mrstep

DAalseth said:

foregoneconclusion said:

DAalseth said: It can and will be used by governments to crack down on dissent. It’s not an if but a when. It will produce false positives, it’s not an if but a when. Apple’s privacy safeguards are a fig-leaf that will be ripped off by the first government that wants to.

Governments that want to crack down on dissent will still do so regardless of whether Apple has CSAM hash scanning or not. They have the money to hire programmers just like Apple does. 

There’s no reason to give them the keys to the castle. 

I swear you'd think Apple hired foregoneconclusion to cheerlead their anti-privacy tools.  Some part of "no, other companies aren't adding scanning on users devices"* and "it will expand and be abused" must not make sense.

Apple could scan people's files on the cloud side - it's what every other company does.  Pretending that adding scanning on-device is a massively brilliant privacy feature is just insanity.

* Companies like Facebook actually have done stuff like scanning your contacts, I don't remember hearing "it's all good, there have been hackers stealing contact information for a while, so ignore it".

It's totally surreal.

foregoneconclusion said:

tedz98 said: However the byproduct of this action- the scanning of content of people’s devices- will be disastrous. Now that governments know there is an ability for Apple to interrogate the content on people’s devices it won’t be long before governments require Apple to perform other types of content scanning on devices.

The origins of hash scanning began in the 1940s. It's too late to be worried about the implications for electronic search that involves hashes.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/hans-peter-luhn-and-the-birth-of-the-hashing-algorithm

Concentration camps were pioneered by the British during the Boer wars, so it's a little bit late to oppose them?  Murder and theft have always been around too, why bother making laws against them either?

Apple is adding client-side file scanning on customers devices - both with hashes (photos) and with ML matching (messages), and everyone's point is that it's almost certain that it will be abused. Once that 'protection' is added, governments will start the push for matching content on the device regardless of whether it's being uploaded to iCloud, and push to expand the definition to include political content, copyrighted content, and anything they want to control.  You have humble Apple defending this idea, rights groups, governments, technical experts, and regular people questioning it.  It shifts the definition of "privacy" to include searching your content on your own device when there's no warrant and no reasonable suspicion.

That cloud-side content has been scanned for a while is well known, even if it seems like a questionable practice as well.  If you put something in a bank vault, it typically at least takes a search warrant to get that opened.  If a bank decided it was going to install cameras in your home - but would only use the cameras to inspect items you were going to bring to their vault, pinky promise that it wouldn't be abused! - most people would see that as overreach.

Others would explain that cameras aren't a new technology and that it's too late to worry about the implications of how they're used. 🤦‍♂️

Loses SharePlay but gains Big Brother.

newisneverenough said:

Apple is becoming pathetic in their deafness to criticism. This not a feature. It’s an invasion of privacy and the the ´back door’ they said they wouldn’t build. I don’t buy their devices to become a part of the surveillance state. Get out the h*** out of my data, Apple. Serve the customer. iCloud is supposed to helpfully sync across devices and helpfully provide off device storage. Now, suddenly they are proud to announce that it’s become a tool for surveillance. 

They can repeat their message of “but it’s the good kind of surveillance” as often as they want, it’s still uninvited surveillance running on your own device.  They can also keep saying that it will never expand or be abused - the history of this industry says otherwise.  Total hubris, totally tone deaf, and totally doubling down on it.