Call me crazy, but I don’t think corporations should be in the business of scanning everyone’s private data on behalf of “the authorities”.
Too many ways it can go very wrong.
Agreed. Children have been exploited for much longer than there has been photography, much less iPhones.
Also, I feel like there’s probably not much of that on apples servers… Like wouldn’t that mind if cloud network be the last place you’d want to put illegal pictures? If I was trying to hide some felony pics or data I wouldn’t be trusting a large corporations cloud services.
This title is misleading click bait for an article advocating for intrusive data scanning, which by the way, cannot be completely automated.
Here’s a snippet of the iCloud TOS which specifically forbids CSA on iCloud.
You agree that you will NOT use the Service to:
a. upload, download, post, email, transmit, store, share, import or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harassing, threatening, harmful, tortious, defamatory, libelous, abusive, violent, obscene, vulgar, invasive of another’s privacy…
Further down, the same TOS specifically calls out that such content may be identified or removed by Apple
Again, not defending Apple, but I’d rather not have them or an army of underpaid contractors search through people’s pictures as a type of corporate law enforcement, because “think of the children”. This is a systemic problem which can be addressed without invading EVERYONE’s privacy
Remove locks from all your houses. Locks allow child abuse to go on without being reported.
Why stop there? Walls allow kids to be hurt too. Why not mandate that every human, at their own expense, provides 100% video coverage of their property at all times, on penalty of automatic child endangerment charges.
And obviously monitoring that isn’t free, so we’ll send you the bill shortly.
No, people don’t want this. To be clear, I AM NOT saying that people don’t want the end to CSAM. I would say most people want that. What I am saying is that people don’t want someone to spy on your data to stop it. Spying on everyone to catch the few sickos out their is not cool. Apple protects privacy, and that’s what I want.
Apple “protects privacy”***************
Illegal drugs are transported on the interstate. The department of transportation should be held accountable for not searching every vehicle.
Heat Initiative is launching a multi-million dollar campaign in which it presses Apple on this issue.
I can’t help but wonder which generous benefactors are providing Heat these multi-millions of dollars in order to pressure apple into compromising privacy?
Are a few million dollars productive against a trillion dollar company?
It’s not a trillion dollar company they’re looking to spend a few million dollars against, just their stance on your privacy.
child safety advocacy group Heat Initiative wants corrupt governments to be able to scan your personal device for: evidence of sexual orientation, firearms ownership, anti-government speech, political affiliation, messages from any sort of sexual affair, oh yes, and CSAM.
Please think of the children! lol.
This is a great opportunity to identify the group of people and organization that advocate for the government to scan your private data, a violation to your privacy and rights.
It is very obvious they have very limited wisdom or are acting solely to serve a certain party interest i.e, the authority that wants your data without any hassle.
Another possibility is they are a complete retarded. For anyone that interested,
- Christian Brothers Investment
- Degroof Petercam, a Belgian investment firm
Christian Brothers Investment Services describes itself as a “Catholic, socially responsible investment management firm.” The proposal is believed to play a role in Heat Initiative’s advertising campaign as well. Simultaneously, the New York Times is also now reporting that Degroof Petercam, a Belgian investment firm, will also back the resolution.
Maybe it is time to research into these two entities.
If that is true provide the evidence to the FBI and they’ll arrest People. That isn’t what is done because they have no evidence and breaking encryption is the real goal.
Dang here we go again
All big tech analyzes our data. I rather they not analyze anything but since we’ll never see that day, they can at least use their privacy invasion power for good.
The thing is that while many companies have access to your data in various services, Apple has designed their systems such that they can’t access most user data. Can’t be both ways, your data is either private or not, and many would prefer it stay private.
As I understand the actual situation with iCloud and CSAM scanning is Apple does scan iCloud photos (the ones that users choose to upload to iCloud) if they can. A few years ago they tried to design a privacy focused version of that scanning that would allow them to access that kind of content for the purposes of reporting it, while preserving the users privacy. It was supposed to happen on device(while most companies only scan the photos on their servers) before the photos were uploaded, and use hashes to compare user photos to known CSAM material. This seemed an odd thing at the time, but a while after that Apple released end to end encryption for iCloud Photos, which means they can’t scan the uploaded photos anymore because they don’t have that access. Some have a theory that the big tech companies have regular contact with various government/law enforcement/etc. agencies and the on device scanning was a negotiated by them as a response to Apple’s plans to add E2E encryption to iCloud Photos, among other previously less secure services.
Some nits: Apple could access many classes of data stored on iCloud by default (including any photos), even now, but you can make almost every class end to end encrypted now if you explicitly chose to. Previously, and by default now, it’s Apple policy and internal controls over the keys your data is encrypted with that protect that data, not the encryption itself (though you can opt in to the encryption itself protecting you from Apple). From what I understand, Apple is only known to actually scan iCloud mailboxes regularly, with the on-device scanning having never been implemented. Outside of nits, considering the delay between the proposed scanning and offering of a wider E2EE program for iCloud, I doubt the two are actually related myself.
There’s also no way to validate that Apple’s E2EE operates as stated. They could have added a backdoor for themselves or “intelligence” agencies, and we have no way of knowing other than “trust us”. Even if the source code is ever leaked (or a backdoor exploited by hackers), it could be written with plausible deniability — in such a way that it could be interpreted as unintentional (a bug/error).
This is why you should never trust closed source code with your sensitive data, and encrypt it yourself using open source, widespread/trusted, audited tools before uploading it to someone else’s computer.
The FBI has complained publicly about iMessage encryption many times. I view that as a good sign.
This is exactly what Apple wanted to do and lots of people (myself included) were against that because it would involve Apple scanning data on your phone. Sure, it was only at the point to deciders to upload photos to the cloud, but still it was unacceptable to scan our phones for data that hasn’t been uploaded yet.
This is what end-to-end encryption is for. A properly designed system shouldn’t allow anyone but the user to see the data, not even those who created the system.
In your model you need to question who decides what “good” is. Protecting children is always the way they try to get public support, as it is seen as a universal good. Once the practices have been established, what else is “good” and who decides?
Suppression of political messages the company doesn’t agree with? Something that Verizon has done and T-Mobile seems to still being doing in SMS. How about scanning for copy-written material? I can see it now, a 5th grader getting a summons for a picture of a painting they used in a book report. How about parents getting flagged for taking picture of their babies? Or a woman who needs an abortion, but lives in a state where it’s not allowed… someone might thinks it’s “good” to stop that from happening and arrest her for trying.
Searching someone’s phone or storage is no different than searching through their home. We have protections against random and unwarranted searches for a reason.
Suppression of political messages the company doesn’t agree with?
Paywalled
