bharper

foregoneconclusion said:

beowulfschmidt said: As I recall, one of the major bones of contention was that the system was going to scan photos destined for iClound, but not yet actually there, and was using resources on the user's phone itself, and not using iCloud resources, to do the actual scanning.  There were also, if I remember correctly, concerns about mistakes, as happened with some Google attempt to do the same thing flagging a file with a single character in it as problematic and locking an account.

It was a controversy that didn't really make much sense. The files that would be scanned were the same regardless of whether the scan happened in the cloud or on the phone itself. The user would choose whether or not to use iCloud for file backup. If they did choose to do so they would have to agree to Apple's terms for iCloud (which always include file scanning) and then choose which applications would have files backed up. Only the files from the applications that the user chose to use with iCloud would be scanned. So there's no actual difference to the files being scanned on the phone or in the cloud. Nothing would change in terms of what files were being scanned. 

I agree, this was impossible to talk about because Apple did a terrible job announcing it. It wasn't clear that this was only for iCloud-bound pictures, ONLY pictures that Apple would store on their servers. By the time they clarified that, it was too late and "Apple will scan photos on your phone and report you" was the only thing people heard.

There was some interesting technology behind it, and it would have likely been the first widespread use of fully homomorphic encryption (the ability to run operations on data without decrypting it first). They came up with a whole host of techniques like private set intersection that would have provided security guarantees in the cloud (Apple wouldn't have the ability to view your photos without meeting a threshold of positives). And even people who understood the technology compared it against some non-existent ideal system that doesn't exist, instead of viewing this as an improvement to the current "cloud provider can see 100% of the pictures you send them" system.

I actually lost some respect for the EFF during this whole episode. I still think they generally do good advocacy, but in this instance they totally failed to evaluate the proposal honestly.