Spencer314

Maybe it was staged. This can happen, and this likely will happen. That's what the notifications are for. 

This is definitely dual-use technology. As someone who would be concerned about someone stealing, say, my camera bag, I would rather it be harder for a thief to detect or disable my AirTag. But, the better AirTags are for that use case, the better they are for stalkers. But even better for stalkers would be throwing any still functioning iPhone into a car. Those won't beep and will connect to cell phone networks themselves. Since it won't use the screen and the only thing you need it to do is ping the Find My network, you can run it in low power mode with the screen off and it will probably run for two days. Admittedly, an AirTag is only $25 and is a lot smaller, but if you are really going to stalk somebody using tech, you can get an older iPhone for $150 and do so perfectly well, particularly if you are willing to stalk their car rather than, say, their purse. 

jasonfj said:

Exhibits two and three, your honour. 

And is that a "Nevermind" logo tattoo'd across his chest?

Even if he has been suffering from this, the many times he has referred to (and reproduce) the iconic image for humor value is going to be a pretty large barrier to jump over, coupled with his parents being paid for the shoot and further coupled with the fact that pictures of naked babies are hardly unusual. 

KaseyKeiser said:

I believe Apple has a hidden agenda for doing this and it has nothing to do with protecting children or child trafficking. For all the bad press and blowback from the public, and the fact that this seems to contradict their own security ideals, there is more to this than meets the eye! 

Apple's agenda is to do what they can to stave off government intrusions on their privacy-focused business model. This presumably gives them some breathing room for that by doing the minimum they think they can get away with while still "thinking of the children." Getting lawmakers to pass laws destroying privacy is just too easy if you can make it about stopping child porn. 

This is literally just scanning for CSAM images, an extremely restricted dataset. It's hard to imagine what the hidden agenda for doing that might be. They don't need this excuse to do phone-side image fingerprints. And it's weird that everyone is so much more focused on the CSAM stuff rather than the ability for parents to have their kids' messages scanned by AI algorithms looking out for sexting. 

fultonm said:

I wish they would just scan iCloud like the other cloud providers. What an ass backwards way of saving server side processing cycles at the expense of privacy and device processing cycles, and Apples reputation in the toilet.

Apple goes to greater lengths than most vendors to ensure that they can't easily decrypt the stuff users upload. Generating these signatures given the unencrypted data is likely very quick and would be a barely perceptible use of your phone's battery power. Think of all the processing Google Photos does to your images to find similar faces or figure out that a set of photos can be made into a cute animated GIF. That's all done server side and it can only be done on decrypted images. Apple doesn't provide similar levels of capabilities because they don't have as ready access to the decryption keys. 

Indeed, a good number of the differences in how much Apple's cloud services can do for you versus Google and Alexa come down to the fact that Google and Amazon servers prioritize their ability to use their servers to process your data for their purposes.

Admittedly, none of them are as lax as Facebook at using and selling your data, but then Facebook makes crappy products even with all that data. Evil and incompetent yet still wildly profitable should be a weird combination, but I guess you find a lot of that outside of the tech world, so maybe it isn't. 

aderutter said:

I do think Apple should lock MacOS down to a single Apple provided Mac app-store, but they would likely need to reduce the commission to a much lower figure to appease the big developers and not hurt the platform. Then again, they could even maybe not take a commission at all just like they don’t charge for MacOS upgrades nowadays. 

That would be the death of the Mac as a viable alternative to PCs for all manner of things. Pros wouldn't use it anymore. I would probably have to abandon it as well. If nothing else, I run plenty of things that I get from Homebrew, to run in the Mac's Unix environment (something that is currently impossible on iPads). And, those apps, and many more, have access to pretty low level aspects of the computer. And I need that stuff. Why? Because I use my Mac as a general purpose computer for a large number of things that one uses a general purpose computer for. Whenever I use my iPad, it is abundantly clear that it is a far more limited device. And that's fine. I just do a heck of a lot less with it. 

Apple could disallow non Mac App Store apps by default, and force you to go through some hoops to use apps not downloaded from there, which would be fine. Forcing Mac App Store as the only means of running stuff on the Mac would be platform suicide. 

If you want an iPad, buy an iPad. It supports mice and trackpads well enough, with that support getting better with every iPadOS release. If you want a user experience limited by what is available on an Apple App Store, it works more than well enough. 

And if you want a device you can safely give a parent or friend who you can't trust not to be talked into downloading crap (even with hurdles in place), buy them an iPad. Or, give them a non administrative account that is locked down from being able to install apps not from the Mac App Store. Just be prepared to be their IT person if they need to fix something that requires administrative access.