of this and ignore the fact it could easily happen today,
| with an "anonymous tip" called into the authorities.
|
| If they are scanning it though iMessage they will have
| logs of when it arrived, and where it came from as well -
| so in that case it might protect the victim being framed.
| [deleted]
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| > Were that to happen today, I would be sitting in a jail
| cell, looking at a lengthy prison sentence.
|
| No you would not, I was ready to somewhat agree with you
| but this is just false and has nothing to do with what
| you were talking about before. The law does not say that
| naked photos of (your or anyone else's) kids are
| inherently illegal, they have to actually be sexual in
| nature. And while the line is certainly not all that
| clear cut, a simple picture like you're describing would
| never meet that line.
|
| I mean let's be clear here, do you believe the law
| considers _to much_ stuff to be CSAM, and if so why? How
| would you prefer we redefine it?
| withinboredom wrote:
| A large? portion of "sexual predators" are men peeing on
| the side of the interstate[1]. So it's not far-fetched to
| think that a random pic would also land you in jail.
|
| [1]: I looked up the cases of sex offenders living around
| me several years ago.
| [deleted]
| skinkestek wrote:
| > The law does not say that naked photos of (your or
| anyone else's) kids are inherently illegal, they have to
| actually be sexual in nature.
|
| But that depends on who looks at it.
|
| People have been arrested and (at least temporary) lost
| custody over their children because someone called the
| police over perfectly normal family photos. I remember
| one case a few years ago where someone had gotten into
| trouble because one photo included a toddler wearing
| nothing (even facing away from the camera if my memory
| serves me correctly) playing at the beach. When police
| realized this wasn't an offense, instead of apologizing
| they got hung up on another photo were kids were playing
| with an empty beer can.
|
| Recently this was also linked
| https://jonathanturley.org/2009/09/18/arizona-couple-
| sues-wa...
|
| which further links to a couple of previous cases.
|
| I'd say we get police or health care to talk to people
| who think perfectly normal images are sexual in nature,
| but until we get laws changed at least then keep us safe.
|
| > I mean let's be clear here, do you believe the law
| considers to much stuff to be CSAM, and if so why? How
| would you prefer we redefine it?
|
| Another thing that comes up is that a lot of things that
| are legal might be in that database because criminal
| might have a somewhat varied history.
|
| Personally I am a practicing conservative Christian so
| this doesn't bother me personally at the moment since for
| obvious reasons I don't collect these kinds of images.
|
| The reason I care is because every such capability will
| be abused, and below I present in two easy steps how it
| will go from todays well intended system to a powerful
| tool for oppression:
|
| 1. today it is pictures but if getting around it is as
| simple as putting it in a pdf then obviously pdfs must be
| screened too. Same with zip files. Because otherwise this
| so simple to circumvent that is worthless.
|
| 2. once you have such a system in place it would be a
| shame not to use it for every other evil thing.
| Dependending on where you live this might be anything:
| Muslim scriptures, Atheist books or videos, Christian
| scriptures, Winnie the Pooh drawings - you name it and
| someone wants to censor it.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| > I'd say we get police or health care to talk to people
| who think perfectly normal images are sexual in nature,
| but until we get laws changed at least then keep us safe.
|
| Personally I don't find anecdotes convincing compared to
| the very real amount of CSAM (and actual child abuse) we
| already know exists and circulates in the wild, but I do
| get your point. That said personally I don't think
| changing the laws would really achieve what you want
| anyway - I don't think a random Walmart employee is up-
| to-date on the legal definitions of CSAM, they're going
| to potentially report it regardless of what the law is
| (and the question of whether this is a wider trend is
| debatable, again this is an anecdote).
|
| With that, they were eventually found innocent, so the
| law already agrees what they did was perfectly fine,
| which was my original point. No it should not have taken
| that long, but then again we don't know much about the
| background of those who took them, so I'm not entirely
| sure we can easily determine how appropriate the response
| was. I'm certainly not trying to claim our system is
| perfect, but I'm also not convinced rolling back
| protections for abused children is a great idea without
| some solid evidence that it really isn't working.
|
| > Another thing that comes up is that a lot of things
| that are legal might be in that database because criminal
| might have a somewhat varied history.
|
| That didn't really answer my question :P
|
| I agree the database is suspect but I don't see how that
| has anything to do with the definition of CSAM. The legal
| definition of CSAM is not "anything in that database",
| and if we're already suggesting that there's stuff in
| there that's known to not be CSAM then how would changing
| the definition of CSAM help?
| mlac wrote:
| As soon as it is used in a negative way beyond CSAM
| scanning, it will cause people to sell their phones and
| stop using apple products.
|
| If Apple starts using the tech to scan for religious
| material, there will be significant market and legal
| backlash. I think the fact that CSAM scanning will stop
| if they push it too far will keep them in check to only
| do CSAM scanning.
|
| Everyone can agree on using the tech for CSAM, but beyond
| that I don't see Apple doing it. The tech community is
| reacting as if they already have.
| Kalium wrote:
| It may be worth taking very seriously that you might be
| overestimating both how quickly regular people become
| aware of such events and how emphatically people will
| react.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Problem one is Apple doesn't know what they are scanning
| for.
|
| This is by design and actually a good thing.
|
| It becomes a problem because problem number 2:
|
| No one is accountable if someone gets their life ruined
| over a mistake in this database.
|
| I'd actually be somewhat less hostile to this idea if
| there was more regulatory oversight:
|
| - laws that punishes police/officials if innocent people
| are harmed in any way
|
| - mandatory technical audits as well as verification that
| for what it is used for: Apple keeps logs of all
| signatures that "matched"/triggered as well as raw files,
| these are provided to the court as part of any case that
| comes up. This way we could hopefully prevent most
| fishing expeditions - both wide and personalized ones -
| and also avoid any follow up parallel reconstructions.
|
| I'm not saying I'd necessarily be OK with it but at that
| point there would be something to discuss.
| hoseja wrote:
| That is such a tortured, backwards argument, but the only
| one that has even a semblance of logic so it gets
| repeated ad nauseam. Why be so coy about the real
| reasons?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| What tangible impact in the life of an everyday Chinese
| citizen are you expecting if Apple offered an E2EE
| messging and cloud backup service in China? And why do
| you think the Chinese government would not just ban it
| and criminalise anyone found using a device which
| connected to Apple's servers, rendering any benefits
| moot?
|
| (And why do you think it's morally right, or the
| responsibility of a foreign private company to try and
| force anything into China against their laws? Another
| commenter in a previous thread said the idea was for
| Apple to refuse to do business there - but that still
| leads to the question, how would that help anyone?)
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Any reach into privacy, even while "thinking of the kids"
| is an overreach. Police can't open your mail or search your
| house without a warrant. The same should apply to your
| packets and your devices.
|
| Why not police these groups with.. you know.. regular
| policing? Infiltrate, gather evidence, arrest. This
| strategy has worked for centuries to combat all manner of
| organized crime. I don't see why it's any different here.
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| Devil's advocate: It may not be mostly big organized
| crime. It may be hard to fight, because it's not groups.
| It mostly comes from people close to the families, or the
| families themselves.
|
| Here's a relevant extract sourced from Wikipedia:
|
| "Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their
| victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child,
| most often brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, uncles or
| cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as
| friends of the family, babysitters, or neighbours;
| strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child
| sexual abuse cases.[53] In over one-third of cases, the
| perpetrator is also a minor.[56]"
|
| Content warning: The WP article contains pictures of
| abused children.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Sure, but the people sharing these images do so in
| organized groups, often referred to as "rings". I agree
| it would be very hard to catch a solitary perpetrator
| abusing children and not sharing the images. However
| since they would be creating novel images with new
| hashes, Apple's system wouldn't do much to help catch
| them would it?
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| Let me respond to the "novel images with new hashes"
| part. Apple's system doesn't use only cryptographic
| hashes, it seems designed to catch novel images too.
|
| There is concern that it will be inaccurate and have a
| much higher rate of false positive than the 1 in a
| trillion reported by Apple (as described in the, very
| thorough, article).
| kbenson wrote:
| > Too often the tech community's response is that the
| intangible concept of privacy is more important than the
| tangible issue of child abuse.
|
| I think the actual idea, which the nuance is often lost
| (and let's be honest, some people aren't really aware of
| and are just jumping on the bandwagon), is that privacy is
| a right, and erosion of rights is _extremely_ important
| because it has been shown many times in the past to have
| far reaching and poorly understood future effects.
|
| It's unfortunate that some would choose to link their
| opposition to the idea with making the thing it's
| attempting to combat legal when it's something so
| abhorrent, but _in general_ I think a push back on any
| erosion of our rights is a good and useful way for people
| to dedicate time and effort.
|
| While we shouldn't lose sight that there are real children
| in danger and that this should help, we _also_ shouldn 't
| lose sight that there is plenty of precedence that this
| could eventually lead to danger and problems for a great
| many other people, children included.
| slg wrote:
| >I think the actual idea, which the nuance is often lost
| (and let's be honest, some people aren't really aware of
| and are just jumping on the bandwagon), is that privacy
| is a right, and erosion of rights is extremely important
| because it has been shown many times in the past to have
| far reaching and poorly understood future effects.
|
| The encryption everywhere mindset of a lot of the tech
| community is changing the nature of the right to privacy.
| 50 years ago all these images would have been physical
| objects. They could have been found by the person
| developing the photos or the person making copies. They
| could have been found with a warrant. Now they are all
| hidden behind E2EE and a secure enclave. To a certain
| extent the proliferation of technology means people can
| have an even stronger degree of privacy today than was
| practical in the past. It is only natural for people to
| wonder if that shift has changed where the line should
| be.
| kortilla wrote:
| Right, 50 years ago you needed a warrant. Now with
| Apple's change you don't. That's not progress.
| kbenson wrote:
| In the past these people would have been developing the
| pictures themselves, and handing them between each other
| either personally or in some hidden manner using public
| systems.
|
| Not only has communication become easier, so has
| surveillance. The only difference now is that it's easier
| for people not to be aware when their very personal
| privacy is invaded, and that it can be done to the whole
| populace at once.
| slg wrote:
| >Not only has communication become easier, so has
| surveillance.
|
| It is a devil's advocate response, but can you explain
| why this is a bad thing? If communication is scaling and
| becoming easier, why shouldn't surveillance?
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| 1. We judge these programs under the wrong assumption
| that it is run by the good guys. Any system that depends
| on the goodness of the people running it is dangerous,
| because it can be taken over by the bad guys.
|
| 2. I am a law abiding, innocent citizen. Why should I
| have to face the same compromised privacy as a criminal?
| It used to be that only people under suspicion are
| surveilled and that a judge had to grant this based on
| preliminary evidence. Now everyone is surveilled. How
| long until people who are sidestepping surveillance (i.e.
| using Open Source systems that don't implement this
| stuff), fall under suspicion just because they are not
| surveilled? How long until it's "guilty until proven
| otherwise"?
|
| In my opinion it is absolutely fair and necessary to scan
| images that are uploaded to the cloud in a way that makes
| them shareable. But never the stuff I have on my device.
| And the scanning system has to be transparent.
| macdust wrote:
| >We judge these programs under the wrong assumption that
| it is run by the good guys
|
| Speaking as someone who as a boy was tortured and
| trafficked by operatives of the Central Intelligence
| Agency of the United States of America, I am surprized
| how little appreciation there is for the standard role of
| misdirection in the espionage playbook.
|
| It is inevitable that all these obstensibly well-intended
| investigators will have their ranks and their leadership
| infiltrated by intelligence agencies of major powers, all
| of whom invest in child-trafficking. What better cover?
| bigiain wrote:
| "Wont somebody think of the (white, wealthy, documented)
| chiiiiilren!"
|
| :sigh:
| bigiain wrote:
| > We judge these programs under the wrong assumption that
| it is run by the good guys. Any system that depends on
| the goodness of the people running it is dangerous,
| because it can be taken over by the bad guys.
|
| And sometimes, the "good guys" in their attempts to be as
| good as they can imagine being, turn into the sort of
| person who'll look a supreme court judge or
| Congresspeople or oversight committees in the eye and
| claim "It's not 'surveillance' until a human looks at
| it." after having built PRISM "to gather and store
| enormous quantities of users' communications held by
| internet companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and
| Facebook."
|
| https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/14/q-us-warrantless-
| surveil...
|
| Sure, we copied and stored your email archive and contact
| lists and instant messenger history. But we weren't
| "surveilling you" unless we _looked_ at it!
|
| Who are these "good guys"? The intelligence community?
| The executive branch? The judicial branch? Because
| they're _all_ complicit in that piece of deceit about
| your privacy and rights.
| m_mueller wrote:
| To whom do you give the keys?
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| Surveillance does have its place, but a large part of the
| problem with the new technology of surveillance is the
| people passing the laws on surveillance don't understand
| the technology that surrounds it.
|
| Take, for instance, the collection of metadata that is
| now so freely swept up by the American government without
| a warrant. This includes the people involved in
| communication, the method of communication, time and
| duration of communication and locations of those involved
| with said communication. All of that is involved in the
| metadata that can be collected without a warrant by
| national agencies for "national security" done on a
| massive scale under PRISM (PRIZM?).
|
| Now, this is non targeted, national surveillance, fishing
| for a "bad guy" with enhanced surveillance capabilities.
| This doesn't necessarily seem like a good thing. It seems
| like a lazy thing, and a thing which was ruled
| constitutional by people who chose to not understand the
| technology because it was easier than thinking down
| stream at the implications.
| bigiain wrote:
| > is the people passing the laws on surveillance don't
| understand the technology that surrounds it.
|
| And that the people running the surveillance have a rich
| track record of lying to the people who are considering
| whether to pass the laws they're proposing.
|
| "Oh no, we would _NEVER_ surveil American citizens using
| these capabilities!"
|
| "Oh yeah, except for all the mistakes we make."
|
| "No - that's not 'surveillance', it's only metadata, not
| data. All we did was bulk collect call records of every
| American, we didn't 'surveil" them."
|
| "Yeah, PRISM collects well over 80% of all email sent by
| Americans, but we only _read_ it if it matches a search
| we do across it. It's not 'surveillance'."
|
| But they've stopped doing all that, right? And they
| totally haven't just shared that same work out amongst
| their five eyes counterparts so that what each of them is
| doing is legal in their jurisdiction even though there
| are strong laws preventing each of them from doing it
| domestically.
|
| And how would we even know? Without Snowden we wouldn't
| know most of what we know about what they've been doing.
| And look at the thanks get got for that...
| abecedarius wrote:
| Why shouldn't every Neuralink come with a mandated FBI
| module preinstalled? Where, if _anywhere_ , is private
| life to remain, where citizens think and communicate
| freely? Is Xinjiang just the start for the whole world?
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| Surely there is communication surrounding the child
| sexual abuse, making plans with other pedophiles and
| discussing strategies. Some of this may occur over text
| message. Maybe Apple's next iteration of this technology
| can use my $1000 phone that I bought and that I own to
| surveil my E2EE private encrypted messages on my phone
| and generate a safety voucher for anything I say? The
| sky's the limit!
| abecedarius wrote:
| Good point: neural nets are getting better at natural
| language every year.
| slg wrote:
| Do you see how this underlines my original point? I
| brought up real child abuse that is happening today and
| your response is about brain implants being mandated by
| the government. Most people are going prioritize the
| tangible problem over worrying about your sci-fi
| dystopia.
| SergeAx wrote:
| 20 years ago a device 24*7 inspecting personal data of
| 60% citizens for samples remotely provided by government
| was sci-fi dystopia.
| abecedarius wrote:
| A plausible story of how our rights are in the way is
| always ready to hand. If we can't at some point draw a
| clear line and say no, that's it, _stop_ -- then we have
| no rights. It 's chisel, chisel, chisel, year after year,
| decade after decade.
|
| In America one of those lines is that your personal
| papers are private. Get a warrant. I don't have to
| justify this stand. I might choose to explain why it's a
| good stand, or I might not; it's on _you_ to persuade us.
| slg wrote:
| >In America one of those lines is that your personal
| papers are private. Get a warrant. I don't have to
| justify this stand. I might choose to explain why it's a
| good stand, or I might not; it's on you to persuade us.
|
| Part of the problem is that these devices are encrypted
| so a warrant doesn't work on them. That is a big enough
| change that maybe people need to debate if the line is
| still in the right place.
| computerfriend wrote:
| My memories and thoughts are also warrant-proof. We just
| accept it as a limitation.
| abecedarius wrote:
| That is a change worth considering, though it must be
| treated at the level of rights, not just a case-by-case
| utility calculus. At the same time, most other changes
| have been towards _more_ surveillance and control:
| cameras everywhere, even in the sky; ubiquitous location
| tracking; rapidly improving AI to scale up these
| capabilities beyond what teams of humans could monitor;
| tracking of most payments; mass warrantless surveillance
| by spy agencies; God knows what else now, many years
| after the Snowden leaks. This talk you hear about the
| population "going dark" is... selective.
|
| I think my vehemence last night might've obscured the
| point I wanted to make: what a right is supposed to be is
| a principle that overrides case-by-case utility analysis.
| I would agree that everything is open to questioning,
| including the right to privacy -- but as I see it, if you
| ask what's the object-level balance of utilities with
| respect to this particular proposal, explicitly dropping
| that larger context of privacy as a right (which was not
| arrived at for no reason) and denigrate that concern as
| science fiction, as a slippery-slope fallacy -- then
| that's a debate that should be rejected on its premise.
| sroussey wrote:
| Post your passwords.
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| That's too short a thought, it detracts from the point.
|
| It is bad to post passwords, not just because you lose
| privacy, but because you'd lose control of important
| accounts. Asking people to post their passwords is not
| reasonable.
|
| I think you might have a point you're trying to make, but
| please spell it out fully.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| No actually I kind of like it. It boils down the essence
| of the problem to it's core point-- trust.
| kbenson wrote:
| > It is a devil's advocate response, but can you explain
| why this is a bad thing?
|
| I didn't state it as a bad thing, I stated it as a
| counter to your argument that encrypted communication is
| more common, and therefore maybe we should assess whether
| additional capabilities are warranted. Those capabilities
| already exist, and expanded before the increased
| encrypted communication (they happened during the analog
| phone line era). I would hazard that increasingly
| encrypted communication is really just people responding
| to that change in the status quo (or overreach, depending
| on how you view it) brought about by the major powers
| (whether they be governmental or corporate).
| kfprt wrote:
| The laws regarding CSAM/CSA are not the problem, they are
| fine. The problem is that we are expected to give up our
| rights in the vague notion of 'protecting children' while
| the same authorities actively ignore ongoing CSA. The
| Sophie Long case is an excellent example where the police
| has no interest in investigating allegations of CSA. Why is
| it that resources are spent policing CSAM but not CSA? It
| is because it is about control and eroding our right to
| privacy.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I agree that our current legal and law enforcement system
| isn't up to speed with 21st century internet. And it has
| to be updated, because this kind of makes the internet a
| de-facto law less space, covering everything from
| stalking, harassment over fraud to contraband trafficking
| and CSAM.
|
| I don't think full scale surveillance is the way to go in
| free, democratic societies. It is the easiest one, so.
| Even more if surveillance can be outsourced to private,
| global tech companies. It saves the pain of passing laws.
|
| Talking about laws, those along with legal proceedings
| should be brought up to speed. If investigators, based on
| existing and potential new laws, convince a court to
| issue a warrant to surveil or search any of my devices,
| fine. Because then I have legal options to react to that.
| Having that surveillance incorporated into some opaque
| EULA from a company in US, a company that now can enforce
| its standards on stuff I do, is nothing I would have
| thought would be acceptable. Not that I am shocked it is,
| I just wonder why that stuff still surprises me when it
| happens.
|
| Going one step forward, if FANG manages to block right to
| repair laws it would be easy to block running non-
| approved OS on their devices. Which would than be
| possible to enforce by law. Welcome to STASI's wet dream.
| kfprt wrote:
| All of the 'bad things' you mention are already _very
| illegal_. Changing the laws in this case will only lead
| to tyranny. I cannot emphasize this enough, you cannot
| fix societal ills by simply making bad things illegal.
| Right to repair is of course crucial to free society.
| hef19898 wrote:
| By laws I mean the laws governing police work. And
| bringing police up to speed. Obviously CP and other
| things are already very much illegal, these laws are just
| hardly enforced online. That has to change.
| kfprt wrote:
| The internet isn't the wild west, laws are very much
| enforced.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Stalking and harrasment isn't, at least over here.
| Victims are constantly left out in the cold. Same goes
| for fraud, most cases are not prosecuted. Especially if
| these cases cross state, and in the EU, nation borders.
| Because it becomes inconvenient, so police isn't really
| bothering. And if they do, the fraud is done. The
| stalking went on for years. And nothing really improved.
|
| Hell, do I miss the old internet. The one without social
| media.
| kfprt wrote:
| International fraud is a really interesting problem. I've
| proposed a mandatory international money transfer
| insurance that would pay out in case of court decided
| fraud. It would make doing business with corrupt
| countries that look the other way on fraud within their
| borders crack down to preserve their international market
| access.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I have hands on experience with, what I'd call at least
| attempted fraud, with crypto. Back when Sweden thought
| about state backed crypto, a lot of ads showed up where
| you could invest in that. I almost did, call centers used
| Austrian numbers. Not sure if there was even any coin
| behind that. I reported it to police, got a letter after
| a couple of months that the investigation led nowhere and
| was dropped, apparently Austrian authorities did find
| anything on the reported number.
|
| A couple of hours online found
|
| - the company behind that operated out of the UK - the
| call center was not in Austria but used local numbers for
| a while - company was known for that shady business but
| never even got a slap on the wrist
|
| I decided to never count on authorities for that kind of
| fraud. Or report it, because that's just a waste of time,
| unless you lost a shitload of money.
| kfprt wrote:
| There's a lot of dumb fraud. Being international of
| course makes everything harder. Usually the amount of
| investigation is related to how many people were scammed.
| People need to learn how to do due diligence because the
| definition of fraud can get vague at times. I think your
| example is a good case of due diligence, it couldn't hurt
| to blog about their fraud though.
| hef19898 wrote:
| People did write about it, that's how I found out so much
| so quickly. I didn't invest, but cake reasonably close.
| One could call it due diligence, but I can see how easy
| it is to fall for things like that. I got a lot more
| sceptical of these ads, even more so than before.
| mlac wrote:
| It's not just thinking of the victims when they are kids -
| if they aren't killed after the material is made, then they
| have issues for the rest of their life with a real cost to
| society.
|
| We're talking a life-long impact from being abused in that
| stuff...
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Information is power and you can dethrone anyone with access
| to their communication. Just a quote out of context is
| enough, especially with many people out for blood to handle
| their doubts and fears.
|
| A lot of people allegedly knew about Epstein and he was
| completely untouched while connected to high ranking
| politicians. You wouldn't have needed surveillance to
| identify child abuse and if it had turned up anything, I
| doubt something had happened. Even with that surveillance
| implemented, evidence would only be used if politically
| convenient.
|
| If you are against child abuse, you should add funding to
| child care. People there will notice more abuse cases when
| they have the support and funding they need because that
| means more eyes on a potential problem. An image algorithm is
| no help.
| eftychis wrote:
| > Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In
| my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid
| detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-
| positives. The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law
| enforcement. It won't help victims.
|
| I have to respectfully disagree with that statement and the
| train of thought unfortunately. However, you should seek
| legal counsel before proceeding with anything related: the
| advice from a stranger on the web.
|
| a) You are not in the possession of a mystical secret for
| some magical curve or lattice. The "bad guys" if they have
| enough incentive to reverse a compression algorithm
| (effectively what this is) they will easily do that, if the
| money is good enough.
|
| b) If we followed the same mentality in the cryptography
| community we would still be using DES or have a broken AES.
| It is clear from your post that the area requires some
| serious boost from the community in terms of algorithms and
| implementations and architectural solutions. By hiding the
| laundry we are never going to advance.
|
| Right now this area is not taken seriously enough as it
| should by the research community -- one of the reasons also
| being the huge privacy, and illegal search and seizure
| concerns and disregard of other areas of law most of my peers
| have. Material such as yours can help attract attention
| necessary to the problem and showcase how without the help of
| the community we end up with problematic and harmful measures
| such as what you imply.
|
| c) I guess you have, but just in the slightest of cases: From
| what I have read so far and from the implications of the
| marketing material, I have to advise you to seek legal
| counsel if you come to the possession of this PhotoDNA
| material they promised or about your written work.
| [https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-
| fede...] Similarly for any trained ML model -- although here
| it is a disaster in progress still.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| > Right now this area is not taken seriously enough as it
| should by the research community
|
| Another reason is that basic material needed to conduct
| this research (child porn) is legally toxic to posses.
| Sure, there are ways around that for sufficiently motivated
| researchers. But if you are a CS researcher, you have a lot
| of research oppurtunities that do not involve any of that
| risk or overhead.
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| I would have agreed with this on principle, assuming
| motivated actors who are willing to read technical papers
| on PhotoDNA, keeping it unpublished is only delaying these
| actors.
|
| Although there can be real value in delayed release,
| secrecy, and obfuscation, that is especially useful if the
| author can credibly convince NCMEC and other relevant
| parties to make use of the whitepaper while it is private.
|
| If delaying gains little, secrecy is less helpful. Sunlight
| tends to be the best disinfectant.
|
| As it stands, it is hard to judge how much progress is
| being made behind closed doors to improve PhotoDNA.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about
| the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have
| not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact.
|
| The problem is people use this perfectly legitimate problem
| to justify anything. They think it's okay to surveil the
| entire world because children are suffering. There are no
| limits they won't exceed, no lines they won't cross in the
| name of protecting children. If you take issue, you're a
| "screeching minority" that's in their way and should be
| silenced.
|
| It's extremely tiresome seeing "children, terrorists, drug
| dealers" mentioned every single time the government wants to
| erode some fundamental human right. They are the bogeymen of
| the 21st century. Children in particular are the perfect
| political weapon to let you get away with anything. Anyone
| questions you, just destroy their reputation by calling them
| a pedophile.
| Shaddox wrote:
| This quote sums it up perfectly :
|
| "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the
| good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be
| better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent
| moral busybodies.
|
| The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep ,his
| cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who
| torment us for our own good will torment us without end for
| they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
|
| They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same
| time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness
| stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's
| will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease
| is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached
| the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed
| with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals." C.S. Lewis
|
| There are so many problems with this feature :
|
| - it can easily be used to identify also other types of
| dangerous material such as warnings against government
| activity or posters of organized protests
|
| - some malicious actor can send you this kind of content in
| order to get you in trouble
|
| - false positives
|
| - moral busy bodying (your employer not agreeing with you
| going drinking sunday night)
|
| Honestly, it feels like we're about to enter a new age of
| surveillance. Client-side surveillance.
| gambiting wrote:
| The consequences seem very simple - once this system is
| in place, it's only a matter of time until a state actor,
| be it China or US or Russia or pretty much anywhere goes
| to Apple and says "hey this hash matching algorithm you
| have there? If you want to keep operating in our country,
| you need to match <those> hashes too, no, we won't tell
| you what they are and what they represent, but you have
| to report to our state agency who had those present on
| the device".
|
| Once the technology exists it _will_ be abused.
| bsenftner wrote:
| This is what will happen, it's obvious to anyone not
| emotionally invested in the propaganda theater driving
| all social interaction.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Completely agree. I have absolutely no doubt this
| technology will be abused. I bet it will be used to
| silence dissent, opposition and wrongthink more often
| than to protect children.
| candiodari wrote:
| Why doesn't anyone ever question their intent to protect
| children? There is no such intent. When they do protect
| children, these are the sorts of observations of what
| happens when the state has 100% control over children:
|
| https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-
| reports/article23820...
|
| Why does the state, when they treat children like this,
| get to proceed on "more" child protection _to protect
| children_? Are we totally mad? Any effort to protect
| children is always a de facto effort to deliver more
| children into this system, and the state system is _much_
| worse than being abused in society (never mind that
| someone found there 's actually _more_ abuse in foster
| care than with abusive parents! Therefore even if you
| assume social services is always right ... they never
| protect kids against social services itself. Therefore
| you can reasonably assume that a kid that _is getting
| abused_ will be forced into a worse situation by state
| "help")?
|
| I mean if you want to protect children, obviously the
| first step is to fix the child protection system that
| everybody knows is badly broken (you constantly hear
| stories about schools sabotaging research into abusive
| parents _to protect the child against social services_ ,
| covering for the child, lying about attendance or even
| wounds, ..., because they know social services will be
| _much_ worse for the child).
|
| There's states where the _corrections department_
| provides better care (and _definitely_ better educational
| instruction) for children than social services do. And
| yes: that is most definitely NOT because the corrections
| department provides quality instruction. It 's just MUCH
| worse with social services.
|
| They cover themselves by showing the worst possible
| situations in society "demonstrating the need to
| intervene". And you won't hear them talk about how _they
| treat children_ ... because frankly everyone knows.
|
| Reality is that research keeps finding the same thing: a
| child that gets abused at home ... is being treated
| better (gets a better future, better schools, better
| treatment, yes really, more to read, ...) than children
| "protected" from abuse by the state:
|
| https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.97.5.1583
|
| (and that's ignoring that _reasons_ for placement are
| _almost never_ that the child is unsafe. The number 1
| reason is non-cooperation with mental health and /or
| social care by either one of the parents or the child
| themselves. There is not even an allegation that the
| child is unsafe and needs protection. Proof is never
| provided, because for child protection there is no
| required standard of proof in law)
|
| And we're to believe that people who refuse to fix child
| services ... want extra power "to protect children"? How
| is this reasonable at all? They have proven they have no
| interest whatsoever in protecting children, as the cost
| cutting proves time and time again.
| throwavocado wrote:
| I am supportive of Apple's new child protection policies.
| I spent two years helping to build some of the tools used
| for scanning and reporting content (EDIT: not at Apple).
| There are a few sentiments in this thread that I'd like
| to address.
|
| > Yeah, and none of these assholes (pardon the language)
| is willing to spend a penny to provide for millions of
| children suffering of poverty: free education, food,
| health, parental support. Nothing, zero, zilch. And these
| millions are suffering right now, this second, with life-
| long physical and psychological traumas that will
| perpetuate this poverty spiral forever.
|
| Many people in child safety and I, personally, strongly
| support policies that enhance the lives of children,
| including improved education, food, access to health
| services, and support for parents. To your point, though,
| it's also true that many political leaders who vocally
| address the issue of child sexual abuse on the internet
| also happen to be opposed to the policies I would
| support. Like most political alliances, it is an
| uncomfortable one.
|
| > Anyone questions you, just destroy their reputation by
| calling them a pedophile.
|
| I see this sentiment a lot. I have worked with people
| across law enforcement, survivors, survivor advocates,
| NGOs, social workers, private companies, etc. and I don't
| know anyone who responds this way to people raising
| privacy concerns. At worst, they _might_ , rightly or
| wrongly, consider you alarmist or uninformed or
| privileged (in that you don't have images of your abuse
| being actively traded on the internet). But a pedophile?
| I just can't imagine anyone I've worked with in this
| space accusing you or even thinking of you as a potential
| pedophile just because you're opposed to content scanning
| or want E2EE enabled, etc. I suppose maybe someone far,
| far removed from actual front line workers would say
| something so ridiculous.
|
| ---
|
| Separately, I want to suggest that there are paths
| forward here that could include risk controls to reduce
| the risk that this technology gets extended beyond its
| initial purpose. Maybe NCMEC could provide verifiable
| digests of the lists used on your device to verify that
| additional things haven't been added to it. Or there
| could be public, concrete, transparent criteria for how
| and when a lead is referred for law enforcement action.
| By designing this system by which the matching occurs on
| device against a list that can be made available to the
| user, Apple has made content scanning far more privacy-
| preserving and also created avenues by which it could be
| further regulated and transparent. I'm very excited about
| it and, honestly, I think even the staunchest privacy
| advocates should be cautiously optimistic because it is,
| in my opinion, a step in the direction of less visibility
| into user data.
|
| I think that privacy advocates are arguing in good faith
| for protecting society from a surveillance state. I think
| that advocates of scanning are arguing in good faith for
| protecting children. I also think that both sides are
| using language (screeching on the NCMEC side, comparisons
| to hostile regimes on the other) that make it very hard
| to move forward. This isn't pedophile privacy advocates
| vs. surveillance state NCMEC. Neither of those groups
| even exist. It's concerned citizens wanting freedom for
| all people vs. concerned citizens wanting freedom for all
| people.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| HN is the only place I feel safe enough to post these
| pro-privacy opinions. In many other communities, I've
| seen people being accused of serious crimes for daring to
| take issue with whatever surveillance the authorities are
| trying to implement. I've seen people openly speculating
| about the CSAM stashes of encryption users. What else
| could they possibly be hiding, right?
|
| I don't think I trust actual authorities either.
| candiodari wrote:
| > Many people in child safety and I, personally, strongly
| support policies that enhance the lives of children,
| including improved education, food, access to health
| services, and support for parents. To your point, though,
| it's also true that ...
|
| You work with people who, almost always against the will
| of children _and_ parents kidnap children (sorry, but
| search on Youtube for images of their action: kidnap _is_
| the only correct term) ... then proceed to _NOT_ care for
| those children and destroy their lives. Obviously this is
| the only correct reasoning is that this is entirely
| immoral until the care system is fixed, because they are
| _not_ improving the lives of children, and their complete
| lack of caring about this tells you what they 're goals
| aren't.
|
| Watch "Short Term 12" for what facilities these children
| are provided with. Stop pretending that helping these
| people acquire children (because that's exactly what
| you're doing) helps a single child. It doesn't. Terrible,
| abusive, violent, parents take better care of children
| than these places do. The moral reaction _should_ be to
| do what most of society, thankfully, does: sabotage the
| efforts of social workers.
|
| And if you're unwilling to accept this, as soon as this
| whole covid thing dies down a bit, find the nearest
| children's facility and visit. Make sure to talk to the
| children. You will find you're making a big mistake.
|
| Whatever you tell yourself, please don't believe that
| you're helping children. You're not. You're helping to
| destroy their lives
|
| > I see this sentiment a lot. I have worked with people
| across law enforcement, survivors, survivor advocates,
| NGOs, social workers, private companies, etc. and I don't
| know anyone who responds this way to people raising
| privacy concerns.
|
| I'm adding this response to the other reply to your
| comment ... which makes 2 people who disagree with your
| assessment: you are likely to be threatened in many
| places. I feel like one might even say it's likely we're
| 2 people who _have been_ threatened.
|
| I would like to add that either as a child or an adult,
| child protection authorities, the people you help, _will_
| threaten you, and I 've never known a _single_ exception
| if they think (correctly or otherwise) that you 're
| hiding something from them. That's if you're at their
| mercy (which is why every child in child services makes
| sure to commit some despicable/violent/minor criminal act
| or two every month and keep it secret: if you don't have
| something to confess that won't get you sent to a "secure
| facility" you _will_ be horribly punished at some
| unexpected random time. That 's how these people work.
| And over time you may learn that, for a kid in the
| system, a whole host of places are traps. Like the
| hospital, child services itself, police, homeless
| shelters or school. As in every person in one of those
| places will be shown your "history" as soon as you
| mention your name and if they report you ... _very_ bad
| things will happen. Some children explicitly make bad
| things happen (e.g. commit violent theft), because they
| 'll get sent to "juvie" and finally the stress of
| suddenly getting punished out of nowhere disappears. Also
| some believe you get better schooling in juvie. So you
| hide, even if you're hurt or sick. This is why some of
| those kids respond angrily or even violently if someone
| suggests they should see a doctor for whatever reason.
| Sometimes literally to make sure the option of suicide
| remains open (which is difficult in "secure" care). And
| why does this happen? NOT to protect children: to protect
| themselves and "their reputation", and their peace of
| mind _against_ these children).
|
| This, of course, you will never hear your new friends
| mention needs fixing. They are in fact fighting with this
| side of the system over money, so that EVEN LESS money
| goes to the kids the system takes care of. That, too, you
| will never hear from them. They are doing the opposite of
| what someone who means well with disadvantaged children
| will do.
|
| I have _zero_ doubts they will use your work, not to
| convict offenders, because that 's hard, years of very
| difficult work, but to bring more kids into a system that
| destroys children's lives, and MORE so than the worst of
| parents do. Because throwing children into this system
| (and destroying their lives) is _very_ easy. I 'm sure
| occasionally they will convict an offender (which,
| incidentally, doesn't help the kids) or get a good
| outcome for a child. It happens. If is absolutely not
| common.
|
| And not to worry they will put great emphasis on this
| statement: "I've never seen anyone in the system who
| didn't mean well". Most are idiots, by the way, if you
| keep digging at their motivations, they will reveal
| themselves _very_ clearly quite quickly.
|
| These "people in child safety" DO NOT mean well with
| children. They merely hate a portion of society (which
| includes those victimized children) and want to see them
| punished _HARD_. If you are a moral person, volunteer at
| a nearby children 's shelter and show understanding when
| the inevitable happens and you get taken advantage of (do
| not worry, you will learn). DO NOT HELP THESE PEOPLE GET
| MORE CHILDREN.
| sharken wrote:
| And i think if you're working on these systems, then it's
| all too easy to only think about the happy scenario.
|
| But time has shown that an initial good concept will
| transform into something worse.
|
| We have a very recent example with Corona contact-tracing
| apps, that law enforcement in multiple democratic
| countries are now using for other purposes.
|
| So no, we should not allow this client-side scanning to
| go through, it will not end well.
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| This is such a stupid fallacy and it comes up every time
| something like this is discussed. You don't know if
| anything is or will be abused you expect it because you
| expect your elected government to do so. The problem here
| is with you or your electors not with the technology
| itself. You want to fix the symptoms but not the problem.
| As usual.
| srmarm wrote:
| The thing is tools like this will only make it harder to
| fix the problem.
| gambiting wrote:
| How so? The UK's snooper's charter that compels ISPs to
| save your entire browsing history for a year was only
| meant to be used to catch pedophiles and terrorists, and
| now 17 different agencies have been given completely
| warrantless access to the database, including the UK's
| Food Standards Agency(??!?!?!?). People have already been
| fired for abusing access too, so it definitely happens
| too.
|
| >>The problem here is with you or your electors not with
| the technology itself
|
| No offense, but this is such a shitty answer, and it's
| always made by apologists for these incredibly invasive
| technologies. Like, please explain to me, in simple
| terms, how can I, an immigrant who doesn't even have the
| ability to vote, vote to make an American corporation do
| nor not do something. I'm super curious.
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| It's the exact same shit I was talking about instead of
| fixing your governing body you want to fix it with
| technology. All the crypto apologist are the same way if
| the government YOU are electing does something stupid you
| want to fix the symptom and not the governing body. You
| are just throwing around goal posts instead of working on
| the real problem.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>if the government YOU are electing
|
| Except like I clearly said above, I'm an immigrant
| without the right to vote, so I'm not electing shit.
| Again, how exactly am I supposed to vote my way out of
| this?
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| You can leave the country or you can be political active
| in other ways than direct votes. Don't wiggle your way
| out of your extremist position that you can't do anything
| except building technology which would be totally
| obsolete if you fixed your political problem.
| gambiting wrote:
| >> you can be political active in other ways than direct
| votes.
|
| Which is what we're doing here, by participating in
| protests, complaining to agencies and governing bodies as
| well as Apple itself against this technology. Or is this
| not up to your definition of "politically active"?
|
| >>You can leave the country
|
| I'm envious of your position in life where this is the
| first thing that springs to your mind, well done you.
|
| >> Don't wiggle your way out of your extremist position
| that you can't do anything except building technology
| which would be totally obsolete if you fixed your
| political problem.
|
| Uhm....are you sure you have the right argument there? Or
| maybe replying to the wrong person?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > you can be political active in other ways than direct
| votes
|
| Absolutely. That's why we're posting our thoughts here
| and attempting to convince others.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _government YOU are electing does something stupid_
|
| Is America the entire world to you? What should a Chinese
| citizen do? What should a Saudi citizen do? What should a
| Russian citizen do? Even if you ignore the fact that the
| chance of fascism in American is not zero, why should
| Apple make it easier for totalitarian regimes to spy on
| their citizens? Or do you expect a Saudi person to "just
| move to America"?
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| I am talking to people on this website which is banned in
| 3 of the 4 countries you are talking about. Stop moving
| your shitty goalpost we are talking about the US, Europe
| and other democracies. You know what would help people in
| regimes? Governing bodies that stand up for them in other
| countries... guess who could change that.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I'm not moving the goalposts. I, one, have empathy for
| people other than myself and two, I am not deluded enough
| to think that fascism will never return to the West. If
| you don't care about citizens in other countries, that's
| on you.
|
| > _You know what would help people in regimes? Governing
| bodies that stand up for them in other countries... guess
| who could change that._
|
| What would also help is if Apple didn't build tools for
| those regimes to suppress opposing political bodies.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Civil disobedience. If we think a law is unjust, it is
| our _duty_ to disobey and undermine it. Technology is a
| tool that allows us to do exactly that.
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| This is not disobedience this is beanbag shaped,
| mayonnaise filled tech bros talking about freedom they've
| never lost but also never wanted.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > You don't know if anything is or will be abused
|
| Actually I do. Governments abuse their powers all the
| time. They have done it before, are doing it right now
| and will continue to do it in the future. This is not
| fallacy, it is fact.
|
| Here's an example:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
|
| The only solution is to take their power away. No way to
| abuse power they don't have. We must make it
| technologically impossible for them to spy on us.
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| That's the exact same fallacy you are proposing to fix a
| symptom and not the problem. You want to reign in the
| government YOU ARE ELECTING TO GOVERN you with technology
| instead of real political work. Either vote different or
| get into politics and fix yourself.
|
| Your wikipedia link doesn't show anything regarding abuse
| of the governing body ALL of the examples are from
| private persons.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Any modern state implements separation of powers, trias
| politica in most cases. Your argument ignores that. You
| also haven't made clear what fallacy you mean.
|
| Want to fix child abuse? Fund teachers and child care.
| Apple cannot help those kids and I don't mean that as an
| indignation towards the company.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I didn't elect anyone. There is not a single politician
| in power right now that represents me. I'm not even
| american to begin with so it's not like I have any
| influence over american administration.
|
| In any case, there's no reason why politics and democracy
| ought to be the only way to bring about change. We have a
| far more powerful tool: technology.
|
| Governments make their laws. People make technology that
| neutralizes their laws. They make new laws. People make
| new technology. And so on. With every iteration, the
| government must become ever more tyrannical in order to
| maintain the same level of control over the population it
| previously enjoyed. If this loop continues long enough,
| we'll either end up with an uncontrollable population or
| with an oppressive totalitarian state. Hopefully limits
| will be found along the way.
|
| > Your wikipedia link doesn't show anything regarding
| abuse of the governing body ALL of the examples are from
| private persons.
|
| A government employee abused his access to the USA's
| warrantless surveillance apparatus in order to spy on his
| loved ones. If this isn't abuse of power, I don't know
| what is.
|
| Honestly, it's just human nature. No person should ever
| be given such powers to begin with. I wouldn't trust
| myself with such power. It should be impossible to spy on
| everyone.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Your wikipedia link doesn't show anything regarding
| abuse of the governing body ALL of the examples are from
| private persons.
|
| Have you even like....read the page they linked?
|
| "Siobhan Gorman (2013-08-23). "NSA Officers Spy on Love
| Interests". Washington Wire. The Wallstreet Journal. "
|
| Are NSA Officers "private persons" now? They are
| government employees, they were abusing the power they
| were given _while_ employed by the government. It doesn
| 't matter in the slightest if they were abusing the power
| for private or state gain, it's a state agency and its
| employees abusing the access, that implicitly makes it
| the state abusing the power they have.
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| Wow if you can't distinguish between rogue agents and an
| institutional abuse of power there is nothing left to
| argue.
| gambiting wrote:
| If you really think that an NSA employee abusing their
| access is just a "private person" then yeah, I guess
| there is nothing left to argue. I guess it must be nice
| sleeping well at night not worrying about this stuff,
| right?
| [deleted]
| eecc wrote:
| Yeah, and none of these assholes (pardon the language) is
| willing to spend a penny to provide for millions of
| children suffering of poverty: free education, food,
| health, parental support. Nothing, zero, zilch. And these
| millions are suffering right now, this second, with life-
| long physical and psychological traumas that will
| perpetuate this poverty spiral forever.
| ace_of_spades wrote:
| Thank you! This is a really important observation about
| anything controversial ,,child" related. Be it abortion
| or abuse you can tell what people's real priorities are
| by looking at how much they are willing to spend on the
| welfare of kids outside their immediate point of concern.
|
| All of these types of problems are likely better solved
| in some other ways. Why not have general mental health
| coaching in schools freely available to increase the
| chance of early detection of abusive behaviors? Why not
| improve the financial situation of parents so that the
| child is not perceived to be another burden in a brutal
| life? Why not offer low-friction free mental health
| coaching to all individuals?
|
| The way the world is organized now is ABSURD to the
| highest degrees! We pretend to care about a thing but
| only look at issues narrowly without considering the big
| picture.
|
| In the end, politics and the way power is distributed is
| broken. There are too many entrenched interests looking
| out for their narrow self-interest. There seems to be not
| enough vision to unite enough power for substantial
| change. Even the SDGs don't seem to inspire the developed
| nations as something to mobilize for. We need the fervor
| of war efforts for positive change.
|
| Doing the right thing and doing things right needs to
| become the very essence of what we as individuals stand
| for. Not consuming goods or furthering the idealogical
| agenda of a select few. Each and every one of us should
| look into themselves and look into the world and work to
| build a monument of this collective existence. We were
| here. Let us explain to all following us how we tried our
| best to do the right things in the right way and where we
| fell short of our ambitions and hope that others might
| improve upon our work.
|
| Sorry, I think this turned into a rant but it comes from
| the heart.
| imtringued wrote:
| That would require demurrage which is never going to
| happen. I'll be honest. It's not demurrage itself that we
| need, it's just much easier to implement. What we need is
| a linkage between the lifetime of debt and money.
| Defaulting on debt should destroy money. I.e. money is
| only valid as long as the contract (the debt) that
| created it is valid. Given a sufficiently advanced
| electronic currency you would track the expiry of every
| single dollar. The lender then would decide whether he
| wants to extend the expiry of the dollar and thereby
| extend the due date of the debt.
|
| The fundamental problem with short term thinking
| (positive time preference) is that people want to "flee"
| into fictional wealth. Rather than build a long lasting
| monument (companies like blue origin count as monument)
| they prefer to increase a number on a balance sheet in
| the form of a bank account. What makes fictional wealth
| so attractive? As mentioned above money is just the other
| side of a debt contract. By withholding your money you
| extend the debt. In other words, a lot of people promise
| to work for you. Having idle servants is the entire
| reason behind accumulating money. If you truly wanted to
| achieve full employment then all money earned must be
| spent eventually, to be more specific all debts must be
| fulfilled. It would mean that your wealth cannot exist in
| the form forced coercion of other people. Employees would
| still come and work in your companies but they would
| leave each day with a fair share of the wealth they
| helped create. All your wealth would have to be long
| lasting and the environment, which is the longest lasting
| form of prosperity, would be considered part of your
| wealth.
|
| Ancient Egypt had something closer to a "grain standard"
| meaning that farmers deposit grain in a storehouse where
| they receive something akin to a coupon which you can
| trade in for grain. Their money is representing a claim
| to a spoiling good! The horror! The complete antithesis
| of the gold standard. Just imagine what a backwards
| society that must have been! Of course the truth is
| everyone remembers ancient Egypt as an advanced
| civilization for its time.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| > Be it abortion or abuse you can tell what people's real
| priorities are.
|
| There is also (almost always) an unhealthy matching
| support for an enormous military with nuclear weapons
| whose sole purpose - when push comes to shove - is to
| indiscriminately murder the same babies once they have
| grown up.
|
| Its a symptom of a deeper mental pathology.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| The thing with war is, and especially with nuclear
| weapons - it does not wait for the babies to be grown up.
| It might have gotten more precise to avoid direct hits of
| babies as they make for bad PR, but that still happens a
| lot and mothers with their babies on the run in a burning
| city is not much better either.
| c01n wrote:
| Thank you for this argument, I will put it in my cannon
| of responses to people who are pro spyware.
| dustymcp wrote:
| this so much this...
| vpmpaul wrote:
| OK, I'll forfit 100% of my rights to eradicate CP from my
| country. Then lets say these measures are effective and CP
| is removed in all but name from the country. Now what do we
| do with the thousands of people and billions or of dollars
| that is being funneled into the effort? Well history shows
| us this answer. None of those people or authorizes are
| suddenly going to say well that's a wrap. Lay us off and
| take the budget to a more meaningful use. Nope, instead
| they double down and start looking for other
| "infringements" to justify their funding and their jobs.
| Ever increasing in the pettiness of the trespass until
| powerful sociopath realizes they can now repurpose this
| agency an their resources for their own power gain to
| remove opponents and silence opposition.
|
| Perhaps even worse. They move on to some ML based detection
| that uploads suspected CP that is not in the database. Most
| people have no idea how bad a false accusation can destroy
| their lives. Even if you are 100% innocent there is already
| a formal government case against you. At the very least you
| will be compelled to hire a very expensive attorney to
| handle the matter for you. After all you cant risk a budget
| attorney with a huge caseload to handle this potential life
| sentence case. Not to mention that during this time you
| will possible be locked out of accounts,finances, put on
| leave from employment, banned from hiring, banned from
| assistance programs. Perhaps even posted in the media as a
| sex offender.
| Thorrez wrote:
| >I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author
| seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper.
|
| Would it help anything? Apple isn't using PhotoDNA, so proving
| PhotoDNA is bad would just be met with "we don't use that".
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I believe it would because other image systems will probably
| have to make similar implementations and trade offs that
| PhotoDNA did.
| zepto wrote:
| Why? It would be interesting to compare the two systems,
| but there is no reason to assume the trade-offs are the
| same.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| There are trade offs that can be made that are inherent
| to the space.
|
| There are a handful of hashing methods in papers, and
| each can have its parameters tuned, again making trade
| offs for things like efficiency or accuracy.
|
| Then when it comes to efficient searching through hashes
| for matches and fuzzy matches, there are common
| algorithms and data structures used across perceptual
| hashing systems, each with with their own trade offs,
| implementation details and parameters that can be tuned.
|
| If there's an issue with PhotoDNA that doesn't come down
| to a poor implementation, then there's a good chance that
| other systems might have met the same pitfalls they did.
| And if it comes down to a poor implementation, it would
| be prudent for operators of other systems to make sure
| their own systems don't make the same mistakes.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> Would it help anything? Apple isn't using PhotoDNA, so
| proving PhotoDNA is bad would just be met with "we don't
| use that".
|
| > I believe it would because other image systems will
| probably have to make similar implementations and trade
| offs that PhotoDNA did.
|
| Even if that's the case, that's too subtle of a point to be
| very effective, and you'll have all kinds of PR people
| (Apple and otherwise) selling the "we don't use that [so
| those criticisms don't apply to us]" narrative.
| intended wrote:
| Isn't that an alleged memo from the NCMEC? I would sincerely
| doubt an official memo from any agency would use the term
| "shrieking minority", it sounds like imaginative fiction of
| what a government agency would actually say.
| commoner wrote:
| 9to5Mac published the full message that NCMEC sent to Apple:
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/06/apple-internal-memo-icloud-
| ph...
|
| It does say "We know that the days to come will be filled
| with the screeching voices of the minority."
| intended wrote:
| Wow. Thank you, looks like I was wrong.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The fact that they're willing to openly make such a
| brazen statement is part of why I think they're
| unsalvageable.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author
| seems to still play nice
|
| Stopping to that level is what they want, CNN: "'privacy
| activists' have released a tool to allow the spread of CP"
| zionic wrote:
| If that's how they play then the only winning move is to
| respond in kind.
|
| >shadowy government affiliated agency abuses its role of
| protecting children to install malware on a billion devices
| Sebb767 wrote:
| That's not even news at this point. Privacy invading laws
| have been pushed for years under the guise of either CP or
| terrorism.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That's a PR fight you will lose.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I'm not so sure, I think it may be a lose-lose scenario,
| with both the government and the companies who's products
| have become compromised taking a big hit.
|
| The people merely avoiding the tainted products aren't on
| blast here.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The people on blast are the ones _publicly advocating_
| for privacy. They 're the ones who would be damaged in
| that scenario, and I for one want a society that takes
| them seriously.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Well, it doesn't look that way so far. I haven't seen any
| credible mainstream positions ridiculing the people
| advocating for privacy. It seems like everyone's pretty
| well aware that technology sucks and systems like this
| are not to be trusted, even if they're implemented with
| good intentions.
|
| We will see.
| [deleted]
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| One way to interpret the macaque photo is that the database has
| already been subverted for uses other than catching CP.
| eddyg wrote:
| Or it's one of many test images, like EICAR, so people can
| test and validate the system without using abhorrent images.
| ipv6ipv4 wrote:
| Sure. Though, it's not of much use if it is not documented.
| r00fus wrote:
| NCMEC is a private nonprofit. No government oversight. How are
| they allowed _this much power_ over every photo on everyone 's
| devices?
| gerash wrote:
| I agree. NCMEC is the root cause. It's very much like the war
| on drugs. There are a lot of horrendous crimes out there and
| this level of overreach isn't deemed necessary for any of them.
|
| Child sex abuse seems to have become the excuse to create these
| heavy handed policies to terminate accounts with no recourse by
| Google and scanning locally stored photos by Apple. Even
| _receiving_ a _cartoon_ depicting child sex abuse can get you
| in trouble.
|
| Hopefully this will be a catalyst to reform the law.
| zionic wrote:
| It's not enough to disband the NCMEC, I want jail time for
| these people.
|
| This is literally conspiracy to undermine the privacy and
| security of over a billion devices (and their users) to catch a
| "small minority" of criminals.
|
| These people deserve to lose their homes and freedom for this,
| along with every engineer and executive that participated.
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| wtf. are you OK? Your whole comment history looks like a guy
| diving in a really bad conspiracy rabbit hole.
| therealmarv wrote:
| If this is true and content of pictures can be unhashed to a
| 26x26 picture this is ethically a total nightmare. Nobody wants
| to carry a phone with child porn with them, discusting if you
| think about it.
|
| I don't even want to imagine what very religious people and
| countries will think about the iPhone then.
| kemayo wrote:
| > To reiterate: scanning your device is not a privacy risk, but
| copying files from your device without any notice is definitely a
| privacy issue.
|
| I think the article is wrong about this. Or, right-but-
| situationally-irrelevant. As far as I can tell from Apple's
| statements, they're doing this only to photos which are being
| uploaded to iCloud Photos. So, any photo this is happening to is
| one that you've already asked Apple to copy to their servers.
|
| > In this case, Apple has a very strong reason to believe they
| are transferring CSAM material, and they are sending it to Apple
| -- not NCMEC.
|
| I also suspect this is a fuzzy area, and anything legal would
| depend on when they can actually be said to be certain there's
| illegal material involved.
|
| Apple's process seems to be: someone has uploaded photos to
| iCloud and enough of their photos have tripped this system that
| they get a human review; if the human agrees it's CSAM, they
| forward it on to law enforcement. There _is_ a chance of false
| positives, so the human review step seems necessary...
|
| After all, "Apple has hooked up machine learning to automatically
| report you to the police for child pornograpy with no human
| review" would have been a _much_ worse news week for Apple. :D
| nullc wrote:
| > There is a chance of false positives, so the human review
| step seems necessary...
|
| You misunderstand the purpose of the human review by Apple.
|
| The human review is not due to false positives: The system is
| designed to have an extremely low rate of hits where the entry
| isn't in the database and the review invades your privacy
| regardless of who does it.
|
| The human review exists to legitimize an otherwise unlawful
| search via a loophole.
|
| The US Government (directly or through effective agencies like
| NCMEC) is barred from searching or inspecting your private
| communications without a warrant.
|
| Apple, by virtue of your contractual relationship with them, is
| free to do so-- so long as they are not coerced to do so by the
| government. When Apple reviews your communications and finds
| what they believe to be child porn they're then required to
| report it and because the government is merely repeating a
| search that apple already (legally) performed, no warrant is
| required.
|
| So, Apple "reviews" the hits because, per the courts, if they
| just sent automated matches without review that wouldn't be
| sufficient to avoid the need for a warrant.
|
| The extra review step does not exist to protect your privacy:
| The review itself deprives you of your privacy. The review step
| exists to suppress your fourth amendment rights.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| So.. how well does "human review" work with copyright on
| youtube?
|
| This is basically fearmongering, and saying "if you're not a
| pedo, you have nothing to fear", installing the tech on all
| phones, and then using that tech to find the next wikileaks
| leaker (who was the first person with this photo), trump
| supporters (just add the trump-beats-cnn-gif to the hashes),
| anti-china protesters (winnie the pooh photos), etc.
|
| This is basically like forcing everyone to "voluntarily" record
| inside of their houses, AI on that camera would then recognise
| drugs, and only those recordings will be sent to the police.
| kemayo wrote:
| I was pointing out an inaccuracy in the article, not
| commenting about whether or not this tech is a good idea. I
| think if we're opposed to it, we should avoid misrepresenting
| it in arguments.
|
| On which note... it really does seem to be voluntary, as
| there's an easy opt-out of the process in the form of "not
| using iCloud Photos". Or Google Photos, or assorted other
| services, which apparently all do similar scanning.
|
| _Yes_ , there's a slippery-slope argument here, but the
| actual service-as-it-exists-today really does seem scoped to
| a cautious examination of possible child porn that's being
| uploaded to Apple's servers.
| vmladenov wrote:
| > just add the trump-beats-cnn-gif to the hashes
|
| They could literally do this right now server-side and nobody
| would ever know.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But noone uploads that to iCloud. That's why they must
| implement this feature client-side ("because if you're not
| a pedo, you have nothing to worry about"), and then enable
| it for on-phone-only photos too ("because if you're not a
| pedo, you have nothing to worry about"). Then use the same
| feature on OSX ("because if you're not a pedo, you have
| nothing to worry about").
| DethNinja wrote:
| There is one particular thing I don't understand about this Apple
| policy:
|
| You can buy a SIM card and send images to your
| enemies/competitors through WhatsApp, and these images
| automatically gets downloaded to iPhone and potentially uploaded
| to iCloud.
|
| What precautions are Apple taking against such actions? Or will
| it be some kind of exploitable implementation where you can
| easily swat any person you want and let them go to courts to
| prove their innocence?
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| Funnily enough, iMessage is also adopting this as a (default
| on!) option in iOS 15. Which is also where the anti-CP
| "feature" drops...
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I know of no messaging app the "automatically" uploads to
| iCloud. And what sort of idiot would try and send CP using a
| messenger app (almost all of which CASM detection). That's like
| trying to smuggle drugs past the TSA so you can put them in
| someone's house to frame them.
| vmladenov wrote:
| The app doesn't. The iOS camera roll uploads newly captured
| or saved images when it connects to Wi-Fi.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| If you choose to save it, then you no longer a "victim".
| But someone else can't force a save to iCloud on your
| device.
| vmladenov wrote:
| Sure, but some apps allow you to choose once and
| henceforth save all photos sent to you. That provides a
| vector for someone to inject things into your iCloud.
|
| However, I find this risk exaggerated because if someone
| actually does this, you can just block the app's ability
| to access your camera roll in the privacy settings or
| stop using the app. And report the user to the service,
| of course.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| WhatsApp automatically saves images to the phone, which
| automatically get uploaded.
|
| So yes, it does work this way. It does on my iPhone.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| I think Apple may have really screwed the pooch with this move.
| They're going to catch hell for being able to take images from
| your device without warning or consent, and, they'll catch hell
| if they remove it.
|
| Worse, they've also opened the door to government censorship of
| images and content and propped that door wide open.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Unfortunately, we're in a bit of an echo chamber here. The
| average person is either unaware of these types of issues,
| doesn't care, or can be easily swayed with "think of the
| children"-type arguments.
|
| There's going to be absolutely no oversight or transparency
| into occasions when an image is removed from a device. Nobody
| will ever know when a non-CSAM image is accidentally pulled
| back from a device. All the public will ever see are headlines
| to the tune of "CSAM scanning system catches bad person once
| again".
|
| This is a really awful path that we're going down, and this is
| absolutely going to get abused by regimes around the world.
| caeril wrote:
| Yes, they screwed the pooch with us, representing:
|
| 1. The few who care about privacy.
|
| 2. That's about it. Maybe 1% if you're being generous. ( And
| subtract the portion of that 1% on this site who DO care about
| privacy but are being compensated $400k/yr by Apple and with
| Bay Area rents being what they are, they shouldn't rock the
| boat, and they really need to make good on their Tesla Roadster
| reservation. )
|
| But go ask your mother-in-law, your dad, or any random normie
| friend. They're fighting PedoBear! And if they expand this
| further, well, they're fighting terrorists! And if they expand
| even further, well, I have nothing to hide! Do you?
|
| feh ~/memes/dennis_nedry_see_nobody_cares.gif
| noptd wrote:
| I disagree. Ask anyone you listed if they'd be comfortable
| with Apple reviewing their photos and possibly sending them
| to another organization without any warning or recourse and I
| highly doubt any of them would be okay with it.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > As it was explained to me by my attorney, that is a felony.
|
| Apple could argue they were already going to receive the photo
| (since this algorithm only affects Photos destined for iCloud
| Photos) and thus "when in the upload process it was classified"
| is simply technological semantics.
|
| > This was followed by a memo leak, allegedly from NCMEC to
| Apple:
|
| Well, we certainly are the minority. If a majority of people knew
| and were mad we'd have protests in major cities.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| As a fan of this blog for longer than I can remember, it's
| refreshing to hear this particular author's take on this issue,
| especially considering their background.
|
| I'm glad these issues were addressed in a much more elegant way
| than I would have put them:
|
| > _Apple 's technical whitepaper is overly technical -- and yet
| doesn't give enough information for someone to confirm the
| implementation. (I cover this type of paper in my blog entry, "Oh
| Baby, Talk Technical To Me" under "Over-Talk".) In effect, it is
| a proof by cumbersome notation. This plays to a common fallacy:
| if it looks really technical, then it must be really good.
| Similarly, one of Apple's reviewers wrote an entire paper full of
| mathematical symbols and complex variables. (But the paper looks
| impressive. Remember kids: a mathematical proof is not the same
| as a code review.)_
|
| > _Apple claims that there is a "one in one trillion chance per
| year of incorrectly flagging a given account". I'm calling
| bullshit on this._
| HALtheWise wrote:
| Reading carefully through the paper, an important part of their
| calculation for the "one in a trillion" claim seems to rest on
| the cryptographic threshold approach they are using. In
| particular, it seems likely to me that the number matches
| required for your account to be flagged is relatively high
| (perhaps a dozen). If that is the case, their hash collision
| likelihood could be "only" 1 in a million, but it would still
| be vanishingly unlikely for a typical iCloud user to get a
| dozen false positives. 1e-6 is _much_ more testable than 1e-12
| for the perceptual hashing, and the cryptographic parts of the
| secret sharing are easy to analyze mathematically.
|
| As a disclaimer, I haven't done the actual math here. This also
| implies that the risk of your account getting flagged falsely
| is tightly related to how many images you upload.
| mdoms wrote:
| You're assuming that perceptual hashes are uniformly
| distributed, but that's not the case. If I post a picture of
| my kid at the beach I'm far, far more likely to generate
| perceptual hashes closer to the threshold. Not to mention
| intimate photos of/with my partner.
| dannyw wrote:
| yep. what if i take a burst of 12 photos that all
| incorrectly fall as a false positive to NeuralHash (which
| is a ML black box), and an Apple reviewer is now invading
| my privacy by looking at my photo library?
| ec109685 wrote:
| The the technical paper Apple put out that is linked to
| in the post talks about the risk, but isn't very helpful
|
| "Several solutions to this were considered, but
| ultimately, this issue is addressed by a mechanism
| outside of the cryptographic protocol."
| dannyw wrote:
| Not acceptable for a technology being deployed to
| hundreds of millions of people.
| HALtheWise wrote:
| Good point about the possibility of capturing a bunch of
| distinct photos with the same perceptual hash, either by
| taking a burst of photos or by editing one photo a bunch of
| times. I guess a better implementation would never upload
| two different encryption keys for the same perceptual hash
| and just send dummy data instead, but I haven't seen any
| indication that they actually do that.
| raincom wrote:
| There was a huge brawl of sorts about "a mathematical proof is
| not the same as a code review" between Neal Koblitz, Alfred
| Menezes, etc on the one hand and theoretical crypto community
| on the other hand wrt "provable security". Here is a site:
| http://anotherlook.ca/
| q-rews wrote:
| Regarding that rate, I'm no expert but my guess is that it's
| the result of math, not actual testing of 1+ trillion images.
| This sounds like calling bullshit on "You have one trillion
| chance to win the lottery."
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The author addresses this point:
|
| > _Perhaps Apple is basing their "1 in 1 trillion" estimate
| on the number of bits in their hash? With cryptographic
| hashes (MD5, SHA1, etc.), we can use the number of bits to
| identify the likelihood of a collision. If the odds are "1 in
| 1 trillion", then it means the algorithm has about 40 bits
| for the hash. However, counting the bit size for a hash does
| not work with perceptual hashes._
|
| > _With perceptual hashes, the real question is how often do
| those specific attributes appear in a photo. This isn 't the
| same as looking at the number of bits in the hash. (Two
| different pictures of cars will have different perceptual
| hashes. Two different pictures of similar dogs taken at
| similar angles will have similar hashes. And two different
| pictures of white walls will be almost identical.)_
|
| > _With AI-driven perceptual hashes, including algorithms
| like Apple 's NeuralHash, you don't even know the attributes
| so you cannot directly test the likelihood. The only real
| solution is to test by passing through a large number of
| visually different images. But as I mentioned, I don't think
| Apple has access to 1 trillion pictures._
|
| > _What is the real error rate? We don 't know. Apple doesn't
| seem to know. And since they don't know, they appear to have
| just thrown out a really big number. As far as I can tell,
| Apple's claim of "1 in 1 trillion" is a baseless estimate. In
| this regard, Apple has provided misleading support for their
| algorithm and misleading accuracy rates._
| eh9 wrote:
| I really HATE usage of "CP", it's abuse and has nothing to do
| with pornography.
| defaultname wrote:
| Good article, however-
|
| "Due to how Apple handles cryptography (for your privacy), it is
| very hard (if not impossible) for them to access content in your
| iCloud account. Your content is encrypted in their cloud, and
| they don't have access. If Apple wants to crack down on CSAM,
| then they have to do it on your Apple device"
|
| I do not believe this is true. Maybe one day it will be true and
| Apple is planning for it, but right now iCloud service data is
| encrypted in the sense that they are stored encrypted at rest and
| in transit, however Apple holds the keys. We know this given that
| iCloud backups have been surrendered to authorities, and of
| course you can log into the web variants to view your photos,
| calendar, etc. Not to mention that Apple has purportedly been
| doing the same hash checking on their side for a couple of years.
|
| Thus far there has been no compelling answer as to why Apple
| needs to do this on device.
| amelius wrote:
| Probably because Apple wants to stay away from any suspicions
| that they sometimes actually use their keys to access private
| information.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > why Apple needs to do this on device
|
| Presumably to implement E2E encryption, while at the same time
| helping the NCMEC to push for legislation to make it illegal to
| offer E2E encryption without this backdoor.
|
| Apple users would be slightly better off than the status quo,
| but worse off than if Apple simply implemented real E2E without
| backdoors, and everyone else's privacy will be impacted by the
| backdoors that the NCMEC will likely push.
| zepto wrote:
| > make it illegal to offer E2E encryption without this
| backdoor.
|
| It isn't a back door to E2E encryption. It can't even be used
| to search for a specific image on a person's device.
|
| It could be used possibly to find a collection of images that
| are not CSAM but are disliked by the state, assuming Apple is
| willing to enter into a conspiracy with NCMEC.
| _jn wrote:
| It seems that Apple does not need to be a co-conspirator,
| and that it would be sufficient if someone added
| 'malicious' hashes to the NCMEC database.
| zepto wrote:
| Not correct. When enough images to trigger a match are
| detected _apple employees verify the visual derivative_
| to make sure it matches before an alert is generated.
| They would need to collude.
| m_mueller wrote:
| Whether users are worse off or not entirely depends on the
| rate of false positives. That's the biggest issue IMO and
| OP's article points out how there is zero published and
| trustworthy information on that.
| ncw96 wrote:
| You are correct -- most of the iCloud data is not end-to-end
| encrypted. Apple discusses which data is end-to-end encrypted
| at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
| [deleted]
| cmsj wrote:
| I think that section was rewritten, it currently reads:
|
| > [Revised; thanks CW!] Apple's iCloud service encrypts all
| data, but Apple has the decryption keys and can use them if
| there is a warrant. However, nothing in the iCloud terms of
| service grants Apple access to your pictures for use in
| research projects, such as developing a CSAM scanner. (Apple
| can deploy new beta features, but Apple cannot arbitrarily use
| your data.) In effect, they don't have access to your content
| for testing their CSAM system. > If Apple wants to crack down
| on CSAM, then they have to do it on your Apple device.
|
| (which also doesn't really make sense, if the iCloud ToS don't
| grant Apple the necessary rights to do CSAM scanning there,
| they could just revise it, however, I think they probably have
| the rights they need already)
| defaultname wrote:
| Indeed, for three years or so Apple's privacy policy has
| specifically had this in it-
|
| "Security and Fraud Prevention. To protect individuals,
| employees, and Apple and for loss prevention and to prevent
| fraud, including to protect individuals, employees, and Apple
| for the benefit of all our users, and prescreening or
| scanning uploaded content for potentially illegal content,
| including child sexual exploitation material."
|
| https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
|
| Under "Apple's Use of Personal Data". They had that in there
| since at least 2019.
|
| Add that an Apple executive told congress two years ago that
| Apple scans iCloud data for CSAM.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > Thus far there has been no compelling answer as to why Apple
| needs to do this on device.
|
| "You scratch my back and I scratch yours". Apple doesn't want
| to go through an antitrust lawsuit that will kill their money
| printer so they kowtow with these favors.
| swiley wrote:
| That's obviously completely untrue.
|
| It doesn't matter anyway, end to end cryptography is
| meaningless if someone you don't trust owns one of the ends
| (and in this case, Apple owns both.)
| kemiller wrote:
| They want to move to e2e for photos so they don't have to keep
| those keys. That's what this is part of -- a way to prevent
| their service from being used for CSAM, yet still provide e2e
| encryption. I feel very ambivalent about this.
| Gaelan wrote:
| > They want to move to e2e for photos so they don't have to
| keep those keys.
|
| That's my suspicion too, but has it actually been confirmed?
| kemiller wrote:
| Well why else would they bother? This is WAY more
| complicated than just scanning on their servers.
| gigel82 wrote:
| We have no information to make a decision there. It could
| be (as you say) because they want to implement E2E cloud,
| but it could just as well be because they want to start
| scanning offline content for folks that opted out of
| iCloud storage (and even if that is not their immediate
| intent, you can't argue implementing this system doesn't
| take them 95% of the way to making that possible)
| upbeat_general wrote:
| That was never mentioned by Apple. If that was their
| intention then I suspect they would have mentioned it
| alongside this announcement to provide a justification and
| quell the (justified) outrage.
|
| I also question the value of e2e there's an arbitrary scanner
| that can send back the unencrypted files if it finds a match.
| If apple's servers controls the db with "hashes" to match
| then is it all that different from apple's servers holding
| the decryption keys?
|
| Sure e2e still prevents routine large scale surveillance but
| at the end of the day if apple (or someone that forced apple)
| wants your data, they'll get it.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > If that was their intention then I suspect they would
| have mentioned it alongside this announcement to provide a
| justification and quell the (justified) outrage.
|
| It's August. New iPhones and iOS / macOS are released in
| September. If they want to introduce E2E encryption for
| photos and need this in place to do it, then it makes sense
| to announce this ahead of time and get the backlash out of
| the way so that they can announce the headline feature
| during the main event without it being overshadowed.
| Gaelan wrote:
| Software features are announced at WWDC, which happens
| early summer and already happened this year. It's only
| the hardware that gets announced (and the software
| released) in September.
| kemiller wrote:
| They don't send unencrypted full-res files, they send low
| res "visual representation" and can only decode if they get
| > x "hits". Assuming it works as described I do think it's
| better than just having full keys as they do now. And why
| else would they go to all this trouble? They can scan
| images now on their servers if that's what they want.
| [deleted]
| upbeat_general wrote:
| Low-res I suppose is better but...If it's enough for a
| human to tell whether it's CSAM or not, it's probably
| high-res enough to be a significant invasion of privacy
| in case of a mistake.
|
| Also the > x "hits" part is a good feature assuming that
| the database only looks for CSAM. Otherwise it's useless
| (not to mention totally unauditable).
|
| My guess is that they're doing it on device because
| they've had several years of marketing and proclaiming
| that "everything is done on-device" so to implement CSAM
| scanning server side would go against that. Maybe they
| thought this would somehow look better to the average
| consumer who thinks "on-device" is automatically better?
| russelg wrote:
| Do you actually think they didn't have CSAM scanning
| implemented server-side before this?
| vpmpaul wrote:
| Maybe you can answer this. What amount of the CP pictures are
| actual CP? Like are teens posting selfies of themselves in
| swimsuits or revealing clothes being submitted? People with their
| kids in the bathtub/pool? Are most of these pictures real give
| you nightmares CP?
|
| Its seems insane to me that anyone would knowingly upload CP to a
| forensics site on purpose. Much less several times a day.
| robnewman7900 wrote:
| Wow, 20% of images being misclassified as CP would be terrifying.
| I never thought I'd say it but my next phone will definitely not
| be an iPhone or any device that is uploading my information to
| another server without my permission for any reason.
|
| Is there even any evidence that arresting people with the wrong
| bit pattern on the computer helps stop child rape/trafficking? If
| so, why aren't we also going after people who go to gore
| websites? There's tons of awful material out there easily
| accessible of people getting stabbed, shot, murdered, butchered,
| etc. Do we not want to find people who are keeping collections of
| this material on their computers? And if so, what about people
| who really like graphic horror movies like Saw or Hostel?
| Obviously it's not real violence, but it's definitely close
| enough, and if you like watching that stuff, maybe you should be
| on a list? If your neighbor to the left of you has videos of
| naked children, and your neighbor to the right has videos of
| people getting stabbed and tortured to death, only one should be
| arrested and put on a list?
|
| This is all not even taking into account that someone might not
| even realize they are in possession of CP because someone else
| put it on their device. I've heard there's tons of services
| marketing on the dark net where you pay someone $X00 in bitcoin
| and they remotely upload CP to any target's computer.
|
| It seems like we are going down a very scary and dangerous path.
| robertoandred wrote:
| You did agree to upload your information to another server when
| you turned on iCloud Photo Library.
| robnewman7900 wrote:
| I don't have iCloud Photo Library
| robertoandred wrote:
| Then you don't have to worry about it uploading anything.
| crooked-v wrote:
| ...yet.
| dt3ft wrote:
| > If your neighbor to the left of you has videos of naked
| children, and your neighbor to the right has videos of people
| getting stabbed and tortured to death, only one should be
| arrested and put on a list?
|
| Why is it like this? Why are we not jailing people who enjoy
| watching gore?
| mzsmyk wrote:
| For the same reason why rape is a taboo in American movies
| and murder is not - US still is a deeply Puritan country [1].
|
| [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1
| .66...
| mzsmyk wrote:
| For the same reason why rape is a taboo in American movies
| and murder is not - US still is a deeply Puritan country
| [1][2][3].
|
| [1]http://www.princeton.edu/~sociolog/pdf/asmith1.pdf
|
| [2]https://davetannenbaum.github.io/documents/Implicit%20Puri
| ta...
|
| [3]https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/478/832/RUG01-00247
| 88...
| unethical_ban wrote:
| My only initial guess is that the financial incentives are
| not the same. The "problem" of people getting murdered or
| non-consensually tortured specifically for entertainment and
| distribution is much lower than the problem of the economics
| of child sex abuse.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| This made me think of a good point regarding apples error rate of
| "one in a trillion". If they are so confident that there won't be
| false positive's why bother sending it to apple for manual
| review? Clearly they think the error rate will be high enough
| that a human has to double check everything. But that is not what
| they are saying.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Apple doesn't have access to the original CSAM images -- only
| the hashes generated by the agency that produced them, so there
| could be hashes that don't match anything illegal that trigger
| a false positive.
| xvector wrote:
| The engineers that worked on this should honestly be ashamed of
| themselves. We need some sort of oath of ethics in computer
| science.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > If someone were to release code that reverses NCMEC hashes into
| pictures, then everyone in possession of NCMEC's PhotoDNA hashes
| would be in possession of child pornography.
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be more correct
| to say they "would be in possession of images recognized by
| PhotoDNA as child pornography" rather than actual CP?
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Technically not possible without severely grasping assumptions.
| It would be more likely you would create a collision and have
| calculated an image of a duck (south african whitenoise duck).
|
| Problem with all this is that the images of naked children made
| by their parents is CP in the eyes of its consumers.
|
| Perceptual AI is the best approach, but produces a certainty <
| 1.
|
| In my cryptography course I had a project about invisible
| watermarks and secret messages in imaging. The first hurdle was
| beating partial images and compression, so most early
| algorithms worked in the frequency domain. At that time it was
| basically an arms race between protection or deletion of said
| messages and I think that hasn't changed.
|
| Conventional file hashes can be beaten by randomizing meta data
| since a quality hash function would immediatly create a
| completely different hash. Never mind just flipping or probably
| just resaving them.
|
| If you create a polynomial approximation of frequencies or
| color histograms of an image, you have a relatively short key
| indicator. But you need a lot of those to even approach
| certainty. Could always be an image of a duck.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| I'm just wondering how long it will take before average people,
| jokingly or otherwise, imply that buying an android phone makes
| you a criminal.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Sadly, I'm not worried about that particular possibility. I'm
| fully expecting Google to roll out some similar BS within a
| year or two. "For the children" of course.
| SPBS wrote:
| > Apple's license agreement says that they own the operating
| system, but that doesn't give them permission to search whenever
| they want or to take content.
|
| If this is true, how has this gotten past Apple's legal team? Are
| they not aware it would be a flagrant violation of the law?
| fspacef wrote:
| Great title.
| initplus wrote:
| This reads like a failure of the NCMEC, and the legal system
| surrounding it.
|
| It is insane that using perceptual hashes is likely illegal. As
| the hashes are actually somewhat reversible and so possession of
| the hash is a criminal offence. It just shows how twisted up in
| itself the law is in this area.
|
| One independent image analysis service should not be beating
| reporting rates of major service providers. And NCMEC should not
| be acting like detection is a trade secret. Wider detection and
| reporting is the goal.
|
| And the law as setup prevents developing detection methods. You
| cannot legally check the results of your detection (which Apple
| are doing), as that involves transmitting the content to someone
| other than the NCMEC!
| kelnos wrote:
| > _And NCMEC should not be acting like detection is a trade
| secret._
|
| It feels to me like they want to hide their detection
| algorithms so people don't find out how bad they are.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Doesn't seem like it was an accident, rather protectionism
| written long ago to make sure they were the only "game" in
| town.
| caeril wrote:
| > This reads like a failure of the NCMEC
|
| Yes, it's a "failure" of a "private" Non(lol, _technically_ ,
| wink wink) Governmental Organization who works _extremely_
| closely with the FBI to put their camel-shaped nose under the
| very tent that the FBI happens to have been trying to breach
| for 20+ years.
|
| Come on. It's beyond gullibility, at this point, to believe
| that NCMEC isn't an arm of the Feeb. Specifically, it's an arm
| that isn't required to comply with FOIA requests, which is
| particularly convenient.
|
| Two years. At the current rate, you have approximately two
| years until the Feeb have _full_ access to your iDevice.
| Though, I will admit, Apple 's development of the SEP, their
| high-priced bug bounties, and their convincing play-acting at
| defying the FBI after the San Bernardino case definitely had me
| fooled.
|
| We probably should have been more keen after they failed to
| close the bugs that GreyKey et. al. exploited.
|
| But now we know. Everything they gave to China, they will give
| _doubly so_ to their own corporate domicile.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| 1 in 1 trillion of what?
|
| https://i.imgur.com/E1YRsXQ.jpg
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| This feels like missing the forest from the trees -- Steve Jobs
| said many times to the effect 'it doesn't matter how any of this
| stuff happens, GigaHertz, Ram, Speeds, it only matters that the
| user gets what they want.'
|
| Right now Apple's biggest unhappy user is the DOJ. As it stands
| with the legislation coming down the pipe and both previous
| administrations building on a keenness to 'get something done'
| about big tech, Apple will do as they've done in China and 'obey
| the laws in each jurisdiction.'
|
| Right now there are a lot of unwritten laws that say Apple better
| play right or lose quite a bit more --
|
| So, _how_ it's getting done is a side show.
|
| That said, it wasn't long ago that they stood toe to toe with the
| FBI --- but there also weren't wonderfully strong 'sanctions' on
| the horizon.
| fumar wrote:
| Why do elected officials act as fake representatives to the
| people that elected them in the first place? Has it always been
| this way? It doesn't matter left or right. The governing bodies
| should obey the people not the other way around.
| kelnos wrote:
| I can't say this for certain, but I suspect most people are
| actually happy about this sort of thing; their elected
| representatives are doing exactly what they want.
| fumar wrote:
| That is interesting. I haven't met anyone who thinks
| privacy erosion is a good thing. We don't need to frame it
| as digital vs physical anymore. There is no distinction as
| it relates to personal privacy.
| tylersmith wrote:
| > The governing bodies should obey the people not the other
| way around.
|
| Then they wouldn't be the governing body. By definition the
| governing body does not obey the people; they govern the
| people.
| fumar wrote:
| Isn't a democratic governing body representing the will of
| the people and society?
| tylersmith wrote:
| No, they represent themselves.
| closeparen wrote:
| If the people had their way, those suspected of child sex
| crimes wouldn't even get trials. Things like privacy and due
| process only exist to the extent that a ruling class has the
| power to impose their own values, contrary to popular will.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| I'm one of the people and that's not my way.
|
| I wonder where you got your data from.
| reidjs wrote:
| This made me come up with a thought experiment. If you
| sampled a thousand parents and asked them if they think
| sex offenders deserve a fair and just trial, what do you
| think the result would be?
| kfprt wrote:
| Gary Plauche
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Plauch%C3%A9
| Sebb767 wrote:
| That question is framed wrong. What you should be asking
| is "Should people _accused_ of such crimes get a fair and
| just trial? ". This makes it clear that it takes me one
| sentence to put you in that very position. And that's
| exactly the problem. Your formulation erases any question
| of guilt, which makes the discussion nearly impossible to
| win for the privacy side.
| vmladenov wrote:
| No, what they're saying is that most people _already_
| presume guilt, even if it's just an accusation. Further,
| most would be willing to engage in mob justice. I feel
| like you're doing a lot of work to miss that point.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| The thread parent stated:
|
| > If the people had their way, those suspected of child
| sex crimes wouldn't even get trials.
|
| Emphasis on _suspected_.
|
| I agree that the question, as phrased, would be
| interesting and you'd probably be right that a lot of
| people would condone or even engage in mob justice. Given
| this thread, however, it seems that the actual question
| posed is the one I formulated.
|
| As a side note, my formulation would also be the one to
| find out how likely people are to presume guilt, as the
| original formulation confirms guilt directly in the
| prompt.
| judge2020 wrote:
| These cases of people actually claiming to want people
| locked up without due process are pushed by a vocal
| minority (same with us - even hacker news posts with maybe
| a million views mean than 1% of U.S. adults read it) -
| almost everyone wants due process since we want the truth
| to come out in the most verifiable way, and the court
| system provides that, even if it involves humans that can
| be bribed, persuaded, and manipulated by rich & powerful
| people.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| You may underestimate how much popular democratic support there
| is for stopping child rapists, at the cost of theoretical or
| even actual but low probabity privacy risks.
| Dah00n wrote:
| > _18 U.S.C. SS 2258A is specific: the data can only be sent to
| NCMEC. (With 2258A, it is illegal for a service provider to turn
| over CP photos to the police or the FBI; you can only send it to
| NCMEC. Then NCMEC will contact the police or FBI.) What Apple has
| detailed is the intentional distribution (to Apple), collection
| (at Apple), and access (viewing at Apple) of material that they
| strongly have reason to believe is CSAM. As it was explained to
| me by my attorney, that is a felony._
|
| I'm not sure, after reading the article, who is/has the most
| insane system of Apple or NCMEC.
| cmsj wrote:
| Why is it insane that the law places extremely tight controls
| on the legitimate distribution of CSAM?
| initplus wrote:
| Well the trouble is that it makes developing detection nearly
| impossible.
|
| And the line where the law is crossed is fuzzy. Say you use
| an AI classifier, at what accuracy is validating the results
| of that AI a crime? 50.000001%?
| furi wrote:
| What part of criminalizing the obvious course of action that
| everyone is taught to do (find evidence of illegal activity,
| give it to the police) makes any iota of sense to you?
| [deleted]
| sbarre wrote:
| This is the part that also caught my eye.
|
| Surely Apple's lawyers have also reviewed the same law, and if
| it's that clearly defined, how did they justify/explain their
| approach?
| tdonovic wrote:
| Because Apple (its employees) aren't actually viewing the
| images, nor transmitting them. They mention somewhere that
| it's a low res proxy of the image, or something similar.
| rdedev wrote:
| But wouldn't a low res image of CP be still classified as
| CP ? I guess the manual verification will ve done as a
| joint venture by apple and the authorities
| sbarre wrote:
| > I guess the manual verification will ve done as a joint
| venture by apple and the authorities
|
| Do we know this for sure? And even if it is, this is
| still apparently illegal under current law.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _They mention somewhere that it 's a low res proxy of the
| image, or something similar._
|
| Perceptual hashes are just integer/byte encodings of images
| that were scaled down and had some transformations applied
| to them.
|
| If you convert a hash into an array of pixels and reverse
| the transformations, you'll get some of the original image
| that was scaled down and hashed.
| xucheng wrote:
| And if you then apply DLSS, you may even get the original
| image.
| nyx-aiur wrote:
| You really believe that you as armchair lawyer just found
| something that the legal department of the most valuable
| cooperation of the world missed? You didn't or you
| misunderstood what they are gonna do.
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