Rather than reassuring me, this sounds like an achievable set of steps for an abuser to carry out.
There’s a repository built from seized child porn.
Those pictures and videos have hashes. Apple wants to match against those hashes.
That’s it.
That’s it for now.
I don't know how most people feel about this, but even a false positive would seem hazardous. Does that put you on some permanent watch list in the lowest tier? How can you even know? And besides, it's all automated.
We could of course massively shift society towards a no-photo/video policy for our kids (perhaps only kept on a non-internet connected camera and hard drive), and tell grandma to just deal with it (come back after the lockdown granny, if you survive). Some people do.
And don't think that normal family photos won't get classified as CEI. What is titillating for one is another's harmless family photo.
Previous times down this slope:
* UK internet filters for child porn -> opt out filters for regular porn (ISPs now have a list of porn viewers) + mandatory filters for copyright infringment
* Google drive filters for illegal content -> Google driver filters for copyrighted content
* iCloud data is totally protected so it's ok to require an apple account -> iCloud in China run by government controlled data centers without encryption
* Protection against malware is important so Windows defender is mandatory unless you have a third party program -> Windows Defender deletes DeCSS
* Need to protect users against malware, so mobile devices are set up as walled gardens -> Providers use these walled gardens to prevent business models that are bad for them
That was the first sin of the internet era.
Discussing slippery slopes does nothing.
Edit: It is frustrating to see where we are going. However - conversations on HN tend to focus on the false positives, and not too much on the actual villains who are doing unspeakable things.
Perhaps people need to hear stories from case workers or people actually dealing with the other side of the coin to better make a call on where the line should be drawn.
My problem is that these lists have already been used for retaliation against valid criticism. Scope creep is real, and in case of this particular list, adding an item is an explicit, global accusation of the creator and/or distributor for being a child molester.
I also wrote some less commonly voiced thoughts yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28071872
But just to highlight one aspect, the list of maintained hashes has a known, non-negligible fraction of false positives.
> That’s it for now.
If this is an attempt at "first they came...", we're not biting.
My statement was to clarify incorrect statements of the issue. Someone was worried about incorrect DoBs entered by jilted lovers would get people flagged.
I just outlined what the actual process is. I feel that discussing the actual problem leads to better solutions and discussions.
Since this topic attracts strong viewpoints, I was as brief as possible to reduce any potential target area, and even left a line supporting the slippery slope argument.
If this was not conveyed, please let me know.
Matter of fact, your response pointing out the false positive issues is a win in my book! Its better than what the parent discussion was about.
But what I am truly perplexed by, is when you talk about "firs they came..." and "we're not biting".
Who is we, and why wouldn't YOU agree with a position supporting a slippery slope argument?
You seem to disagree with the actions being telegraphed by Apple.
Could you clarify what you mean?
Trying to frame the question along the usual slippery slope arguments implicitly sets up anyone critisicing the mechanism as a supporter of fundamentally objectionable content.
This thread however was where I was making a separate point that helps this discussion by removing confusion or assumptions on how Apple’s proposal works.
Perhaps you may have misread what I was saying ?
Your original post posited a reasonable question, but I felt the details were somewhat muddled. The reason I reacted and answered was that I have seen this style of questioning elsewhere before. The way you finished off was actually a little alarming: it'd be really easy to drop in with a followup that in turn would look like the other person was trying to defend the indefensible.
With my original reply I attempted to defuse that potential. The issue is incendiary enough without people willingly misunderstanding each other.
To do a factory reset or otherwise get it back into a state where the spyware the abuser installed is not present, the manufacturer requires the authorization of the abuser. If you can't root your own device then you can't e.g. spoof the spyware and have it report what you want it to report instead of what you're actually doing.
Apple should be ashamed. I see this as Apple paying the tax of doing business in many of the worlds most lucrative markets. Apple has developed this feature to gain access to markets that require this level of surveillance if their citizens.
Consider Sally sending a picture of a bee that Apple’s algo determines with 100% confidence is a breast while Tom sits in another room. One could iterate ad infinitum.
Well, as a parent, I can tell you that some 16/17 year olds are responsible and worthy of the trust that comes with full independence. Others have more social/mental maturing to do yet and need some extra guidance. That's just how it goes.
Register your kids with a corporate behemoth! Why not!? Get them hooked on Apple right from childhood, get their entire life in iCloud, and see if they'll ever break out of the walled garden.
This is an argument for me to not start using iCloud keychain. If Apple flags my account, I don't want to lose access to literally all my other accounts.
Also, a father would only land in a national registry of their child’s photos are known to be CSAM. Simply taking a photo of your child wouldn’t trigger it.
The most annoying thing about Apple Family sharing is that in order to create accounts for people you must specify that they are under 13 (source: https://www.apple.com/lae/family-sharing) - otherwise the only other option is for your "family member" to link their account to the Apple Family which is under your purview, which understandably many people might be hesitant to do because of privacy concerns (as opposed to logging into the child account on a Windows computer exclusively to listen to Apple Music - which doesn't tie the entire machine to that Apple ID as long as it's not a mac).
And so in my case, I have zero actual family members in my Apple Family (they're more interested in my Netflix family account). It begs the question, why does Apple insist on having people be family members in order to share Apple Music? We have five slots to share, and they get our money either way. They also don't let you remove family members - which may be the original intent for insisting on such a ridiculous thing - as if they're trying to take the moral high ground and guilt trip us for disowning a family member when in fact it simply benefits them when a fallout occurs between non-family members, because there's a good chance that the person in question will stop using the service due to privacy concerns, and that's less traffic for Apple.
It's actually kind of humorous to think that I still have my ex-ex-ex-girlfriend in my Apple Family account, and according to Apple she's 11 now (in reality, she's in her 30s). I can't remove her until another 7 years pass (and even then it’s questionable if they’ll allow it, because they might insist that I can’t divorce my “children”). And honestly, at this point I wouldn’t even remove her if I could, she has a newborn baby and a partner now, and I’m happy to provide that account, and I still have two unused slots to give away. I’ve never been the type of person who has a lot of friends, I have a few friends, and one girlfriend at a time. But the thing is she’s never been a music person and I assume that she isn’t even using it - and so even if I made a new best friend or two and reached out to her to let her know that I wanted to add them, Apple currently wouldn’t let me remove her to make room for those theoretical friends. While I'm a big fan of Apple hardware, it really bothers me that a group of sleazy people sat around a table trying to figure out how to maximize income and minimize network traffic, and this is what they came up with.
I'm confused, how am I trying to get them to provide anything for free? I pay for the service, and that service has a limited number of account slots, and the people using those slots have their own devices. What am I missing?
Are you under the assumption that child accounts don't occupy a slot, and are free-riding? If so, that's not the case. Child accounts occupy a slot all the same, the only difference is that by providing child accounts to my adult friends, they aren't required to link their existing Apple accounts to the service that's under my control.
That's not how it works, unless you control your partner's Apple ID and you lie about their DOB when you create their account.
I created my kids Apple IDs when they were minors and enrolled them in Family Sharing. They are now both over 18 and I cannot just designate them as minors. Apple automatically removed my ability to control any aspects of their phones when they turned 18.
> Dads' photos of their kids landing them on a national kiddie porn watch list.
Indeed, false positives is much more worrying. The idea that my phone is spying on my pictures... like, what the hell.