[HN Gopher] Delays aren't good enough - Apple must abandon its s...
___________________________________________________________________
Delays aren't good enough - Apple must abandon its surveillance
plans
Author : miles
Score : 1125 points
Date : 2021-09-04 03:49 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| JacksonGariety wrote:
| If you want to always be on the side of truth, learn Hegel's
| Logic. See my blog for more info: https://hegelsbagels.net/
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| Perhaps someone here could lend some insight.
|
| Just exactly _why_ is Apple doing this? I doubt that it was due
| to some huge upsurge in demand from it 's customers.
|
| The arguments against are easy enough. This kind of tech is not
| ethically different from adding an all-seeing AI to your home
| that looks for illegal behavior. If something sketchy occurs, it
| calls the cops.
|
| 'It's for the children' is mockable, but isn't an unreasonable
| talking point.
|
| ...but what is the real driver and who is behind it? Merely
| guessing the cause is not particularly useful.
| sigmar wrote:
| Lots of governments have been pushing it recently. Not sure who
| is pushing it in Apple (or why). Here's Matthew Green's thread
| from 4 months ago
| https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/13928142111228436...
| which is referencing this article that describes the recent
| push https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whatsapp-encryption-child-
| ab...
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| It would be great if someone from Apple spilled the beans on
| what actually went down.
|
| No doubt the Apple Internal Affairs Department would be all
| over that. It would be a good test for Apple Privacy(tm).
| deepdmistry wrote:
| Probably the 3 letter agencies
| MontagFTB wrote:
| As an ill-conceived means of holding both privacy and oversight
| at the same time?
|
| The main sticking point (as you know) isn't what it looks like
| now, but how small a leap is required before the privacy is
| stripped away and all that's left is oversight.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Solution is to buy Chinese phone before its against the law.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| We won't ever be free until we can manufacture computers at
| home just like we can write our own software at home. Right
| now, manufacturing computer hardware requires billions of
| dollars. Governments will target these centralized operations.
| We must decentralize hardware manufacturing.
| no_time wrote:
| So..... Never?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Who knows? Maybe one day.
| domnomnom wrote:
| Hmm I wonder if this is a good idea. Or a hypothetical setup
| with a Chinese and American hardware network setup.
| nullc wrote:
| One can live without a phone.
|
| And outlaw phones won't likely be allowed on local phone
| networks. :P
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > outlaw phones won't likely be allowed on local phone
| networks
|
| Why is it even possible for them to know what sort of phone
| is trying to connect?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| LTE is quite standardized, although VoLTE is far from it.
| IMEIs can be spoofed. VoIP numbers are a thing (e.g. voip.ms,
| or google voice if you can go without emergency services).
|
| I forget if IMEI spoofing is a felony. So much policy on the
| books it would take me months to know for sure.
| roenxi wrote:
| The problem here is similar to what happens with the War on
| Terror.
|
| 1) It is noted that governments could, in theory, be spying on
| everything. Widely dismissed as silly.
|
| 2) There is a trigger event (eg, 9/11). Inside government, a
| standard slips. They start spying on everything.
|
| 3) Years later it becomes public knowledge. It is too hard to
| monitor what is going on now though, so it is difficult to tell
| who specifically should be outraged about what.
|
| 4) The situation persists because it is convenient to the people
| in charge.
|
| 5) (TBD) It gets turned on political dissidents. I'm expecting
| everyone will agree on this point in 5 or so years, at the moment
| that is probably maybe more a partisan observation.
|
| Apple's partnering up will follow the same pattern. There just
| isn't enough transparency about what closed source software does.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > Inside government, a standard slips. They start spying on
| everything.
|
| There is no slippage. Wholesale surveillance has always been
| the aspirational standard.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| This is happening with Extinction Rebellion in the UK now. The
| Home Secretary is using the police to harass groups she
| disagrees with and changing the law to stop protests she
| doesn't like. I think having "infinite surveillance" with
| someone like this in charge is a terrifying idea.
| [deleted]
| GordonS wrote:
| Ever since Theresa May, I've always thought that the Home
| Secretary is one of the most dangerous people in the UK -
| they always want _more_ surveillance and anti-privacy
| measures, it 's never enough for them.
| snthd wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/13/cruel-
| paran...
|
| >The long read: Cruel, paranoid, failing: inside the Home
| Office
|
| Some of the why (at least, according to The Guardian).
| GordonS wrote:
| A good read covering immigration policies over the years
| - thanks for pointing me at it.
|
| This quote stood out:
|
| "They are terrified of the thought that any concession by
| them that can be perceived as soft or liberal or
| sympathetic, might leak out and be another set of Daily
| Mail or Sun or Telegraph stories,"
|
| There is a _really_ toxic and dangerous relationship
| between a large segment of the British media (especially
| the tabloid press), a large segment of the British
| public, and the government. It very often feels like the
| likes of the Daily Mail are the tail that wags the dog,
| and I just can 't see how this long-running status quo
| can ever end.
| collaborative wrote:
| I know how: fill The Guardian's pages with many nearly
| naked women from Love Island. Along with lowest common
| denominator gossip
| dash2 wrote:
| Interesting. Personally, I feel that the Guardian, its
| readers, and government and media elites, are the ones in
| a toxic and dangerous love triangle. Do either of these
| ideas really mean anything more than "I disagree with the
| other side"?
| GordonS wrote:
| I don't simply mean "I disagree with the other" side
| though.
|
| I mean it feels like there is something very corrupt
| about the way the British public is kept whipped up into
| a FUD-driven frenzy by the tabloid press, and that the
| government (whether Labour or Conservative) seemingly
| makes many decisions to pander to that segment, rather
| than based on what's actually best for the country and
| all of it's people.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Wow, the parallels between that and our Department of
| Home Affairs here in Australia are striking. I guess it's
| not surprising, I think it was modelled on the UK's Home
| Office when they put it together six or seven years ago.
| It has similarly been a disaster, but the people in
| charge love the power, so it won't be broken back up into
| separate departments as it was before...
| zionic wrote:
| Per number 5, even sticking to just the verified stuff it is
| well known Obama used these powers to spy on Trump's campaign,
| and Trump used them to spy on Biden/force Apple to be silent
| giving up Biden-people's iCloud data via NSL gags.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Even if it's well-known, and I'm not convinced it is since
| this is news to me, it won't be forever. Sharing some sources
| would help a lot both for people now and people finding this
| post 10, 20, 30 years from now.
| hypothesis wrote:
| It's going to be hard to avoid bit rot on that scale.
|
| Anyhow, I would guess he's talking about "unmasking" issue
| with respect to Trump adjacent figures.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210813094317/https://www.
| cnn.c...
| [deleted]
| onethought wrote:
| I am really missing something in this whole thing. Everyone is
| already partnered with gov. Gov have access to all the servers.
| So that doesn't explain this outrage, Microsoft, google, Apple
| will all comply with warrants asking access to cloud stored
| data.
|
| The outrage was: Apple were spying ON the device. But then they
| explained, they were hash matching so they didn't need to give
| unfettered access to your cloud data.
|
| The device doesn't notify police, it has protections from false
| positives and is no MORE access than any company already has.
|
| This seems like outrage with no substance behind it. Gmail
| scans your mail, Facebook your messages (on and off device).
| Why is Apple suddenly terrible for doing something that seems
| to honestly improve the situation not make it worse?
| noptd wrote:
| To put it bluntly, because whataboutisms do not compose a
| valid argument for accepting a new client-side system with a
| high potential of abuse.
| onethought wrote:
| There is almost 0 potential for abuse... it's scan workflow
| ends in a human verifying that it isn't a false positive.
|
| Not whataboutism, the alternative to apples solution is
| companies openly scan your entire photo library. That's
| what's happening right now. People are upset because Apple
| suggested: "how about we only scan when we suspect there is
| something not right?"
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Because it's my device, it belongs to me and should obey me
| instead of gigantic corporations or governments. I don't care
| about some government agenda trying to improve whatever
| situation. I want my computer out of it. They can go
| "honestly improve the situation" elsewhere, hopefully as far
| away from me as possible. And we don't need to provide any
| other justification either. They're the ones who need damn
| good reasons and warrants before stepping foot in my
| property.
| tzs wrote:
| How do you distinguish this from any other optional
| network-based service that does some of the processing
| client side? If you choose to use a particular
| client/server based service aren't you telling your device
| to do the client side processing that service requires, and
| hence the device is obeying you?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > How do you distinguish this from any other optional
| network-based service that does some of the processing
| client side?
|
| The line is drawn at the network layer: the point at
| which my computer talks to their computer. If I don't
| like what their client is doing, I can reverse engineer
| their network communications and make my own client that
| lies to the server.
|
| Like online video games. The game client ultimately
| doesn't matter. I can trash it, make my own client and
| automate the whole game if I want.
| onethought wrote:
| True, so turn off auto updates. Your device.
|
| There is a weird mistrust of Apple here, despite them doing
| nothing to betray it
| threshold wrote:
| Tell me you're joking. * It's not your device. * Ok, What
| does it mean to own something? To hold it? To be able to
| destroy it? To use the services it provides? Maybe the
| receipt makes you the owner? If that's your definition, in
| a very limited sense, you own it. But you don't control it,
| because you can't understand it fully, because you didn't
| design it. In fact no one person designed it, it's the
| product of the group, and advanced technological products
| like the iPhone serve the interests of the group, first. It
| just so happens in most cases the interests of the group
| align and benefit the user. After all we are very similar
| to one another and so this is a mutually beneficial
| arrangement. You want to buy, they want to sell. You need a
| service, they want to serve and so on.
|
| With a product like the iPhone you're purchasing access to
| an iteration of a design. Delivering that to you in a white
| shrink wrapped box is a clever marketing illusion. You
| can't see the many huge factories full of calibrated
| robotic pick and place machines or the lithography setup
| used to create the chips or the lines of workers that
| assembled the phone one tiny piece at a time. You don't see
| the endless cell towers on the horizon and all the
| engineers that maintain them. And we haven't even begun to
| discuss the human labor that forged the design. There's
| easily 500 straight years of skilled engineering labor in
| the modern iPhone. Perhaps even double that.
|
| Here's my point already. There's some brain damaged,
| mentally ill, psychotic people who like to rape children,
| take photos of it and share it with their friends. Then
| what happens is those kids go kill themselves. This problem
| is happening at scale and it's not in the interests of the
| group to let it continue. If the group believes it's
| interests and your own diverge, you'll quickly discover who
| really owns that device. They control the product they
| designed and manufactured and they can do whatever they
| want via signed software update, and you can do exactly
| nothing about it. That's a fact.
|
| A $1200 iPhone might be the best deal ever offered to a
| human being in recorded history. But you're buying a
| service, leasing a disposable product. You're a guest.
| That's the truth.
|
| It's a really ugly image I have of the simple type of
| person who's having a hard time choosing between email
| privacy and stopping a child predator.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I recommend this piece from Snowden for a different point
| of view
|
| https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| God when did this world get so screwed up?
|
| I'm buying a phone. I'm not buying a service, an
| experience, a design or whatever. I'm buying a phone. How
| is it even possible to twist this?
|
| Buying a phone is really just a fancy way of saying I'm
| buying a computer. And if this world was just, this
| computer would not execute a single instruction without
| my consent. I don't really care what "the group" wants,
| they're not gonna use my computer for it.
|
| > It's a really ugly image I have of the simple type of
| person who's having a hard time choosing between email
| privacy and stopping a child predator.
|
| I don't have a hard time choosing between anything. I
| will choose privacy every single time. If authorities
| want to stop crime, they can go out there and do real
| police work. They don't get to surveil everyone on earth
| just because it would make things easier for them.
|
| If you have such an easy time giving up your privacy and
| freedoms, then you should be the first to be scanned. Who
| are you anyway? You're not even posting under your real
| name, threshold.
| threshold wrote:
| You don't want to be a part of the group and reap the
| benefits of collaboration and economies of scale? Well
| then your $1200 isn't going very far. But you can have a
| lump of aluminum, a pile of sand and a sheet of glass.
| And there's enough left over for a huge pile of books so
| you can learn how to fab chips, make circuit boards,
| write your own operating system and build your own phone
| network. Good luck
|
| This idea that you're somehow special and exist in a
| vacuum is privileged and arrogant. You're relying on
| other people to do everything for you. They feed you and
| look after you when you're sick. And they build these
| fantastic technologies and work long hard hours and die
| early just to make it affordable. You got a great deal,
| the best any living human ever was offered. But the group
| asks you to run a program you can't even see so their
| children don't get raped and suddenly you've been cheated
| and violated and wronged.
| summm wrote:
| Your own device? That ship has sailed long ago, as you
| decided to buy it and not root/jailbreak it. You never had
| any power over that device.
| yunohn wrote:
| Why do people like making these comments on HN everyday?
| Is it some weird feeling of superiority? I'm tired of
| low-effort shit like this.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Device belongs to you, but software belongs to the Apple.
| If you want your device to fully belong to you, you need to
| find a device supporting software which you can control.
| Otherwise you're at corporation mercy when it comes to
| privacy and other sensitive topics.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Otherwise you're at corporation mercy when it comes to
| privacy and other sensitive topics.
|
| Despite HN's desire, the vast majority of touch points in
| our daily lives are NOT open source. I'd rather laws be
| setup to safeguard my privacy versus relying on "FOSS" as
| if that's a panacea.
| feanaro wrote:
| I agree this is effectively how it is today in some
| countries, but I don't consider this an acceptable
| stance. Software cannot be exempted from normal rules of
| physical ownership of sold goods.
|
| You sold me a device, which also means you sold me the
| software within because the device is useless without it.
| The software is not separate from the device, it _is_ the
| device.
|
| Of course, that doesn't mean I can do whatever I see fit
| with the software; I cannot redistribute it under my own
| terms. But insofar the actions I take with the software
| strictly pertain to my own usage of my own device, I
| should be allowed to do it. And it also means you (the
| company) shouldn't be able to do with the software
| _installed on my device_ as you see fit.
| avidiax wrote:
| > no MORE access than any company already has
|
| Yes, Google and Apple are both capable of writing code to
| scan your device for anything. Only Apple (to our knowledge)
| has written this code. It's a distinction with meaning.
|
| For the moment, yes, they are only scanning things that will
| eventually be stored on their servers. It's just another
| minor policy change to scan things that you are keeping
| locally.
|
| My hope is that they will delay this until they can announce
| E2EE for iCloud, which would then at least be give and take
| on privacy, potentially a net win.
|
| As it stands, this is a net loss.
| simion314 wrote:
| Imagine you use some OS, say Ubuntu or Windows and the
| company behind it canonical/Microsoft creates an application
| that scans your files for illegal shit and reports you to the
| government. This application is optional you download and
| install it if you want it.
|
| Who in the right mind would download and install such an
| application that runs in background , uses your resources and
| reports you to the police, no advantages for you.
|
| So the equation is clear, the user has nothing to gain, a lot
| to lose if the system triggers and the user also needs to
| blindly trust(no way to check the hashes or the binaries)
| that the system will not be abused.
|
| If you are a person that strongly thinks Apple should handle
| CSAM then ask them why they did nothing until now? They
| collaborate with FBI/NSA on other stuff.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Imagine you use some OS, say Ubuntu or Windows and the
| company behind it canonical/Microsoft creates an
| application that scans your files for illegal shit and
| reports you to the government.
|
| You don't have to imagine it. This has literally been
| happening for the past decade.
|
| >The system that scans cloud drives for illegal images was
| created by Microsoft and Dartmouth College and donated to
| NCMEC. The organization creates signatures of the worst
| known images of child pornography, approximately 16,000
| files at present. These file signatures are given to
| service providers who then try to match them to user files
| in order to prevent further distribution of the images
| themselves, a Microsoft spokesperson told NBC News.
| (Microsoft implemented image-matching technology in its own
| services, such as Bing and SkyDrive.)
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/your-cloud-drive-really-
| pr...
|
| Google has been scanning everything in your account for the
| past decade as well.
|
| >a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after
| Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in
| the Houston suspect's Gmail account
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-
| le...
|
| Apple will only scan photos you post to iCloud Photos, and
| their system is set up in such a way that they cant see the
| scan results until a threshold of 30 matches is met, to
| protect you from being flagged to the government for a few
| false positives. (They do have a human verify there is a
| real issue, and that you haven't just somehow posted more
| than 30 false positives to iCloud)
|
| Google and Microsoft's systems have no such protection.
|
| Anyone who can issue a subpoena can maliciously use false
| positive data against you.
|
| We've seen the data trove companies like Google retain used
| to imprison innocent people before.
|
| >Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million
| after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days
| when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene
| of the 2018 crime
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-
| arre...
| simion314 wrote:
| >You don't have to imagine it. This has literally been
| happening for the past decade.
|
| You either do not understand or trying to avoid the
| question
|
| Is there a TurnMeToThePolice app for linux or windows ?
| and who installs it for free ?
|
| For server side makes 100% sense , I use Facebook,Gmail,
| Dropbox for free so I expect they will scan shit for
| stuff. For sharing files I am also expect that cloud
| providers will also scan and respond for copyright
| violation, makes sense , for stuff you post on Facebook I
| also expect they scan for porn or other stuff that is
| against their TOS.
|
| But it would be retarded to install something to scan my
| local files and report me to the police if I had nothing
| t6o gain from it , so you have already the iPhone, you
| paid for it, if Apple wants you to allow them to install
| this shit you should think, why? what I have to gain? Do
| I trust Apple and my government, what about the future
| government and the future Apple? The equation is that you
| gain nothing and the future is unclear so it is 100% a
| FACT that is a net negative for the user.
|
| Still nobody found an answer why Apple did not scan
| iCloud for CSAM? And why are they starting now with this
| "think different" way of doing it. If you are a think of
| the children person you should denounce the fact they did
| nothing so far , if you are a privacy kind of person you
| should ask why Apple is giving up now on privacy.
| sbuk wrote:
| > Still nobody found an answer why Apple did not scan
| iCloud for CSAM?
|
| They do.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Nope.
|
| Apple prefers to keep that sort of data private, and a
| kiddie porn false positive is not the sort of data that
| should be vulnerable to misuse by anyone who issues a
| dragnet warrant.
|
| Google's data hordes are already widely abused today.
|
| >Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all
| US demands
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-
| warrants/
|
| Another example would be that Google scans all your
| photos to identify the people in them and retains that
| data on their servers, while Apple chooses to perform
| those sorts of actions on your own device without
| uploading it to their servers.
| snuser wrote:
| It's all fucked up. all of it. Google, Facebook Apple,
| Microsoft, whatever they are a disease worse than covid
| sbuk wrote:
| https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/01/09/apples-
| scanning-...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200119050834/https://www.ap
| ple...
|
| Please. This information is out there. It takes 5 minutes
| to look for it.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| I keep seeing more and more of these passionate comments
| shilling for apple!!
| dang wrote:
| You've been breaking the site guidelines with comments
| like this. Please read the rules and follow them:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note
| this one:
|
| " _Please don 't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It
| degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're
| worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll
| look at the data._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=co
| mme...
| simion314 wrote:
| From what I read they only scan images that are attached
| to emails. So iCloud could be filled with CSAM.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > You either do not understand or trying to avoid the
| question
|
| I understand perfectly.
|
| Google and Microsoft have been scanning everything in
| your account for the past decade and turning customers
| over to the police.
|
| Apple is set to start scanning iCloud Photos and only
| iCloud Photos in the future.
|
| They waited until they found a way to preserve your
| privacy until they were reasonably certain there was a
| real issue with what you were uploading to your online
| account and not just a false positive.
|
| With their system, Apple cannot see the scan results
| until your device informs them that you have crossed the
| threshold of 30 images flagged as kiddie porn and hands
| over the encryption key for the scan results. They can't
| turn over scan result data to the feds before that,
| because they can't read it.
|
| Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, would have to
| hand over an every account with a single false positive
| to anyone who issues a dragnet warrant since they carry
| out their scans on the server.
| simion314 wrote:
| Apple have the key to read your photos, they probably are
| even encrypted since you can view them from browsers, so
| this is fake news. They could have scanned the images on
| the server at the moment you uploaded them, they could
| have reported CSAM to the authorities and catch the bad
| guys.
|
| I want the proof that Apple is unable to scan on the
| server, that they don't have the keys and the only
| solution is on device scanning.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Of course Apple can read data you have uploaded to
| iCloud.
|
| Every cloud service can read the data you upload to it.
|
| How do you think Google and Microsoft are scanning
| everything in your account?
|
| What Apple cannot do is see the results of a scan that
| was not conducted on it's servers, since those results
| are encrypted with a key Apple doesn't have until the
| threshold of 30 images matching known kiddie porn is
| reached.
| simion314 wrote:
| This logic makes no sense
|
| 1 Apple can read data you have uploaded to iCloud. 2 What
| Apple cannot do is see the results of a scan
|
| What makes 2 impossible? if 1 is true then Apple can
| generate the scan and check the hashes on the server so 2
| is possible.
|
| What is the advantage? Apple will also have to push the
| scanning on device to the laptops too and what do you do
| with devices that don't get updated? Instead of having a
| simple solution that works for all images in iCloud you
| get a privacy-invasive solution that only works for some
| hardware that runs latest stuff. Seems to me that this
| implementation is not solving the problem of "Prevent
| CSAM to be uploaded to iCloud" but solves soem other
| problem and the CSAM is a cover.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The scan is not conducted on Apple's servers, so they
| don't have access to the scan results the way Google and
| Microsoft do when they conduct the same scan on their
| server.
|
| Apple designed the system that way because it is more
| private to keep potentially damaging information from
| being readable on their server, where it can be misused
| by anyone who can issue a warrant.
|
| They can't decrypt the scan result until the device tells
| them that 30 images have matched kiddie porn, whereupon
| the device hands over the decryption key.
|
| The theory is that you are unlikely to have 30 false
| positives, but the next step is to have a human make sure
| that's not what happened.
|
| Since Google refuses to hire expensive human beings when
| a poorly performing algorithm is cheaper, I have no doubt
| Google is turning in people for as little as a single
| false positive.
| simion314 wrote:
| >They can't see the scan result until the device tells
| them that 30 images have matched kiddie porn
|
| Isn't this FALSE? the devices hashes the images but it
| does not have the database, so the hashes are sent to the
| server, and Apple servers compares your hashes with the
| secret database, so Apple knows how many matches you
| have.
|
| Your argument would make sense ONLY IF your images would
| be encrypted and Apple had no way to decrypt them so the
| only way to compute the has is with the creepy on device
| code.
| matwood wrote:
| The system is designed as if iCloud photos is already
| E2EE. It's not currently, so Apple could have simply done
| mass decryption server side and scanned there.
|
| But the way the CSAM system is designed works exactly as
| described. It's technically pretty cool. Each matching
| hash builds part of a key. Only when the key is complete
| (~30 matches) can the matches and only the matches be
| decrypted for review. This also only works on photos
| destined for iCloud, and actually makes it harder for LE
| to show up and say 'here is a warrant to scan all photos
| for X' since the matching hash db is included in the iOS
| release.
| simion314 wrote:
| >The system is designed as if iCloud photos is already
| E2EE. It's not currently,
|
| and it will never ever be E2E because of the US laws or
| if it will be ever encrypted it will use the backdoored
| NSA crypto (and Apple PR not even tried to hint at it to
| calm down the waters).
|
| I agree the algorithm is prety clever but it feels that
| is not designed to solve the CSAM problem but to look
| good on someone CV.
|
| Now you have the worst of both worlds, Apple has access
| to your photos on the server(and if they would respect
| the laws they should scan them for CSAM already since
| they are responsible on what they store and share (I mean
| when you share stuff)) and Apple has a scanning program
| inside your phone.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _I understand perfectly._
|
| If you did, you would stop mentioning on-cloud as part of
| your response.
| zo1 wrote:
| I would just like to point out without diverging or causing
| too much of a "flame war", that this same line of thinking
| is the one us Libertarians point to regarding "voluntary"
| things like taxes. I.e. If you asked people to voluntarily
| sign up for taxes, "who in their right mind would" do so?
|
| My overall point being: To the government, this is the
| same. It's a power imbalance and they don't see anything
| different because they think they have the right. We've
| opened up that can of worms a long time ago and it's
| important for us to realize it instead of continuously
| living in pretend-land where we think we have a "choice"
| over what government does.
| simion314 wrote:
| You gain something from taxes, like police to protect
| your big pile of money and villa. But from this scanning
| you gain nothing , Apple could have scan iCloud and
| caught the evil guys already if they exist so you can't
| claim that the society benefits from this when it could
| have implemented exactly like Google does it a few years
| ago.
| dudeman13 wrote:
| >.e. If you asked people to voluntarily sign up for
| taxes, "who in their right mind would" do so?
|
| Those who would naturally cooperate in the prisoner
| dilema, those who believe society is better by having a
| government instead of going full anarchy, those who think
| humanity is better off if the strong protects the weak.
|
| So only the tiny subset of people who care about people
| instead of those who adhere to the "fuck you, I got mine"
| point of view.
| zo1 wrote:
| I really didn't want to get into this, I just wanted to
| point out how we've already "breached" that whole "if you
| make this optional will people choose it" line. You're
| now attaching a moral argument about how only the "fuck
| you, I got mine" people will say no to taxes.
|
| And as a side note: I, as a libertarian/an-cap, would be
| perfectly fine with paying for all manner of things (with
| taxes) if I could choose how it was spent to some nominal
| degree. Here we are in a discussion about government
| surveillance, which would probably be a non-issue if we
| all just had the ability to slide that slider next to the
| "NSA Contribution" heading in our tax-contribution forms.
| onethought wrote:
| The gain is, an Apple user can assume that Apple is not
| scanning their photo library for csam. Because the only
| time Apple start scanning is if the device gets 30 positive
| hash matches.
|
| Where as if they used another service, all their photos
| will be scanned all the time.
|
| There is a clear privacy gain here
| smolder wrote:
| You're using the word "scanning" strangely here. Most
| people would consider the perceptual hash checking of all
| images to be "scanning".
| onethought wrote:
| A hash is a string comparison. No details (privacy) are
| leaked during that comparison.
|
| When your phone tells you it only has 1Gb of storage
| left, do you consider that "on device scanning"?
| simion314 wrote:
| Hashes are generated for all images(I think some
| thumbnail is also generated ), then sent to Apple that
| checks each hash vs the secret database, the
| if(matches>=30) code runs on the server too.
|
| I would say the scan is on the device and the check is on
| the server to make sure the secret database of hashes
| does not get leaked. The image is never encrypted and if
| FBI (or the corresponding national agency)comes with a
| warrant your iCloud data will be fully readable.
| onethought wrote:
| The image is never scanned either, unless you consider
| generating a hash: scanning.
|
| Given hash comparison is how we treat passwords (an
| extremely sensitive piece of information). I don't see
| how anyone can make a compelling case that: generating a
| hash is an image in some way compromises the privacy of
| the owner of the image or contents of the image.
| hypothesis wrote:
| So this is step 1 then and we're basically waiting for an event
| for step 2, because "privacy-preserving" surveillance system is
| production ready at this point and is going to be deployed in
| near term.
|
| Just a minor update away from a ML-powered thought crime
| prevention as step 3.
| laurent92 wrote:
| So... await elites making a big pedophile catch (perhaps
| recycling Epstein's story, which gained a lot of popularity
| among the youths), and using it as a launchpad for "see, we
| needed an automatic iPhone search".
| ectopod wrote:
| Sadly, "privacy-preserving" surveillance is already a thing.
| After the Snowden revelations the NSA didn't stop collecting
| everyone's data, they just refined the legal justification.
| They claim that it isn't illegal surveillance if they don't
| look at the data.
|
| So if you become a person of interest they get a warrant and
| then trawl through your digital life since forever.
| sharken wrote:
| You can either have privacy or surveillance, Apple is trying
| to sell the idea you can have both which is a false
| statement.
|
| Since Apple have been pushing privacy as a differentiator
| with Android, i can see their problem when they also want
| surveillance.
|
| The answer is simple: Drop all plans for surveillance also
| known as on-device scanning.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| This. It literally happened to me yesterday. The internet was
| blocked altogether and one Sim card service was allowed after a
| long time so I did something interesting. I asked a friend in
| another country to log into an old reddit account, I dictated
| him the text I wanted to post and he pushed it.
|
| I had kept that reddit account dormant for over 7 months for
| this very purpose because I remember somehwere about reddit 90
| days history policy or something. This is the level of threat I
| am looking at. I was willing to dictate PNG base54 character by
| character so that the other person could reconsititute it but
| they reopened internet the next day but this is the level of
| threat facing a casual internet user
|
| https://m.thewire.in/article/media/internet-shutdown-blocks-...
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| I'm really sorry to know this. And I'd like to apologise for
| not being able to convince some of my close friends to not
| vote the fascists in, in the last national elections.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Eh. You need a billion people to change their opinion. I am
| in a small minority which gets trampled on.
| C19is20 wrote:
| I see your words, but what are you exactly apologising for?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| The upcoming mau Zedong or xi is the cow in charge of
| India. That is what he/she is apologising for. This
| person is saying they did not know in 2014 the country
| would crumble like this,
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > 3) Years later it becomes public knowledge.
|
| And Edward Snowden is still exiled in Russia for fear of
| retaliation (and considered a traitor by some).
| colordrops wrote:
| The US government was spying on everything well before 9/11
| [1]. This sort of surveillance has been happening since the
| dawn of civilization. It's imperative for elites that wish to
| stay in power.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
| Animats wrote:
| It was more narrowly focused in the Cold War era, though. NSA
| was very focused on the USSR, which was quite opaque from the
| outside. "Team A" worried about the USSR, "Team B",
| everything else. Huge amounts of effort had to be expended to
| get basic info like "where are their air bases"? One head of
| the NSA said during that period that they produced about
| three pieces of actionable intelligence per day, of which
| maybe one per week was important enough to be brought to the
| attention of the President. Much info went into NSA, but not
| much came out. NSA belonged entirely to DoD, which had no
| domestic role and wasn't interested in anybody who lacked
| serious military power.
|
| The "trying to find small numbers of people who might do some
| terrorist act via SIGINT" is post-9/11. That's when
| surveillance became dangerous. Now, law enforcement has
| access to far too much take. Worse, there's a huge US anti-
| terrorist establishment that's orders of magnitude larger
| than the number of terrorists and doesn't really have enough
| to do. So they self-generate work.
| colordrops wrote:
| How are you so certain they didn't have a domestic role?
| jkepler wrote:
| Didn't McCarthyism rely on or expand domestic spying? And
| didn't they extend suspicions and charges against far
| more people than the evidentiary basis would have
| supported? According to Wikipedia, the FBI's ranks nearly
| doubled in size to accommodate all the new investigations
| being pursued.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. That was Hoover and the FBI. The CIA also did some
| domestic stuff, more during the 1960s than later. NSA,
| not so much.
|
| There wasn't much wiretapping in the US before the advent
| of electronic central offices. Phone switches just
| weren't equipped for it. Somebody had to physically
| connect wires to listen in. (Yes, you could listen to a
| few lines remotely using the test gear. Telcos hated
| that, because it tied up the automatic line insulation
| test equipment, COs had only 2 to 4 sets of that, each
| set took up three racks, and each could only do one line
| at a time.) In Guliani's old book about taking down the
| New York mob, he writes about the government having to
| pay phone bills to New York Telephone for wiretap lines.
| Once they didn't pay the bill, and the billing system
| billed the party being tapped. That's where the pressure
| for CALEA and built-in wiretapping began.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| > That was Hoover and the FBI. The CIA also did some
| domestic stuff, more during the 1960s than later. NSA,
| not so much.
|
| Project MINARET was one of the first times the public was
| made aware of the NSA. It started in 1962 and it involved
| the wiretapping of US citizens like Martin Luther King Jr
| and Senator Frank Church.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yes, and it's almost expected at this point. But a private
| corporation doing it voluntarily(apple _really_ doesn 't have
| to implement this, lots of articles on this point) is at
| least something we can discuss and hopefully vote with our
| wallets against. Can't do that against a government.
| Fiahil wrote:
| "Vote with our wallet" is an illusion. Do you really think
| you can cast a vote by _NOT buying_ an iPhone?
|
| In large companies -like Apple-, there is tracking of
| conversions (see the ad -> buy the product), churn (a
| client who stopped coming/buying), interest/reach (who am I
| targeting with this ad). And that's it. There is no
| tracking of "people who would have bought an iPhone but
| chose not to SPECIFICALLY because of the new tracking
| feature we added. Thinking this kind of metric is relevant
| and measurable is a complete fantasy, and borderline silly.
|
| Public discussion might influence product decisions. But it
| have to be hugely controversial to have any effect.
|
| You can't "vote with your wallet". That's it. I have no
| idea why such belief made it's way into pop culture.
| falcolas wrote:
| > Do you really think you can cast a vote by _NOT buying_
| an iPhone
|
| Isn't that how any vote works? My ballot is one of
| several hundred million - statistically meaningless by
| itself. But it is a vote. And if enough people vote, the
| millions of statistically meaningless datapoints become
| meaningful.
|
| And in the end, even if my single wallet-vote is
| meaningless, I'm no longer affected by what Apple chooses
| to do with their phones. A successful vote, IMO.
| fouc wrote:
| A boycott is an illusion?
| mromanuk wrote:
| To boycott, a large portion of buyers are needed on
| board. That's why "vote with your wallet" in loneliness
| like a "rational agent" doesn't work. Are you going to
| vote and convince others to boycott?
| danuker wrote:
| > You can't "vote with your wallet".
|
| If there's anything that will make a business listen,
| it's money (or lack of it). When it affects the bottom
| line, they are forced to listen.
|
| Sure, I don't affect them much by myself. But everyone
| commenting about Apple around my presence will find out
| why I am not sponsoring them.
|
| There is also the crappy hardware design, not just the
| privacy issues (which negate the advertising spending
| they made the months before). Here is what Louis
| Rossmann, who repairs Apple devices, says:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8
| auggierose wrote:
| I find your argument a bit silly, but why do you think
| wallet voters would not show up as churn?
| mromanuk wrote:
| As stated above, if you want to show up in the CHURN.
| Many "voters" are needed (as in millions), a few guys mad
| at Apple, stopping from buying a product, are not even a
| blip. You need to spread awareness, convince others, to
| join in your crusade.
| Fiahil wrote:
| You need to correctly assign the churn event to the
| privacy issue. This is a) very difficult to do and b) not
| evaluated because churn relates to marketing, not product
| design.
|
| "Wallet voters" live under the illusion that their intent
| is known and taken into account by BigCo decision makers.
| This is NOT the case. They just don't show up in reports.
| So what do you think they are going to do about it ?
| Nothing.
|
| If you want to influence product design, you can talk
| about it online and condemn their choice. If that's big
| and controversial enough, they might do something about
| it. And ypu can do that while buying a new iPhone as well
| because it doesn't matter.
| colordrops wrote:
| That's the thing, is it really voluntary? I'm not sure if
| apple has as much leverage as everyone is thinking. The
| Chinese government certainly forces companies to do this
| sort of thing, and there is precedent in the US as well
| with national security letters and warrant canaries. AT&T
| has basically been an extension of the NSA, with tap rooms
| built into their centers, and I'm certain all kinds of
| things have been forced on companies using some sort of
| leverage behind the scenes.
| Ms-J wrote:
| I agree with this statement in it's entirety. There are
| some pretty messed up demands going on I've heard.
| arvinsim wrote:
| So who is accountable? Because arguing that "it has
| always been this way" is not a satisfactory answer,
| danuker wrote:
| The powers that be.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-
| cost...
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Of course US forced Apple to do so. Surely NSA have enough
| levers to force American company to do anything.
| gambiting wrote:
| US undoubtedly forces Apple to hand over everything and
| anything they want. It's not fine, but I feel like we
| have no say over it anyway. Apple announcing publicly
| that they will scan your photos is something they chose
| to do, and the law doesn't require them to so this in
| their implementation of iCloud.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They probably made a deal with the Justice Dept.: We give
| you surveillance in exchange for not pursuing an anti-
| trust investigation. That's the only prize that could
| justify Apple's "voluntary" behavior.
| input_sh wrote:
| Also see: WhatsApp being end-to-end encrypted, but not
| encrypting backups to Google Drive / iCloud.
| dannyw wrote:
| Apple in 2022: it would be a shame if dissents could
| download apps outside the app store, like Signal, which
| refuses to implement encryption back-door...
| danaris wrote:
| And what would you buy _instead_?
|
| Apple has been up front about what they're doing. They're
| explaining how what they're doing is _specifically_
| designed to protect your privacy in practical terms. No,
| they probably don 't _have_ to be doing this, and I would
| be happy if they decided not to.
|
| But do you really think that _any other_ phone you buy--
| apart from something ridiculously niche like a Librem--
| doesn 't have exactly the same problems, only they're still
| keeping it secret from you?
|
| "Voting with your wallet" only works if there are realistic
| alternatives.
| yyyk wrote:
| >But do you really think that any other phone you buy...
| doesn't have exactly the same problems, only they're
| still keeping it secret from you?
|
| At the moment, ALL of the other smartphone models (except
| iPhone soon) don't have this problem. There's no reason
| to bother with client-side given the current server-side
| implementations and this scanning can't be hidden for
| long.
| noptd wrote:
| Exactly, and even if it's already occurring in some
| fashion, that doesn't mean we should sit idly by and allow
| it to get worse.
| oreilles wrote:
| Apple does not spy on your device. They only get
| information about the data you agree to sending it to them
| by using their cloud services. It's nothing remotely close
| to the surveillance we are talking about here.
| GordonS wrote:
| You could argue that the public at large "agrees" to
| total surveillance by:
|
| 1. Claiming such things are conspiracy theories, despite
| an abundance of evidence 2. Not giving a shit, even
| during the (very brief) period where it was covered (very
| briefly) in the news 3. Buying into all the thingly-
| veiled gov and media FUD about terrorism, paedophiles,
| organised criminals and communists 4. Not protesting _en-
| masse_ 5. Not voting for a party that runs on privacy and
| anti-surveillance policies 6. Not starting such a party
| as in (2), since AFAIK it doesn 't even exist...
| gambiting wrote:
| I think that's a very dishonest take. The scanning takes
| place on your device _before_ any data is sent to apple.
| The fact that you were intending to send that data to
| iCloud is almost irellevant to the entire discussion
| since apple has clearly built a system for scanning your
| files on your device, not in the cloud. There 's nothing
| stopping then from using the exact same technology to
| scan for literally anything on your phone.
|
| It's like if apple added a 360deg motorized camera in
| your home but said "don't worry, it's only pointing at
| the door!"
| oreilles wrote:
| Your phone _is_ the camera. It can already read and write
| everything that 's inside because that's how an operating
| system works.
|
| There is zero breach of privacy unless the result of the
| scan are sent without your consent. Just like for
| everything else that's on your phone, scanned or not.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _The fact that you were intending to send that data
| to iCloud is almost irellevant to the entire discussion
| since apple has clearly built a system for scanning your
| files on your device_ "
|
| This is a very dishonest take. They already have a system
| which runs on your device and processes _all_ photos in
| the photo library, tagging categories like faces and pets
| and food and so on. They could have added this new system
| into that one with much less engineering and design
| effort using a system which scans all your files. They
| didn 't, they went to a lot of extra effort not to. They
| already have system services e.g. location awareness or
| device monitoring and diagnostics, they could have built
| this new system as something like which would run 24/7
| and access everything and be a simpler design, and they
| didn't.
|
| What they did was put it into the iCloud upload feature
| to be matched by additional code on the iCloud server
| side. Something which took them more time, more effort,
| more complexity, and gave the whole thing less power and
| less flexibility.
|
| If this system is as dreadful as all the complaints say,
| it should be plenty of ways to show that without having
| to make stuff up. If describing it accurately isn't scary
| enough, maybe it's not as scary as y'all want people to
| think.
| Retric wrote:
| Except Apple already turned iCould on without really
| making a big deal about it, just up the storage while
| making everything automatic and nobody would have
| noticed. This outrage just seems silly in that context
| because iCloud data is already available on request:
| https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-
| guidelin...
|
| This is "simply" Apple leveraging people's phones to run
| perceptual hashes rather than paying for the servers to
| do it themselves. Which is why the outrage caught them
| off guard, from their perspective nothing changed
| governments have been spying like this since 2011.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I think the idea that Apple is just moving rote hash
| calculations from the server to the phone - and therefore
| they were "surprised" anyone cared - does a disservice to
| the smart people at Apple. They're not dummies and they
| didn't think this would be an easy sell.
|
| The question of whether we can and should build client-
| side scanning has been a huge and controversial issue in
| our community since at least 2019 -- when AG William Barr
| wrote an open letter to Facebook requesting these
| features. As a cryptographer who works on E2EE I've been
| reading opinion pieces on this, writing pieces and
| attending Stanford-hosted workshops since that time. Many
| people attended those workshops from child safety groups,
| policy think tanks and other tech firms. Apple was also
| invited and declined to attend. But to imagine they
| didn't realize how controversial these systems would be
| -- that defies belief. They would have to be living in a
| cave, and the Apple security leaders don't live in a
| cave.
|
| The Apple system was clearly designed to enable scanning
| on E2EE backup files. The fact that iCloud isn't E2EE
| right now is amusing, but I think it's safe to assume
| that they want to enable that feature but felt they
| needed this coverage. Apple doesn't share their
| reasoning, but it's fairly obvious they felt some strong
| pressure -- largely instigated by government agencies and
| members of the Senate - to implement some kind of
| "voluntary compromise" here. This is the one they chose.
|
| Where they were surprised, I think, is that there was so
| much broad negative reaction beyond the usual suspects
| like privacy groups. As you said, server-side scanning is
| already ubiquitous so what's the big deal? My suspicion
| is that "server side scanning of your _private_ files is
| ubiquitous" is something that is only actually well-known
| to tech experts. Most of the general public is ignorant
| about all this, and they only really get a chance to
| react to any of this technology when something big makes
| it national news: as Apple did this summer. (Putting it
| on your phone _and_ making it apply to private backup
| photos rather than shared albums, as some cloud providers
| have in the past, also didn't help.)
| Retric wrote:
| Encryption at rest is easy, but E2EE isn't on the table
| simply because they don't trust people to keep secure
| backups of their own private keys. Thus Apple needs a way
| in, and if Apple has a way in they are required to let
| the FBI in.
|
| As to scanning on device, that's not what is involved in
| the child porn system as the list it's being compared to
| is kept secret. So inherently the system requires an
| upload of each image for comparison. Further, it also
| needs to actually upload an image for comparison not just
| a hash.
| docmars wrote:
| And on the bit about it being on your phone (rather than
| their servers), I think it opens the door to an entirely
| new phenomenon that either companies or governments want
| people to begin accepting: you no longer own your phone,
| but rather, rent it under certain conditions.
|
| Those conditions would undoubtedly be tied to social
| credit scores, required viewing of ads, required on-
| demand "checking in" with the government, and direct
| access to local phone data on demand to catch and
| prosecute political dissidents sharing critical
| information and memes.
|
| Example: Australians are now required to install an app
| that has them taking a photo of themselves and sent to
| authorities to enforce COVID mandates like staying in one
| location, even if you're not sick:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemi
| c-a...
|
| Semi-related - social credit score system:
| https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-australian-
| government-pl...
| oreilles wrote:
| You never owned an iPhone. You can't read the OS source,
| you can't install other OS, you can't sideload apps, you
| can't repair it yourself, you can't buy official spare
| parts, and you cannot even reuse the parts of your phone.
|
| There is no changes whatsoever in that regard. You never
| owned your iPhone, and you still don't, no more, no less
| than before.
| docmars wrote:
| You're not wrong!
| antattack wrote:
| After 9/11 surveillance had been privatized. (not to say it
| was not going to happen anyway)
|
| https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019.
| ..
| throwawayswede wrote:
| This sort of reminds me of the whole thing with lockdowns
|
| 1) It is noted that governments could, in theory, be requiring
| and enforcing lockdowns not because they're scientifically
| better for public health. Widely dismissed as silly and "anti-
| science".
|
| 2) Some scientists come out in opposition of lockdowns,
| evidence from other countries shows that lockdowns don't help,
| both get banned/censored or painted as lunacy.
|
| 3) Years later, it becomes public knowledge that lockdowns did
| not in fact help, and countries that had zero lockdown policy
| did just the same as those that did. It is also too hard to
| know what went through exactly and to hold people accountable,
| technically everyone was complicit.
|
| 4) The situation persists because it is convenient to the
| people in charge.
|
| 5) It gets turned turned on political dissidents. If a
| government wants to get rid of your noise, they can paint you
| as an endangerment to public health and suggest to the public
| to "cancel" you by banning or by being painted as a "conspiracy
| theorist".
|
| Australia is following this plan almost to the letter at the
| moment. People getting arrested for not wearing a mask while
| they're with their daughters and government officials
| "advising" the public not to talk to their neighbors and to
| avoid interacting with them socially, even in public, and even
| if wearing a mask.
|
| People are still treating this like "oh we don't know what's
| going on" or "it's still dangerous" while in a few decade or
| so, the way we're headed (if nothing changes) seems to be a
| form of soft-occupation by CCP ideology. It'll be too late to
| change anything, and then people wonder how can the Australian
| government pass a bill that allows police to add, delete, and
| modify your data during an investigation.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I know there is a case to be made as to whether lockdowns are
| effective, but as someone who is not trained in epidemiology,
| it seems like something that you can try that's well-
| intentioned and within your available set of tools. This
| would be especially true during the early phases of a
| pandemic, when you don't necessarily have great models for
| disease transmission, preventing more precise restrictions.
|
| If the goal is to single out and persecute some specific
| opposition, this seems like an incredibly clunky and
| inefficient way to do so. Surely it's easier to tie them up
| ny having some proxies bury them in court actions or plant
| some drugs on them, than to throw the entire country into
| rictus. If nothing else, they're having to personally pay for
| the economic blowback of declaring a lockdown and all the
| inevitable egg-on-their-face moments when they themselves
| break it.
| varjag wrote:
| To be fair the (5) been professed for decades and is yet to
| happen. I've been hearing that all my life and my hair is
| greying.
|
| The worst hit democracy has taken was not from sinister NSA
| bureaucrats but from kooks calling themselves citizen
| journalists, real estate developers, one-book activists and
| Crossfit trainers.
| noelsusman wrote:
| I've been wondering for decades if privacy advocates are ever
| going to go back and examine the dystopian proclamations
| they've been making to see how many actually turned out to be
| true.
| yunohn wrote:
| > (TBD) It gets turned on political dissidents.
|
| This is not TBD. All the people who exposed this and similar
| coverups (Snowden, Assange, Manning) are being prosecuted by
| the USA.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Assange is being punished by almost all western countries.
| Sweden had a big role in it too and so does UK. And Australia
| is doing absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening to
| their citizen.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I think it meant "inactive dissidents" or "potentially one
| day active". Non-conformants.
|
| As is very, very frequent in history - today, with more
| instruments.
| quantum_solanum wrote:
| this is also already happening.
|
| "If you Tweeted about BLM protests last yr, there's a good
| chance your Tweets were forwarded to the LAPD. Even if you
| don't live in LA."
|
| https://twitter.com/ShotOn35mm/status/1434203354696019971
|
| https://www.lataco.com/lapd-social-media-surveillance-
| protes...
| nikkinana wrote:
| Absolutely not. Go Tim Apple! I have nothing to hide. Do you?
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| Oh well, even if Apple backs off they'll just try something else.
|
| Even though surveillance has always been a thing, the ability to
| both collect and parse the data is unparalleled. No need for
| Walsingham's secret police, or at least not so much anymore. The
| loose coalition that actually runs matters will do whatever it
| takes.
|
| I'd say that a lot of what drives this at the mass level is the
| need for revenge, that's a lot more fun than being _for_
| something. 9 /11 occurs, lets get the bastids. The forces of the
| State are now arrayed at the evil
| TrumpWhiteSupremacistGuysWithFlags regardless of the lack of
| their actual presence on the street. You enemies need to be
| ground to dust.
|
| I doubt that boycotting Apple will make a lick of difference. In
| a time of turmoil your optimal solution is to cut dependencies on
| the system. It's a battle that should be watched from a distance
| and the soul-rot that comes through computer screens and cell
| phones is best kept to a minimum.
| xedarius wrote:
| At this point I feel unsurpringly betrayed. As others have
| pointed out there is no going back. With little to no visibility
| on what the phone, the ipad, the mac-mini is doing, are they
| safe? I hear there's no device level scanning, has that been
| confirmed by someone other than Apple?
|
| What are you guys also doing? Is there a website that helpfully
| details how to get yourself out of the eco system?
|
| I can tell you what I have done so far, but it's very much work
| in progress.
|
| - Removed all photos from iCloud and turn off all iCloud stuff.
|
| - Backup up phones to my mac (encrypted), will transfer to
| nextcloud and NAS.
|
| - Built a NAS and now storing photos there - looking at. running
| PhotoPrism, but haven't made that work yet.
|
| - Transfered useful cloudstuff to Hetzner's NextCloud hosted. and
| enabled E2EE on certain folders.
|
| - I use NordVPN but I always have done.
|
| I realise it's a lot of effort to go to so I can privately store
| a pictures of me eating an ice cream in Rome ... but as we all
| know that's not really the point.
| abacadaba wrote:
| Ya but now you're flagged as someone who has something to hide,
| possibly trying to clear off devices before the change was
| implemented.
|
| Hmm maybe that's their game. You don't need to scan, just need
| to see who deleted all their photo's over the last few days. A
| higher than random hit rate I'd guess.
| willis936 wrote:
| And what about all the people like me: imminently following
| the same path but never having used iCloud photos?
|
| You're suggesting they are faking one violation of the 4th
| amendment for a much more egregious violation of the 4th
| amendment. They (AAPL) have nothing to gain by doing this.
| abacadaba wrote:
| Just sayin, it's not a _completely_ unimaginable situation.
| If the FBI was somehow able to access to those delete
| logs..
|
| Anecdotal: One year my brother was coming back from spring
| break and there was a sign that said "drug checkpoint 1
| mile." right before an exit. Everyone that got off at the
| exit got searched.
| willis936 wrote:
| I agree that it's a very likely tactic if Apple and the
| TLAs are conspiring together. In my mind those two
| parties have very disparate goals.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| I'd rather be flagged as someone who gives a shit about
| privacy and autonomy than passively accept the further
| degradation of those things. If we all treat this as a
| tragedy-of-the-commons situation and impotently accept
| whatever these companies do in order not to raise a fuss and
| draw attention to ourselves, then the future is inevitable
| and the world will go further down this path than it already
| has. The presumption of guilt is fucking ridiculous and I
| won't be a party to it, nor will I run and hide.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > With little to no visibility on what the phone, the ipad, the
| mac-mini is doing, are they safe?
|
| No. You can't trust proprietary software. Even if it's not
| doing anything bad now, that could change tomorrow.
|
| All this Apple polish is a mirage that distracts us from the
| truly important stuff. Real computing is built on top of open
| software. Software that works for us instead of them. In the
| end that's the only thing we can actually put some trust in.
| antattack wrote:
| This is not a delay, it's anoffensive to build up support - just
| look at the headlines:
|
| "Apple delays child abuse detection" "Apple delays plan to scan
| iPhones for child exploitation images" "Apple Delays Rollout of
| Child Safety Features"
|
| None headlines I could find pronounce that Apple is delaying
| their spying tool. None of the media seem to be on board with
| that characterization.
| BoHerfIIIJrEsq wrote:
| No matter what Apple does, I'm moving away from Apple products in
| the near future.
| davesque wrote:
| Seems like a reasonable response. Apple has now revealed that
| they were capable of failing to consider the optics on this one
| which is worrying regardless of what happens next. It's really
| unbelievable that we now live in a world like this. Yet another
| reason that I feel like I stumbled into a dystopian novel these
| past six years or so. Never imagined I would live to see
| something like it.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Better yesterday than today. Better today than tommorow.
| alexashka wrote:
| Me too. I am moving into the forest to be with animals and
| insects, because no matter where I go, humans do naughty things
| and I will not stand for it.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| There are still solutions, even though the situation is dire.
| The problem is, those solutions should not eat up too much of
| one's time, and the naughters not past the naught of one's
| energies, preferably.
|
| Of course one may finance malicious endeavours hence
| encourage them - but since this is against the most basic
| rule of "do not encourage undesirable behaviour", that one
| may be shortsighted, while in fact antisocial.
|
| Is it possible that the poster defends antisocial behaviour
| coating the opposite as antisocial?
| dainiusse wrote:
| This approach just guarantees one - all the privacy talks from
| them is just marketing. You can not be serious about privacy and
| do this at the same time...
| sekathlon wrote:
| Yes you obviously can.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I've been pondering the idea of an offline-first experience on a
| laptop for my own mental health for a while. I feel like
| computing was just so much better without the internet as a
| distraction. Who is in?
| kongin wrote:
| Everyone who can't reply to you because they are offline.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'm already there! I loaded up a distraction-free work laptop
| with Ubuntu, i3, 20 gigs of ambient Spotify playlists and all
| the documentation it's poor little SSD could hold. I seldom
| connect that machine to the internet, when I do it's only to
| clone a repo or install a package.
| AHappyCamper wrote:
| I am adding my comment for what it's worth. This reckless grab
| for power is immoral and contradicts Apple's core values. They
| must stop all attempts at surveilling their users or lose their
| user-base altogether. Apple, stop this evil plan!
| bni wrote:
| Why is Google and others getting a pass?
|
| Google have blog posts from 2019 about scanning gmail and google
| drive for CSAM in the same way.
|
| All cloud providers scan user content, most for mining
| advertisement gold.
| Jabbles wrote:
| I feel that scanning data that is present on a server the
| company owns is very different to scanning data that is present
| on a device that they have sold to a user.
| djrogers wrote:
| Even if the only data scanned on device is data that is in
| the process of being uploaded to a cloud server?
| foxfluff wrote:
| Who's giving Google a pass? Just because people are criticizing
| Apple now doesn't mean they approve of what Google and the
| others do.
| roenxi wrote:
| Google is an intentional privacy disaster. Apple was claiming
| to have standards.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Not even Google had the audacity to scan files stored on my
| physical phone. They can do whatever they want with their own
| computers, just leave my device alone.
| meibo wrote:
| Apple is running "the phone that respects your privacy" ads in
| prime time slots for 3 years now. A lot of people have chosen
| apple devices based on this promise.
|
| You know what you get when you use Google accounts.
| gigel82 wrote:
| It most definitely isn't "in the same way". Not even "privacy
| slumlord supreme" Google dared scan files on your device.
|
| Yes, they scan stuff in the cloud (we all know this) as does
| Microsoft OneDrive / Outlook, Facebook, Dropbox, etc. but none
| of them dared to add code on your device to look at your
| private data.
| ashildr wrote:
| Google: We scan all the data you upload to us and store it
| unencrypted so we can scan it again if we feel like it.
|
| Apple: We scan only the data you decide to upload to us before
| you do so and store it encrypted so nobody, even us can see what
| it is.
|
| Press / FBI: Apple bad!
| jasonlfunk wrote:
| You forgot the most important part! Google is doing to for
| their own profit while Apple is only trying to stop child
| exploitation.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Apple: ... store it encrypted so nobody, even us can see what
| it is.
|
| Since when is iCloud end to end encrypted? In fact, it's
| explicitly not encrypted, at the request of the FBI.
|
| source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-
| exclusiv...
| morinoandou wrote:
| Google: We scan everything that happens on our servers
|
| Apple: We scan your phone
| tyfon wrote:
| One has marketed it self as the privacy champion, the other has
| never pretended. That is the main difference.
|
| I'm still sticking to iphone due to it since it was not going
| to be implemented where I live anyway, but switching back to
| google would not be a good option. I'm currently looking at the
| pro 1x[1] phone though.
|
| [1] https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x
| rambambram wrote:
| Only because "Do no evil" is basically the lowest threshold
| one can think of.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Their motto was actually "don't be evil," but the shine
| wore off that apple pretty quick. It was dropped shortly
| after the dotcom explosion.
| BostonEnginerd wrote:
| I don't believe that the data stored in iCloud is encrypted
| from Apple since you can view it through the iCloud website.
| feanaro wrote:
| You're making it sound like stuff stored in the iCloud is E2E
| encrypted.
|
| And yes, both are bad, let's have none of that.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah this is basically my take too. It really reveals how low
| quality most public discussion is on any complex or nuanced
| topic - specifics be damned.
| willis936 wrote:
| But OP's comment isn't specific. It's quite general.
|
| A specific summary would at least include details about how
| AOSP is open source and auditable, so if you de-Google a
| google phone (which is something that is actually possible,
| unlike Apple phones) you can be more confident that it isn't
| spying on you. Other relevant details are that Apple phones
| are _entirely_ closed. No one can be confident of anything
| that this black box does. Everyone 's lowered their guard
| because Apple says "no no we're on your side". This move
| shows Apple actually is not on your side.
|
| Little details like that, damned as they may be, are what
| make this an upsetting topic.
| shuckles wrote:
| Their point is general because the discourse has been run
| through analogies instead of facts. They don't have
| specific arguments to respond to. Any time you get to the
| facts, they're weak. iOS may be closed source, but there
| are avenues for introspection: jailbreak, security
| researcher device program, disassemblers, proxies, etc.
| You'd be hard pressed to design a scanning system which
| implements behaviors such as "scan your whole phone"
| without detection, versus alternative server side
| implementations where the purpose and processing is totally
| opaque.
| willis936 wrote:
| >You'd be hard pressed to design a scanning system which
| implements behaviors such as "scan your whole phone"
| without detection
|
| On this point I greatly disagree. Apple has control of
| the entire stack and shares nothing about it. If you
| jailbreak an iPhone you still don't know what happens
| when you send bits of data into any block of an SoC or
| modem. There are computers inside Apple devices that have
| no avenue for being audited.
|
| Apple having total control of their devices is deeply
| ingrained in their technical identity. It only works if
| you trust Apple. Apple has shown that trusting them is a
| bad idea. That's why this is news.
| shuckles wrote:
| The point you have to show is why trusting them has been
| demonstrated as a bad idea, but instead you take that as
| given.
|
| The rest of your argument is very ambiguous. Shares
| nothing about their stack? The entire controversy began
| with an extremely transparent announcement about future,
| planned behavior.
|
| Jailbreaking gives you visibility into the application
| processor, and the secure element must be trusted on any
| modern smartphone. If you compare to devices without one,
| you are comparing apples to oranges. There are plenty of
| closed source or hard to audit components of every
| system. Do you trust your baseband?
|
| Like I said, the argument has been run through analogies
| and the facts are quite contingent.
| kemayo wrote:
| Pragmatically, though, AOSP isn't relevant to the
| conversation. OP was comparing the popular smartphone
| ecosystems that most people are using, and that basically
| means the Apple phones and the phones which are running
| with Google's services.
|
| _Very few_ people are actually running AOSP -- they 're
| running Android builds from Samsung or Google which add a
| lot of binary blobs into the system.
|
| Telling people "you could have a more secure phone if you
| strip out most of the systems that the apps you _use_ your
| phone for rely on " isn't very helpful.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| One must ask: What are they gaining from this technical garbage
| and publicity nightmare?
|
| It's not about the children, that's for sure.
| cube00 wrote:
| That's a very wide selection of services you're offering your
| customers, and they're very seamlessly integrated, and secured
| from open development (looking at you PWAs in Safari) it'd be a
| shame if they needed to be broken up or opened up with new
| legislation.
| jasonlfunk wrote:
| The majority of these discussions are starting in the wrong
| place, I think. Instead of asking whether this specific feature
| is good or bad, we should start by asking whether Apple should be
| doing anything to try to stop the sexual exploitation of
| children.
|
| If the answer is "no, it's not Apple's job." then of course these
| plans are terrible.
|
| If the answer is "yes, Apple should try to use it's immense power
| and wealth to try to stop a terrible evil" - then the obvious
| follow up question is "How?".
|
| They could do whatever ever other company is doing and just
| looking at all of your data, but Apple didn't want to do that. So
| they came up with a system that they felt was a good compromise
| between privacy and trying to stop the spread of CSAM. If you
| want to quibble about the implementation details, that's fine.
| But if your position is that they shouldn't be looking at your
| data at all, then you have to go back to the first question and
| say "Apple should not be trying to stop the exploitation of
| children."
|
| Now you might say, "Yes, but 'what about the children?' has been
| used to justify terrible things." Granted. But... "what about the
| children?" is a very important question to ask and shouldn't be
| used as a cliche to dismiss Apple's attempt to make the world a
| better place in this area.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > But... "what about the children?" is a very important
| question to ask and shouldn't be used as a cliche to dismiss
| Apple's attempt to make the world a better place in this area.
|
| I've never seen a single person ask this question in good
| faith. It never stops. Every single day we have a new crisis
| involving children and the solution is surveillance, more
| government control, less freedom, whatever.
|
| Nothing but emotional manipulation. None of this will ever stop
| crime. None of this will ever undo the suffering already
| inflicted. All of this is mainly justified by the debatable
| notion that demand for CSAM causes child molestation, the
| _actual_ crime authorities should be trying to prevent. Instead
| of doing that they use children in order to establish the
| surveillance tools needed for government oppression. Using
| children as a political weapon should be considered child abuse
| as well.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Cloud scanning would be better, because there's a clear way to
| opt out - don't back up to the cloud. Scanning in device takes
| a hard technical restriction where they can't scan files they
| don't have access to and turns it into a policy restriction
| where they say they won't scan files that are not being
| uploaded to iCloud.
|
| How long do you expect that policy to realistically hold when
| some three-letter-agency comes knocking?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Apple isn't law enforcement. Of course it's not their place to
| be stopping the sexual exploitation of children. They're
| selling storage devices. Has anyone ever suggested that closet
| and basement makers should install covert scanners to make sure
| no one is hiding kidnapping victims, that automakers should put
| scanners in the trunks to make sure nobody is hauling off
| murder victims to bury, that makers of filing cabinets should
| install scanners to ensure you're not storing photos of known
| exploited children in your filing cabinet? Why is this topic
| treated so differently when the devices become networked? We
| could just as easily tap every phone line in the world and zoom
| in on some region where a child was just reported kidnapped and
| flag all people who say their name over a phone line, but we
| don't do that, and no one in their right mind would find that
| acceptable. The police need probable cause and a warrant
| _before_ they can install a listening device on your phone
| line. They don 't pre-surveil everyone to flag potential
| criminals before they become known by other means. I don't
| understand why software services are held to such a lower
| privacy standard than every other form of storage and
| communication we have.
|
| And to specifically answer the question of what they _can_ do.
| When the police come with a warrant because they have good
| reason to suspect some customer X is storing and /or
| transmitting child porn, _then_ transmit a covert over the air
| update to that customer 's device and that customer's device
| only, scanning photos on-device before they get encrypted for
| iCloud backup. Don't push the surveillance update to every
| single customer on the planet before they're under any
| suspicion and this suspicion has been certified by a judge just
| in case.
| jasonlfunk wrote:
| If you say, 'Yes, apple should be doing something, but not
| this." I'd love to hear your ideas about how Apple can do more
| to stop CSAM while better protecting your privacy.
| foxfluff wrote:
| Detecting CSAM on a phone is not stopping exploitation of
| children. Just as detecting images of violence isn't stopping
| violence. Violence and abuse have existed before phones and
| cloud storage, and will continue to be ever after.
|
| And Apple cannot stop exploitation of children. Anything they
| try is trivial to circumvent, a massive breach of privacy, or
| both.
| yyyk wrote:
| >They could do whatever ever other company is doing and just
| looking at all of your data, but Apple didn't want to do that.
|
| Note that Apple doesn't do end-to-end encryption, there's
| little evidence they are even thinking about it, and there are
| other issues that would stand in their way if they had tried
| to. Under the current system, we get client-side scanning _and_
| server-side scanning whenever Apple feels like it. Right now,
| there 's no privacy benefit other than the made-up one some
| Apple fans invented from thin air.
|
| >So they came up with a system that they felt was a good
| compromise between privacy and trying to stop the spread of
| CSAM.
|
| It's a terrible 'compromise'. In return for a bad precedent,
| they get a system that catches way less cases than the typical
| server-based ones. Unless Apple expands the system further to
| catch these cases too, in which point one should ask how much
| privacy is really kept.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| >But if your position is that they shouldn't be looking at your
| data at all, then you have to go back to the first question and
| say "Apple should not be trying to stop the exploitation of
| children."
|
| You're getting pretty far into "affirming the consequent"
| territory here.
| jasonlfunk wrote:
| That's fair. I guess a better answer would be "Apple should
| not be trying to stop the exploitation of children by looking
| at user's data."
|
| But what else could they meaningfully do?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Donate to NCMEC. They are woefully underfunded...
| coolspot wrote:
| I am afraid they can not even if all their top heads decide so.
|
| Governments saw it can be done, so there is no reason Apple won't
| do it for them.
|
| China&co probably already busy writing laws mandating on-device
| scanning of all media and messages for anything remotely matching
| Winnie-The-Pooh.
|
| Apple won't have a choice when it is a law of land. They can't
| quit China.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I keep seeing China getting blamed for this move that was only
| targeting US phones. While it's definitely possible China would
| have tried to also force implementation in China, if a
| government deserves blame for this move it's the US government.
|
| I can't understand why so many people see a US company try to
| spy on US citizens and say China must be at fault.
| grecy wrote:
| > _I can 't understand why so many people see a US company
| try to spy on US citizens and say China must be at fault._
|
| This is extremely common - i.e. blame the immigrants stealing
| jobs, blame the muslims for eroding our religious
| institutions, blame literally _anyone_ but "us". That's
| because it's so much easier to blame someone else for our own
| societal problems.
| systemsignal wrote:
| China can make that regardless of what Apple thinks, that's
| totally unrelated to this.
|
| Also this technology does not develop similar images, the image
| has to be essentially identical...
| gzer0 wrote:
| This is incorrect.
|
| The images in this link [1], are completely different. One is
| a cat, one is a dog. Same hash produced for both.
|
| [1] https://github.com/anishathalye/neural-hash-collider
| robertoandred wrote:
| Do you have an example using a version of NeuralHash from
| less than 9 months ago?
| djrogers wrote:
| That's a hash collision on the first of two distinct
| perceptual hashing algorithms that are used before a human
| review.
|
| It's mind-numbingly unlikely that 2 images would match 2
| unique perceptual hashes and a human review and not be the
| same image.
| coolspot wrote:
| Previously there was no precendent of an on-device content
| scanning protocol proposed by the top phone manufacturer
| themselves and even deemed privacy-preserving and secure by
| them.
|
| Now please idividually hash every word of every message on
| the phone. Then give us all illegal messages that contain
| _exact_ hash match with the dangerous word "Tianamen".
| Government abuse is impossible though: our team of Apple
| employees here at iCloud-China will manually review them
| before passing the list to firing squads. Thanks!
| hypothesis wrote:
| > idividually hash every word
|
| It will likely be a fuzzy match on though crimes. But every
| citizen will get their budget of 30 or so "security"
| vouchers, so we can all vent a bit once in a while.
|
| Oh and they will also double check it with "totally
| independent" blacklist on server before running it by a
| party person last.
| dhx wrote:
| Australia is pushing for client-side scanning too:
|
| "We know there are a number of solutions that would ensure
| illegal activity online can be addressed, without weakening
| encryption and still allowing lawful access to information
| needed in serious criminal investigations. Solutions include:
| using certain types of encryption that allow proactive tools to
| function, implementing proactive detection tools at
| transmission, rather than on receipt, moving AI and proactive
| technical tools to the device level."[1]
|
| The main problem with client-side scanning is that to have any
| effectiveness it requires a situation where "Trusted Computing"
| becomes a legal requirement for sale and use of computing or
| communications devices, where only registered operating systems
| can be installed and software can only be installed from
| registered application stores. And in terms of the Internet,
| registered operating systems would have to only permit access
| to registered web services, and registered web services would
| find themselves quickly unregistered if they allowed end users
| to execute their own scripts within a browser session. It'd
| require the end of "General Purpose Computing"[2] e.g. along
| the lines of regulations such as [3].
|
| Criminals are being pushed increasingly down the Phantom Secure
| [4] path (developing their own technology that doesn't
| implement backdoors, client-side scanning, etc), and in
| response, public policy is increasingly seeking to outlaw[5]
| "General Purpose Computing" and the current decentralised model
| of communications. It'll take a long time, but perhaps over the
| course of the next 20 years we'll see the end of "General
| Purpose Computing"?
|
| [1] https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/tech-trends-and-
| challeng...
|
| [2] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139679
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_Secure
|
| [5] https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/tech-trends-and-
| challeng...
| navjack27 wrote:
| If Australia does this then they would expand it to any
| pictures of a woman or a female presenting humanoid with
| small breasts as CP
| Sandro_Linux wrote:
| I agree with this one like I usually do with EFF
| tempodox wrote:
| > Apple has abandoned its once-famous commitment to security and
| privacy.
|
| The cat's out of the bag now that this has never been more than a
| marketing gimmick. You can rely on Apple to protect your data
| from their competition, but other than that they'll be at least
| as happy to implement dystopian surveillance nightmares as the
| next megacorp. This time they even won the prize for the worst
| idea ever.
| askafriend wrote:
| Which cloud provider can you store your images on that does
| CSAM compliance in a more privacy friendly way?
|
| None. All the main ones scan your entire library of content you
| upload.
|
| Apple's solution is the most privacy conscious by far.
| coolspot wrote:
| Mega.io does CSAM compliance in a more privacy-friendly way:
| they scan their cloud day and night, but it is end-to-end
| encrypted, so the scan always returns exactly 0 results.
| askafriend wrote:
| Mega absolutely complies with law enforcement and does
| issue takedown requests. It's all built into their
| policies.
|
| https://mega.io/takedown
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| And why is this normal? Why can't they offer zero knowledge
| cloud storage? Encrypt before upload and decrypt after
| download. The less they know about the data, the less liable
| they are for anything. Data is and should be a massive
| liability for companies. They should aim to know as little as
| possible.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Porn is apple's new terrorism
| z3ncyberpunk wrote:
| Apple has been a part of the NSA's PRISM program since like 2012.
| Why would you think they stopped spying since then?
| noptd wrote:
| Here's an interesting thought experiment for anyone who disagrees
| that the proposed system is problematic.
|
| Let's say the police installs a new device in your house. This
| device could be capable of seeing or hearing anything that
| happens in your entire home. However, the police claim that the
| device is only watching a specific door in your house and
| forwarding encrypted low resolution photos to their servers "just
| in case" some criteria is met and they need to take a look.
| Nevermind that it would only take a policy change and an OTA
| update that you have no visibility into, or chance of blocking,
| before it's watching your entire house in real-time and sending
| practically anything to their servers. After all, they did
| release a carefully worded statement regarding what the device
| supposedly does.
|
| But hey, you have several other doors to enter or exit your house
| from so what's the big deal right? You could seal that door and
| never be subjected to the system _as advertised_.
|
| Would you trust the police in that scenario, regardless of
| whether you have anything to hide?
| Joeri wrote:
| It's not just your house, it's everyone's house. Our
| smartphones and computers are our digital homes. When something
| is installed in those homes which monitors everyone for
| potential crimes, that is what I would label as an unreasonable
| search and a violation of privacy. It doesn't matter what
| they're looking for, our personal devices should be inviolate
| unless there is a suspicion of crime, and even then a court
| order should be involved.
|
| What apple doesn't understand is that scanning on the device is
| worse for privacy than scanning on the server, not better.
| chuckee wrote:
| > our personal devices should be inviolate unless there is a
| suspicion of crime, and even then a court order should be
| involved.
|
| Even _with_ a court order, your devices should not cooperate
| with a search, unless instructed to do so by you, their
| owner.
| hypothesis wrote:
| > What apple doesn't understand is that scanning on the
| device is worse for privacy than scanning on the server, not
| better.
|
| We don't have to excuse one of the most valuable corp around.
| They _do_ understand, but are willing to cash-in some of the
| "privacy budget".
| spullara wrote:
| This is already the case with the iPhone. They could
| theoretically update it with software that does whatever they
| want at any time.
| noptd wrote:
| True, but that's tangential to the issue at hand.
|
| To continue the physical home analogy, let's say you're a
| renter and your landlord has the ability and access to
| install something in your home at any time without you
| knowing. Maybe they include it as part of the terms for your
| upcoming lease renewal, maybe they don't.
|
| Does that mean you should just accept it when they decide to
| install one of those devices in your home?
| thinkloop wrote:
| > should you just accept it when they decide to install one
| of those devices in your home?
|
| The device they installed is invisible and you will never
| have any way of knowing they were in there, it's irrelevant
| what you accept.
| feanaro wrote:
| That's a _further_ problem. That 's the reason why you
| shouldn't accept closed platforms and closed-source
| software.
|
| But it also doesn't lead to the conclusion that what
| Apple is trying to do here is good or even neutral.
| simion314 wrote:
| There is a giant difference,If you are a developer you might
| understand this better, it is much easier to have an
| application behavior setup from a config file or from a
| database then from code. So you have a config that looks like
| scan_everythin = false; and an update would flip this to true
| for everyone or for special users. Also with the hashes , the
| check is not done locally so the government will ask Apple
| "hey check those hashes you have stored against this secret
| database too and if you find even 1 match send it to us, here
| is a judge order so shut up and do it".
|
| So after this the governments around the world job is easy,
| they throw hashes to Apple(and fortunately for Apple they can
| say they had no idea what original photos content was) where
| before the government would have needed to ask Apple to write
| new software and Apple could have said that it can't do it
| without starting a shit storem.
| onethought wrote:
| That is nothing like this... you've just made an argument
| against having smart phones at all. Not apples improvement to
| protect the privacy of your photos.
| feanaro wrote:
| Interesting choice of words. What exactly did they improve
| with this and how?
| onethought wrote:
| The ability to avoid decrypting and mining your entire
| photo library in order to comply with us law. Instead
| performing a hash match on the device that gives their
| compliance team a partial key to decrypt only the images in
| question to confirm it wasn't a false positive.
|
| Mean while on a google pixel, google will just scan your
| entire library.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Mean while on a google pixel, google will just scan
| your entire library.
|
| Google doesn't scan anything on Pixel phones. Only photos
| and files that you upload to Google Photos or Drive. This
| is standard industry practice, and apparently Apple
| wasn't doing that. So now they built this client side
| system that nobody else has, and created local
| surveillance.
| yunohn wrote:
| But iCloud is NOT encrypted, specifically because the FBI
| told them not to.
|
| source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-
| icloud-exclusiv...
| onethought wrote:
| They are encrypted. Apple explained that. The article you
| referred to was for backups not iPhoto libraries.
| yunohn wrote:
| Could you source Apple's explanation, that you read?
|
| It's pretty common knowledge that most of iCloud
| (including Photos) is not E2E encrypted; in fact, here's
| the proof right from Apple -
| https://support.apple.com/en-ae/HT202303.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Not apples improvement to protect the privacy of your
| photos.
|
| This is quite the twist. What's decreasing the privacy of my
| personal photos, before the neuralhash scanner is deployed?
| onethought wrote:
| Because the alternative is to scan all the images on the
| server. With the hash scanner only hash matches are
| scanned. All the other images are kept private.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Stop being disingenuous. They're all scanned, regardless
| of whether it's on the server or the phone.
| onethought wrote:
| Apple specifically said that isn't the case.
|
| I'm being disingenuous?
| robertoandred wrote:
| Hashing on device instead of on the server is a policy change
| too.
| oreilles wrote:
| > This device could be capable of seeing or hearing anything
| that happens in your entire home
|
| This device is your smartphone. It can already watch and listen
| everything you do. It can already read and write everything
| that's inside because that's how an operating system works. The
| fact that it can now scan for CP makes zero difference privacy
| wise.
|
| If you don't trust your smartphone to do what they advertise,
| you don't use one.
|
| If you believe Apple can make the iPhone send data to them or
| the governments without your consent and without even telling
| you, you shouldn't use Apple software in the first place
| because you'd have no reason to believe that such a feature
| hasn't already been implemented.
|
| Your device scanning its content is not a breach of privacy
| until that information is send without your consent. Wether it
| is for malware or for child porn. Claiming that this is a
| slippery slope is like claiming that building a bridge is a
| slippery slope as the worker could place a bomb inside anytime.
| matwood wrote:
| The analogy is missing a key part of the system _as designed
| today_ - putting something on someone else 's property. The
| house analogies are terrible, but closer to what's happening is
| as follows.
|
| I'm your neighbor and I want you to store a box for me. It's
| tapped up so you don't really want to open it, but would you
| store it for me without knowing what's in it? You could be like
| other cloud providers, rip the tape off and rummage through
| looking for whatever.
|
| Apple has designed a method for me to scan the box at my house
| only for CSAM (agreed upon by the intersection of multiple
| databases), then hand it to you with a note that says 'this is
| not CSAM'. Now you can store the box with some confidence in
| knowing you're not storing CSAM. It's also more private because
| you don't need to go rummaging through my box - even though you
| currently can if you want.
|
| Of course we're starting from the basis that you have decided
| you don't want to store any CSAM. If you don't care about what
| you store it doesn't matter.
|
| And you're right that Apple could make a policy change to scan
| my whole house and upload that somewhere, but guess what? iOS
| users (smart phone users in general) have always been one
| policy change away from Apple/Google doing something like
| uploading/sharing all the face ML data (which IMO is way more
| valuable than some hash matches). So nothing has really
| changed.
| frzj wrote:
| Analogies are always misleading. A cloud provider is no
| neighbor. They facilitate a specific service, and it is clear
| that the package is owned by the client. The cloud provider
| shouldn't have any liability for the data he stores,
| especially if it's encrypted and not shared to the public,
| nobody should ever care what's inside the package. If the
| authorities have a good reason to think that you have drugs
| or CP in your package, then they can force you to open it.
|
| IMHO, no combination of ones and zeros should ever be
| illegal. The act of distributing them to others or creating
| them in the real world should be. The energy stored on a
| flash drive doesn't harm anybody, human action does.
| askafriend wrote:
| iCloud servers are not your property, they are Apple's
| property. Even the neighbor terminology is accurate since
| there's is an implied trust higher than a random stranger.
|
| OP's analogy is spot on.
| rank0 wrote:
| It's really not. A commercial service is not like a
| residential neighbor.
|
| Apple is asking that people store their shoe boxes in
| Apple's "house" in exchange for money.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Now change that a little bit. And imagine that you're renting
| this place. And that's not a police requirement, but home owner
| requirement who wants to prevent undesirable behaviour to
| protect everyone (or so he says).
|
| That would be a better analogy. You don't own your iPhone at
| all. You own few dozens of grams of steel, glass and silicone.
| You don't even own parts of it, they're sealed, DRMed and non-
| functional without proprietary firmware. And of course you
| hardly own the entire device, as you can't control software
| which runs on it.
|
| Don't pretend that you own a house.
| beezischillin wrote:
| I don't trust anyone even though I have nothing to hide.
|
| If Apple was serious about privacy maybe they'd put some of
| their lobbying / peer pressure efforts towards that instead of
| trendy social fads at least this once.
| memetomancer wrote:
| This is so frustrating, I generally expected the Hacker News
| community to observe a more sophisticated take on this topic.
|
| Let's get it straight: the other Big Tech companies have done
| this CSAM scanning for many, many years. Their users have been
| reported. Arrests have been made. Microsoft had this sorted in
| 2009 with PhotoDNA, and made it available to everyone else in
| 2014[1]. I doubt very much this has stopped any of you from
| working at Microsoft or the FAANGs when given the chance.
|
| The ONLY distinctions here are that Apple has opted to do the
| mundane hashing part on the device prior to upload, have been up
| front about the plan, have take comments from the public and are
| saying that they will work out a more satisfying scheme.
|
| Apple even appears to be responsive to the shady claims that a
| 'reverse engineered (old) version of NeuralHash' might have
| resulted in some novel collisions, and spend the money to improve
| their current implementation.
|
| The other big tech concerns did not do these things; they simply
| imposed it all and started informing the police.
|
| As far as I can see, the only real misstep Apple has taken is
| being explicit about their plans and assuming people could
| understand the scope of the subject at hand. Instead they've
| stepped into a bear-trap of outraged hysteria, a moral panic from
| people who should know better.
|
| The take away lesson here is "Do not announce stuff like this,
| the general public will flip out if you try to keep them
| informed". Is that anyone's goal here?
|
| [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna
| rebuilder wrote:
| If scanning is done in the cloud, I can disable cloud uploads
| and reasonably trust no filter list will get me reported. If
| it's done on-device, I have to rely on Apple to uphold their
| policy of only scanning material uploaded to iCloud. That's a
| big difference.
| sodality2 wrote:
| >If scanning is done in the cloud, I can disable cloud
| uploads and reasonably trust no filter list will get me
| reported
|
| Or that it uploads local copies to be scanned in the cloud
| and doesn't save them to your account but may trigger LE
| response... Though I suppose that would cause concern about
| the massive network traffic, whereas no one would notice
| Apple scanning local photos (w/o some sort of advanced
| disassembly to see how much the on-board ML chip is used)
| rebuilder wrote:
| I'm thinking more about what legal defence a phone
| manufacturer has against inevitable LE requests for access.
| Not having the technical capability is much stronger than
| not being willing, even though it's obvious that a targeted
| "software update" is within the capabilities of Google and
| Apple alike.
| blagie wrote:
| There are two possibilities:
|
| 1) You're missing something.
|
| 2) Everyone else is missing something. That includes
| organizations like the EFF.
|
| In terms of missing nuance: What Facebook is doing absolutely
| and completely different from what Apple is doing. You should
| take time to understand why Apple's approach is so utterly
| repulsive, while I'm 100% in support of Facebook's.
|
| There are distinctions other than your "ONLY distinctions." You
| should take time to understand what those are, and why they're
| important. As a hint, those have to do with where users might
| or might not have expectations of privacy, with due process,
| and with who owns what.
| robertoandred wrote:
| The EFF's goal is to get donations. Hence why they've lied
| about the system since the beginning to stoke outrage.
| blagie wrote:
| I guess we're all in on the conspiracy :)
| max_ wrote:
| The real problem is that their are no real replacements to apple
| products.
| nbzso wrote:
| I will share my solution:
|
| If I have something that spies 24/7 in my home or around me I
| throw it in the recycle bin.
|
| No more tech talk, implementation talk on closed software and
| dark pattern designed products by any company.
|
| Apple is using its market leader in "user convenience" position
| to normalize on device user behavior analysis and data processing
| and active policing. This is madness.
|
| I expect police and three letter agencies to use their own
| hacking tools and budget. I will not pay the bill on a multiple
| levels to be monitored and classified. Yes you can vote with your
| wallet as first reaction, as second you can push your
| representatives for political and legislative reaction.
|
| Imagine this news in 2010. For sure some Apple stores will be
| burned down to the ground.
|
| But make no mistake: If you don't buy products created from the
| get go to snoop around and extract your data, you will have more
| privacy.
|
| The only way into the future for people who want peace of mind is
| not to buy into smart home, smart appliances, smart cars and
| smart surveillance. Period.
|
| They are called smart for a reason. Because we are becoming
| stupider.
|
| Start self-hosting and local backups, there are tech savvy people
| who are moving away from surveillance state and building more
| private and sustainable future for themselves.
|
| Apple is the big writing on the wall. They act as political
| entity now, the users are their voters and as a classic politics
| move they are selling the audience to the highest bidder.
|
| Checks and balances.
| [deleted]
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| This is my approach. If sovereign governments don't want to
| regulate in my interests and protect me from surveillance
| capitalism, I'm simply going to take every route I can find to
| opt out of the whole enterprise. I already have started just
| turning off my phone for the majority of the day and opted out
| of all the major social networks. Hopefully a sufficient
| critical mass of people take this route such that it destroys
| enough economic value to push society in a better direction
| with meaningful trust and security guarantees, but in the
| meantime as long as the entire digital ecosystem is
| untrustworthy and actively antagonistic towards me, I'd rather
| just have nothing to do with it.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Have you tried to buy a new car or a home appliance recently?
| Its nigh impossible to buy something new that is plain old and
| dumb.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Yesterday while driving my wife to the nearest large town for
| shopping (one hour each way) I was explaining my thought
| process on getting an Android phone with an alternative
| software stack. The most painful part of this proposed
| transition is that our 2021 Honda Pilot basically becomes
| whichever of our iPhones is currently synched, and let me
| tell you, this is damned convenient (pun intended).
|
| Currently I am using the full range of ProtonMail products,
| and have my Google, Apple, and device settings as strong-
| privacy as I can. Google is a good example: I use a range of
| paid for Google services but except for YouTube Premium, I
| have data collection turned off. I let Google store YouTube
| data for 30 days, and still get a good user experience.
|
| As others here have said, stay away from any smart home
| devices.
|
| EDIT: reading this article (and her book Privacy is Power)
| yesterday is what kicked off our conversation. People who
| protect their privacy have advantages over people who don't.
| sizzle wrote:
| Is Alexa really spying on me? What's the concern here?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| good question, thanks. I forgot to add the interview link
| that answers this question:
| https://protonmail.com/blog/carissa-veliz-data-privacy/
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > What's the concern here?
|
| It's an internet connected microphone running proprietary
| software.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Is Alexa really spying on me?'
|
| Yes.
| nbzso wrote:
| People who protect their privacy have advantages over
| people who don't.
|
| This is the essential thing that we as a tech savvy
| professionals must communicate to the normal users. The key
| word is "advantages". We all like having one or two.
| Blurring the lines of "ownership" and "renting" is the
| global corporate plan for the future.
|
| But I have a question: If data is the new petrol, and we
| all are the source, why they expect us not only to give it
| free but to pay the extraction fee?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| If they don't have pay us for our data, then they will
| not.
|
| I am pretty much hard-over on privacy, yet I carefully
| use many fine Google services, keep a Facebook account
| because I really enjoy my Oculus, etc.
|
| I am conflicted about Apple because my professional and
| personal digital lives are so smooth with an Apple Watch,
| and iPhone, iPad, and M1 MacBook Pro. Low friction.
|
| I have several Linux laptops, including a really nice
| System76. The thought of getting a CalyxOS Android, and
| just using Linux is a rough decision.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I actually feel this one a lot: Android Auto and it's
| contemporaries are surprisingly great experiences on the
| road, and it's going to be tough to drop it going forwards.
| As long as my PinePhone ships with Bluetooth, I should be
| okay.
| nbzso wrote:
| Yes, and this is a challenge. And nothing will change until
| your refrigerator reports you to the police for having too
| much beer in your possession:) Than all the "nothing to hide"
| people will revolt.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| I'm not so worried about the fridge ratting me out. Cars on
| the other hand have lots of potential. Every traffic light
| could have a red light camera if it's the car watching and
| reporting.
| jorvi wrote:
| In The Netherlands we had this problem with vehicle plate
| scanners. At first, they were strictly for vehicle tax
| purposes. Then later it came out they could be used by
| our three (well, four) letter agency in extraordinary
| circumstances. Then the police could request access in
| extreme cases, then less extreme, and now the 'requesting
| access' is nothing more than an automated process that is
| logged.
|
| Build it and they will come.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| Sounds like you're describing an external device
| monitoring vehicle actions. The person you're replying to
| is describing the vehicle monitoring and reporting its
| own actions.
|
| In my opinion, people have proven themselves too
| irresponsible in cars (in a way that results in them
| regularly killing other people), and while I dislike
| surveillance, I am for the monitoring/reporting measures
| that are in some European countries.
| parineum wrote:
| He's describing an already existing slippery slope to
| warn against the slippery slope of putting surveillance
| in the cars themselves.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Right. Like Apple's on-device scanning and reporting,
| cars could scan and report bad behaviours. Toyotas
| already can detect when a driver is drowsy based on their
| driving and prompts them to take a break. How hard would
| it be to make it call police when the driving is severely
| impaired?
| haswell wrote:
| Driving is a privilege. Historically, the solution to
| irresponsible driving is to revoke that privilege.
|
| Why should law abiding drivers be subjected to
| surveillance caused by the irresponsible crowd? Why is
| removing one's driving privileges not enough?
|
| Proactive monitoring/reporting is the stuff of slippery
| slopes and Minority Report is the direction we're going
| at this point...
| notriddle wrote:
| If you want to treat driving as a privilege, then the
| city needs to be built with non-driving citizens in mind.
| lrvick wrote:
| This is why I only buy used cars and motorcycles these days.
|
| I don't want a vehicle I can't repair or control as I please.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, someone here told me cars have microphones installed
| somewhere now. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they
| also had GPS and wireless internet connection.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Yeah, impossible, or like, so totally "impossible"
| Terretta wrote:
| > _If I have something that spies 24 /7 in my home or around me
| I throw it in the recycle bin._
|
| Unless you've figured out how to eliminate the pervasive use of
| common client SDKs from popular mobile apps, or forgo mobile
| apps altogether, this is hyperbole.
|
| Watch a MITM while running Android or iOS, you'll discover a
| wide array of apps using a 'usual suspects' set of client SDKs,
| all checking in frequently.
|
| Go read the docs for those SDKs. Turns out they're offering any
| number of user analytic, registration, or management
| conveniences. Easy to see why devs include them like
| boilerplate.
|
| Look closer, you'll find them doing cross app and cross device
| linking and behavior aggregation, and "sharing with our
| partners". Tracing further, the partners are adtech. Look more
| broadly, you'll find these used as sources by firms
| commercially offering user screening, fraud prevention, credit
| approval, etc. to enterprises that are making increasingly
| automated decisions about who qualifies and who doesn't.
|
| We aren't talking about this*, and that's weird.
|
| ---
|
| * Footnote: We talked about it when weather apps were using
| some offending location SDKs, Apple got more aggressive on
| surfacing ongoing user location tracking. We talk about it when
| one firm such as Facebook does it across their own properties.
| We don't talk about it when everyone from indie devs to mega
| banks are doing it by using these client SDKs and libs, either
| on purpose or inadvertently.
| nbzso wrote:
| "Look closer, you'll find them doing cross app and cross
| device linking and behavior aggregation, and "sharing with
| our partners". Tracing further, the partners are adtech. Look
| more broadly, you'll find these used as sources by firms
| commercially offering user screening, fraud prevention,
| credit approval, etc. to enterprises that are making
| increasingly automated decisions about who qualifies and who
| doesn't.
|
| We aren't talking about this*, and that's weird."
|
| Agree.
|
| I avoid mobile apps like plague, the only emergency thing is
| banking apps and for this I have an old iPhone SE. Other than
| this mobile apps are no go for me. Until I have in my hands
| Linux phone with acceptable UX I am out of the whole mobile
| apps idea.
| Terretta wrote:
| Banks are among those making telemetry calls they have no
| idea they're making. Your bank app strategy is the same one
| has to use to install or update most IoT today, including
| appliances that shouldn't be IoT at all. Those too
| incorporate these SDKs.
|
| Perhaps having a "Linux phone with acceptable UX" in your
| hands will change product manager and developer behaviors
| with regards to client-side SDKs. Perhaps Linux will step
| up and block developers of these SDKs from monitoring Linux
| users, the way Apple updated their OS (against developer
| wishes) to block always-on location tracking.
| nbzso wrote:
| This is hyperbole. Obviously.
|
| There somewhere in my house iPhone SE (the old one, and the
| last iPhone that I bought) which is used for emergency
| banking with mobile apps and emergency phone calls. When
| outside I use regular flip-phone. Never used Siri. Never used
| iCloud, deleted Dropbox in 2012 and moved to multiple
| Synology NAS stations.
|
| Everything that I have to do is channeled trough desktops or
| laptop computers. I run Little Snitch (since v.2) on macs and
| Open Snitch on my Linux boxes. If I want to take casual photo
| - Sony RX100 is handy. If I want more serious stuff -
| LeicaM240/Summilux is enough for me.
|
| My cars have Garmins for navigation and paper maps for
| backup:) There is no internet connection without VPN.
|
| Never used "subscription" based entertainment and never will.
| Never bought into Bluetooth, Noise canceling, Shitty design
| headphone thing. My first iPad Pro 12 WIFI is with broken
| WIFI and runs only Procreate and Filebrowser app, soon to be
| abandoned for Cintiq/Krita combination.
|
| I left the smartphone / social media sickness long time ago.
| As a result I found immense reserve of mental and creative
| energy, normal sleep and lack of depression.
|
| Since this "fabulous" move from the geniuses at Apple Glass
| Doughnut, I have payed overtime to my developers to remove
| macOS from production and install ARCH/Manjaro over Apple
| hardware (happily no T1s in my company).
|
| The designers Apple machines are running Catalina and are
| semi air-gaped. Writing this on an old MacBook Air with
| Pop!_OS on it.
|
| Luckily I invested in multi-platform software and in the
| future even designers will run Linuxes with Windows 10 VMs
| (properly sand-boxed).
| antattack wrote:
| Apple is fine with that since they have enough of people
| hooked. Google is fine with that too for the same reasons.
| Facebook just knows that it's an empty threat and they have
| WhatsUp, Instagram and Oculus to fallback on to. Microsoft just
| laughs all they way to the bank receiving government and
| business money.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| > I will not pay the bill on a multiple levels to be monitored
| and classified.
|
| You already do. It's called taxation.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| No, that's not what taxation is.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _If I have something that spies 24 /7 in my home or around me I
| throw it in the recycle bin._
|
| how do you define "spies"? As that could apply to pretty much
| any phone (smart phone or not, the cellular provider (and
| almost certainly the government)) tracks everywhere you go,
| modern TV's, cars, and many modern appliances have some degree
| of spying built in.
| freebuju wrote:
| Technically, spying on someone involves the element of the
| subject not knowing that they are being watched.
|
| In this case, if you haven't been following this CSAM scandal
| and making use of iCloud as usual, should Apple turn this
| enigma machine on, you don't know your device is being used
| to spy on you.
|
| Am sure Apple will employ the best brains to craft some form
| of legalese to make sure you tick the "accept" button without
| fully understanding what it means in the event they roll out.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Do you know all the ways your TV is reporting your viewing
| history? Did you know it can also report your over the air
| viewing as well as what you play on your DVD player? Do
| they use the built-in microphone to listen for keywords?
|
| What about your smart refrigerator - you might expect it to
| report refrigerator data (temperature, door openings,etc),
| but would you be surprised if it's also reporting your
| bedtime, wake up time, and when you're on vacation?
|
| Do you know how long the cell phone company retains your
| location data, or what they do with it? Do most people even
| know the cell phone company tracks their location?
|
| Many appliances spy on us in ways we don't know.
| freebuju wrote:
| Maybe true, but I at least know in advance that these
| devices may be collecting data on me. I'd argue that this
| is mostly opt-in on my end since am fully aware of the
| data collection and have a rough idea of the extent this
| is done. Average Joe down the road doesn't give any care
| and still actively uses his Facebook account stands no
| chance against the spying. He can't see it coming.
|
| Personally, I live a simple "non-connected" life as much
| as I possibly can. Any service providers I choose to
| entertain have to do with the minimum required
| information to hold the account.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Closed markets guarantee income. Apple products are not simply
| consumer devices, they're used by big box stores to handle
| inventory, many companies require them for specific
| apps/ecosystem. Apple and universities conspire against
| students to require the purchase of MacBooks and other apple
| hardware, paid for by funny money student loans, which
| ultimately ends up being tax payers footing the bill for apple
| hardware.
|
| Apple is a company reliant on public tax payer dollars, and
| should be regulated as such.
| xondono wrote:
| I don't know what university did you went to, but most are,
| if anything, too reliant on students having Windows devices.
|
| I had to finish my masters work on a VM.
| askafriend wrote:
| Lol this is a silly stretch. MacBooks marketshare is tiny and
| iPhone doesn't have the dominant market share in any country.
|
| Turns out if you build things people really like - they'll
| buy it and maybe even pay a premium for it.
| [deleted]
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I worked for a university in the IT department for a few
| years. Everything we implemented needed to work for Windows
| and Mac devices. For mobile, both iOS and Android were
| supported.
|
| Students were free to purchase whatever hardware they wanted.
| At the end of the day they could get their studies done on
| either device. The only courses that required an apple
| computer were the iOS development class, and with Swift
| becoming more popular I believe there's a way to do that on
| windows now. Either way if a student did not have access to
| an apple computer there were entire labs with apple devices
| they could use.
|
| Universities are not mandating apple hardware. Not by a long
| shot. Maybe your anecdotal experience is different but I can
| assure you that is not the norm.
| [deleted]
| nr2x wrote:
| At CMU at least you see a Macs, followed by Linux, and then
| Windows. A device mandate would be anathema to the
| institution.
| OOPMan wrote:
| I feel like people in the US have a warped viewpoint on
| this because Apple hardware is so common there.
|
| Outside of the US, especially in poorer countries, Apple
| hardware is vastly less prevalent, both at universities
| and in general.
|
| You folks are victims of your own financial success :-)
| atok1 wrote:
| I can proudly say I am one of those people building a private,
| better, future :)
| [deleted]
| Guthur wrote:
| "as second you can push your representatives for political and
| legislative reaction."
|
| Apple are not doing this for anything other than Political
| reasons. They see the writing on the wall, governments want
| this level and are either explicitly asking Apple in secret or
| implicitly encouraging it with their rhetoric.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| There's nothing implicit in what's going on. It's clear that
| Apple leadership promised the backdoor to people in
| governmental power and got great monopoly power in return.
| stouset wrote:
| This is utterly baseless speculation and overwhelmingly
| likely to be a pure fantasy narrative.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I agree with the first part of your sentence (it's 100%
| speculatiom on my part), but the fantasy would be
| thinking that Tim Cook cares about child pornography so
| much that he would turn 180 degrees in his principles
| after just 1-2 years.
| [deleted]
| KaiserPro wrote:
| What people have so far missed is the nugget burried way down in
| the small print.
|
| Apple are doing this because they have a child porn problem.
|
| The biggest suprise of this whole bruhaha is that _facebook_ of
| all the companies come out looking better than apple.
|
| Whatsapp essentially had the same issue: people using it to share
| nasty stuff. despite similar encryption issues, whatsapp manage
| to report hundreds of thousands of instances of nasty stuff,
| without putting in client side filters.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes and:
|
| > _Apple are doing this because they have a child porn
| problem._
|
| They're also under relentless pressure. From governments, who
| demand backdoors and full access. From hackers, who are pwning
| the entire stack.
|
| Like the EFF, I oppose the image scanning.
|
| But I'd like someone, anyone propose what Apple (Google,
| Facebook, ...) is _supposed_ to do?
|
| My hunch is that Apple is trying to thread the needle. Do the
| absolute bare minimum, to fend off the inevitable governmental
| policy overreaches. Find some technical solution to mollify all
| the would be tyrants.
|
| If Apple's attempts to find a balance don't work, the default
| position is backdoors, not Matrix-style end-to-end full
| encryption.
|
| I'm not saying EFF should stfu.
|
| EFF and others should be savvy enough to see the meta game and
| advocate their own policy (platform) accordingly.
|
| Edit: u/dhx makes similar points
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28412861
| dhx wrote:
| It's not a problem that can be realistically solved with
| technology. The problem existed before electricity had been
| discovered[1][2] and continues to exist[3] in a significant
| way regardless of the presence of computers and the Internet.
|
| I'd guess that the intent behind client-side scanning is to
| force child abusers away from mainstream technology towards
| niche technology[4][5][6], increasing the signal-to-noise
| ratio for finding and targeting child abusers. At present,
| there is nothing inherently suspicious about someone using
| WhatsApp, which means child abusers can hide amongst millions
| of other users. If CSAM is instead pushed onto Tor and a
| little-heard-of encrypted messaging app with servers located
| in eastern Europe, the theory is that it becomes easier to
| target just these niche users. If they're using Tor, they
| must have something to hide and therefore further
| investigation is warranted...?
|
| A key problem with this approach is that, as has happened in
| other criminal circles, criminals find increasingly clever
| ways to remain 'boring' and not inviting of further scrutiny,
| or to otherwise remain hidden in the masses. For example,
| 9/11 hijackers communicated using boring methods, without
| encryption, using a coded language to make messages appear
| innocuous[7]. Even if general purpose computing was
| prohibited, would it be realistic to prevent users from using
| spreadsheet formulas to implement encryption and display of
| images[8][9][10], without impacting other users?. Another key
| problem is that innocent people will likely be targeted and
| harassed by association with niche technologies, which also
| wastes resources that could be used to limit child abuse via
| more effective means.
|
| It would be possible to implement something that looks like
| North Korea's Kwangmyong[11] and largely solve the CSAM-
| sharing-via-computers problem, but at that point you've
| essentially banned computing altogether. This is actually a
| decision some countries have made[12] (not for CSAM reasons
| though) but good luck convincing the modern world that it'd
| be a good idea to eradicate the last 40 years of
| technological advancement whilst other countries continue to
| leap ahead technologically with the help of open and
| unrestricted access to general purpose computing.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi
|
| [3] https://europepmc.org/article/nbk/nbk554624
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANOM
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat
|
| [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)
|
| [7] https://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/july-2001-commu
| nic...
|
| [8] https://poisonninja.github.io/2016/12/07/AES-in-Google-
| Sheet...
|
| [9] https://www.iacis.org/iis/2017/2_iis_2017_103-112.pdf
|
| [10] https://github.com/takacs/pixel-spreadsheet
|
| [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network)
|
| [12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Burmese_protests#Inte
| rnet...
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I think you are jumping ahead.
|
| I am not, and I don't think anyone here seriously thinks
| that kiddie fiddling is new.
|
| The issue is that Apple's platform is being used to store
| _and share_ this abuse. Not by some clever mastermind, but
| by tech illiterate garden variety nonces. As I have alluded
| to before, whatsapp have reported hundreds of thousands of
| images in 2020. Apple have reported 256.[1]
|
| This is a legal and PR risk. Storing these images, and or
| allowing them to be distributed via a system that you own
| carries stiff legal penalties. They have to do something
| about it. I don't think client side scanning is the best
| way.
|
| The crucial point is this, you won't be able to find all of
| the nonces. But you will be able to find a good number. The
| idea is that you remove the ability for your standard
| criminal to be able to use your platform. Or at least give
| them the feeling that they might not be able to operate
| with impunity.
|
| There will always be sophisticated criminals, always. But
| if we can keep them to a manageable number, then that will
| be an improvement.
|
| [1]https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/geth
| elp/...
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > But I'd like someone, anyone propose what Apple (Google,
| Facebook, ...) is supposed to do?
|
| I think what apple should do is follow Facebook/google's
| lead: the "report this message" button that _everyone_ else
| has.
|
| Obviously google doesn't encrypt user's stuff, so do server
| side scanning. Whatsapp supposedly relies entirely on
| reported messages.
|
| Given that iCloud accounts are tied directly to ID, it
| doesn't seem all that difficult for apple to get their report
| rate up just by letting users report stuff.
|
| > EFF and others should be savvy enough to see the meta game
| and advocate their own policy (platform) accordingly.
|
| agreed, the "EWWW NO NEVER EVER EVER" approach is counter
| productive, it just allows people to paint them as people
| that hide kiddyfiddlers. the wider public supports apple's
| drive a lot more than I would like.
|
| But apple do need to do something more, they apparently
| reported less than a thousand people for having illegal
| images.
| robertoandred wrote:
| How do you propose someone reports a photo someone else has
| in their personal photo library?
| yehaaa wrote:
| Yes but Facebook is a communication plattform, iCloud is a
| backup and sync feature. Not sure how you think a "report
| this message" would work.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| iMessage is a communication platform.
| yehaaa wrote:
| True, but it's 1-to-1 like sms. If someone were to send
| CP to you over iMessage wouldn't it be more natural to
| contact the police instead of Apple?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > If someone were to send CP to you over iMessage
| wouldn't it be more natural to contact the police instead
| of Apple?
|
| probably.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| "No, you cannot make more money with your new thing!" scolds the
| toothless banshee of grift.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Nobody has ever brought up this argument, but isn't it odd,
| despite all the self imposed backdoors in China, Apple is
| targeting the us market for the pedophilia stuff? Why is that so?
| No such thing for Android. Must be pressure from the government I
| suppose. Or did they somehow think this would pass the clients
| sniff test and can be sold as additional safety measure?
|
| The real why was never disclosed as far I am aware.
| MontagFTB wrote:
| US legislation states that cloud storage providers are liable
| for storing/transmitting CSAM via their services. They are
| legally bound to identify and report it.
| midrus wrote:
| My next phone was going to be an iphone because I'm tired of all
| the Google tracking (and Android itself). But now I'm holding up
| my purchase until they release (or hopefully abort it).
|
| I'm happy to pay more for a robust and privacy protecting device.
| I won't pay more for the same bullshit.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| There are many threads on HN about contemporary pocket-sized
| personal assistants with telephony not using Google Android or
| iOS. Some of them are at their early stages, but some may be
| usable. It is something most of us will have to go to sooner or
| later.
| pachico wrote:
| My solution is simpler: I will never buy an Apple product.
| Cort3z wrote:
| The main argument here is that we are afraid that governments can
| demand, through court, that Apple should add some other hashes
| than the ones they start with.
|
| What is preventing those said governments from going through the
| same legal process demanding that Apple should implement such a
| system from scratch?
| beermonster wrote:
| Whistleblowers
| runnerup wrote:
| Generally the US government can't compel work to be done
| through subpoenas. Adding a hash is probably not considered
| work, but writing a bunch of code is. Typically the government
| can only compel parties to divulge information - such as "use
| your existing systems to tell us which users have this image on
| their phone".
|
| Forcing citizens to perform work would be reserved for
| something that's part of a punishment for a crime conviction,
| such as prison labor. This would be "design, implement, test,
| release a brand new system to tell us which users have this
| image on their phone."
|
| There's some academic debate over whether the "all writs act"
| can compel work/action/speech, but that would be the only
| avenue I'm aware of, and it's on pretty shaky ground for
| something like this.
|
| If the system doesn't exist, Apple could fight an all writs act
| type request. If the system does exist, they probably can't
| really effectively fight a FISA order/subpoena to add some
| hashes in.
|
| If they had never invented it, they might have been able to
| tell China "its not technically feasible" and potentially
| convince Chinese leadership that its even true. But at this
| point that game is up and China could definitely compel Apple
| to finalize and release this.
|
| https://www.justsecurity.org/29634/readers-guide-magistrate-...
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-...
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/feds-used-1789-l...
|
| https://thefederalist.com/2016/02/19/cut-the-crap-apple-and-...
| zerocrates wrote:
| In this kind of situation I'd say the more realistic "risk"
| isn't subpoenas or court orders or whatever, at least not
| standing alone. Instead you just have the government mandate
| that vendors provide this kind of capability though positive
| law. Then later legal processes like subpoenas or other
| orders simply use the capabilities that you mandated.
|
| Think basically CALEA, which required telecom providers to
| change their systems to better enable law enforcement
| wiretaps, as existing methods weren't quite keeping up with
| telecom digitization. You don't need to use the wiretap
| orders themselves to make AT&T build in your access points.
|
| Content matching by government mandate for various things
| feels kind of inevitable... It's already out there in terms
| of plans for requiring it in the copyright sphere, and
| obviously for CSAM.
|
| Anyway, I don't know that whether Apple actually deploys this
| system makes that much of a difference in this sense: the
| idea is already out there. Which is basically what you said.
| matwood wrote:
| Yeah, it's legislation that Apple is trying to get ahead of
| here. The conversation about government mandated backdoors
| last year where Graham threatened Apple to either do
| something or legislation will [1].
|
| There's also the emails that came out where Apple thinks
| they have a CSAM problem in iCloud photos and they don't
| want them there [2].
|
| I think a lot of people are missing the larger playing
| field when discussing this issue. Apple is going to do
| _something_ either by choice or by force.
|
| [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/02/21/backdoor-to-encryption/
|
| [2] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/08/20/apple-exec-
| said-i...
| Cort3z wrote:
| Super interesting. But what about the case where the
| hypothetical government develops the system themselves and
| requires apple to add it to their product? Of course apple
| could deny and possibly be blocked from operating in that
| market. I just find the whole situation fascinating
| mrtksn wrote:
| Elections. If people start demanding maximum security, it can
| become a popular opinion. This can definitely happen but at the
| moment implementation of listening devices to everyone is
| unpopular.
|
| It's useful to remember that organisations are made of people
| with individual aspirations. Some would really want to have
| listening devices implemented to everyone so that they can do
| their jobs better(usually the intelligence people, the police
| etc), others will want it for less "Acceptable" reasons but at
| the end of the day the people who can allow or disallow it will
| have their careers determined by the general population in a
| very public manner.
| Cort3z wrote:
| I would assume that elections isn't a guaranteed option in
| this though experiment.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Of course, you can coups, you can have wars etc. That's why
| people should watch out to keep the Democracy intact, go
| vote and have a healthy level of interest to the political
| processes.
| amelius wrote:
| > Elections.
|
| The problem: at least 90% of the population doesn't care
| about privacy, and scandals (see Facebook etc) have no
| influence on this whatsoever, so awareness-campaigns are not
| likely to work either.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-04 23:02 UTC)