Child safety group Heat Initiative plans to launch a campaign pressing Apple on child sexual abuse material scanning and user reporting. The company issued a rare, detailed response on Thursday.
The CSAM database isn’t controlled by Apple. It’s already in use practically everywhere. Apple tried to compromise between allowing private encrypted image storage at scale and making sure they aren’t a hot bed for CSAM. Their competitors just keep it unencrypted and scan it for content, which last time I checked is worse 🤷♂️
It’s not very useful for much else. It only find known copies of existing CSAM. It doesn’t detect new ones. Governments could already force Apple to do whatever they want, so it’s a keep to say this is going to do much more.
You go way out of your way to lick Apples boot here. With comparing hashes to whatever Apple wants/is told to, you can profile everyone, find leaked material the gov doesnt want you to have and so on. The fact that people just accept it, or endorse it is beyond me, but again, after the last 3 years I came to the conclusion that most people are scared to be free.
While scanning for leaked government documents is the first thing I’ve heard that could be a problem for whistleblowers, I’ll point out this scanning tech is already in use in major cloud platforms and no government has forced anyone to do it. Having a database of all government documents like that wouldn’t be trivial to put together either. It’s just not practical to be used that way.
I don’t care that it was Apple who did this, it presents a legitimate answer to E2E encryption of data while cutting many government arguments off at the legs. Without an answer we are closer to E2E being made illegal then we are nothing happening.
Yes, thats why I dont use cloud and have a degoogled android. The problem is that this is a slippery slope. I can say I dont mind because it doesnt affect me, but step by step they outlaw anything else, even custom roms and alternative app stores. Either people are against it, or this will get much worse down the line.
I don’t think it’s a slippery slope. That ship set sailed when we started putting our data on other people’s computers. Your situation is extremely niche, not many are going to go through that effort.
The CSAM database isn’t controlled by Apple. It’s already in use practically everywhere. Apple tried to compromise between allowing private encrypted image storage at scale and making sure they aren’t a hot bed for CSAM. Their competitors just keep it unencrypted and scan it for content, which last time I checked is worse 🤷♂️
But Apple still fetches that list of hashes and can be made to send an alternative list to scan for
It’s not very useful for much else. It only find known copies of existing CSAM. It doesn’t detect new ones. Governments could already force Apple to do whatever they want, so it’s a keep to say this is going to do much more.
You go way out of your way to lick Apples boot here. With comparing hashes to whatever Apple wants/is told to, you can profile everyone, find leaked material the gov doesnt want you to have and so on. The fact that people just accept it, or endorse it is beyond me, but again, after the last 3 years I came to the conclusion that most people are scared to be free.
While scanning for leaked government documents is the first thing I’ve heard that could be a problem for whistleblowers, I’ll point out this scanning tech is already in use in major cloud platforms and no government has forced anyone to do it. Having a database of all government documents like that wouldn’t be trivial to put together either. It’s just not practical to be used that way.
I don’t care that it was Apple who did this, it presents a legitimate answer to E2E encryption of data while cutting many government arguments off at the legs. Without an answer we are closer to E2E being made illegal then we are nothing happening.
Yes, thats why I dont use cloud and have a degoogled android. The problem is that this is a slippery slope. I can say I dont mind because it doesnt affect me, but step by step they outlaw anything else, even custom roms and alternative app stores. Either people are against it, or this will get much worse down the line.
I don’t think it’s a slippery slope. That ship set sailed when we started putting our data on other people’s computers. Your situation is extremely niche, not many are going to go through that effort.