Today it's only geared toward iCloud and CSAM. How many lines of codes do you think it will take before it scans all your local pictures?
How hard do you think it will be for an authoritarian regime like China, that Apple bends over backwards to please, to start including other hashes that are not CSAM?
iCloud is opt-out. They can scan server-side like everyone does. Your device is your device, and it now contains, deeply embedded into it, the ability to perform actions that are not under your control and can silently report you directly to the authorities.
If you don't see a deep change there, I don't know what to say.
I live in a country that is getting more authoritarian by the day, where people are sent to prison (some for life) for criticizing the government, sometime just for chanting or printing a slogan.
This is the kind of crap that makes me extremely angry at Apple. Under the guise of something no-one can genuinely be against (think of the children!), they have now included a pretty generic snitch into your phone and made everyone accept it.
- You are running a closed source proprietary OS that you cannot verify is not already doing anything.
- This could theoretically already be weaponized (with the existing server-side implementation) by getting someone to download a file to a folder that iCloud automatically syncs from.
>iCloud is opt-out.
Yes, and that's how you opt out of this scanning. It's the same opt-out as before.
>Under the guise of something no-one can genuinely be against (think of the children!) they have now included a pretty generic snitch into your phone and made everyone accept it.
I dunno what to tell you. I think the system as designed is actually pretty smart[1] and more transparent than before.
If you used iCloud before, and you're putting photos up that'd be caught in a hash comparison, you've already got a snitch. Same with any other cloud storage, short of hosting your own.
[1] I reserve the right for actual bona-fide cryptographers to dissect it and set the record straight, mind you.
We actually had the anti terror department arrest a popular, left-leaning YouTube influencer for harassment while physically assaulting his mum (all on video).
That's something that is literally unprecedented in Hong Kong just 3 years ago.
There are without doubt enough privacy bogeymen to go around, trying to derail a valid argument over its use of the Chinese as the placeholder bogeyman detracts from the discussion pointlessly.
We're talking about China taking advantage of this integrated technology to increase control over its population through backdoors like these.
China already imposes that all data from Chinese users be located in China and readily accessible and mined by the authorities[1].
Apple is willing to bow to these regimes because it has substantial supply-chain interests there and it sells hundred of millions of devices. A boon to both Apple and the local government.
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
But still: Secondary. The main effect of even mentioning it is to deflect attention away from Apple.
And is it really unfathomable that the US government could use this sort of thing for evil? I mean, wind back the clock to something like the Red Scare. If they had iPhones back then, they totally would have pressured Apple to add hashes for communist imagery, and use that to persecute people (or worse).
(Before anyone brings this up: I do categorically reject the notion of "that was in the past; that couldn't happen today". If you truly believe that, I have a bridge you might be interested in purchasing...)
Apple has announced they'll be doing this check?
What exactly do you think is the same as before?
>The exact same outcome can happen regardless of whether it's done on or off device. iCloud has _always_ been a known vector for authorities to peek.
That's neither here, nor there. It's another thing to peak selectively with a warrant of sorts, than to (a) peak automatically in everybody, (b) with a false-positive-prone technique, especially since the mere accusation on a false match can be disastrous for a person, even if they eventually are proven innocent...
>That's neither here, nor there. It's another thing to peak selectively with a warrant of sorts, than to (a) peak automatically in everybody, (b) with a false-positive-prone technique, especially since the mere accusation on a false match can be disastrous for a person, even if they eventually are proven innocent...
I do not believe that iCloud CSAM server side matching ever required a warrant, and I'm not sure where you've gotten this idea. It quite literally is (a) peak automatically in everybody.
Regarding (b), with this way - thanks to them publishing details on it - there's more transparency than if it was done server side.
>especially since the mere accusation on a false match can be disastrous for a person
As noted elsewhere in this very thread, this can happen whether client or server side. It's not unique in any way, shape or form to what Apple is doing here.
The same checking when you synced things to iCloud. As has been repeated over and over again, this check happens for iCloud Photos. It's not running arbitrarily.
Your photos were compared before and they're being compared now... if you're using iCloud Photos.
Who said it's running "arbitrarily"? Who said it's not about iCloud Photos?
>Your photos were compared before and they're being compared now... if you're using iCloud Photos.
They weren't always compared, they started being compared a few years ago, and they moved to comparing them with a new scheme now.
Both are bad, and not the responsibility of a company selling phones - and also a bad precedent (now it's "think of the children", tomorrow "think of the country", then "think of those with wrong ideas", then "think how much money insurance companies can save" and what have you).
As for your suggestions to just "stop using iCloud Photos", how about we get to enjoy the features we bought our devices for, without stuff we didn't ask for and don't want?
Apple is not just a hardware company and there is no obligation for them to host offending contents on their servers - just as Dropbox, Google, and so on would maintain with theirs.
>As for your suggestions to just "stop using iCloud Photos", how about we get to enjoy the features we bought our devices for, without stuff we didn't ask for and don't want?
It's odd to say that a business shouldn't be allowed to police what's on their platform, given we're on a forum explicitly enabling entrepreneurs.
It's odd to say that a business should be allowed to police private user content, given we're on a forum with the name "Hacker" on it, built by ex-hackers, and with part of its member's interests heritage not in and "enabling enterpreneurs" but in hacking (in the MIT sense of yore).
What if the post office announced they were installing a man with a scanning machine in your home who would scan your letters before they left your house?
It's the same outcome. The same process. Just inside your house instead of out in the mail system. They're exactly the same, except somehow it's not.
If that scanning machine didn't reveal the contents of my mail, and then ensured that it wasn't able to be given out in-transit? Yeah, I'd potentially be fine with it - but I'll leave this answer as a hypothetical since it's all theory anyway.
The point here is that you're choosing to use the mail system and you're thus choosing to play by those rules. Given that these checks happen for iCloud you're effectively making the same agreement.
and deciding who gets reported to police based on their cultural views on nudity
And on a second note I think people are allowed to be freshly concerned at the idea of Apple scanning photo libraries given a government-provided hash list, even if it was already happening before now.
I'm just very tired of people (not necessarily you) spouting off as if the functionality is new. It dilutes an otherwise important conversation. So many of the threads on this site are just people privacy LARPing.
Even if the outcome is theoretically the same, the means are different and it feels different.
That is a totally bogus comparison.
The post office 100% does NOT can the content of every piece mail they handle.
Not even close to the same scenario as Apple/governments being able to continually and silently check your phone/photo library for images on their watch list.
I agree that data content scanning is more invasive than physical scanning. It was an intentionally simplistic example not meant to defend Apple.
I doubt the entire world has enough X-ray machines to scan even a vanishingly small percentage of the envelopes the postal service delivers every day.
If someone discovers a way to reliably generate adversarial images they can send such images to someone else to iSWAT them.
You could literally piggyback on the directories that Macs use to sync to iCloud Drive, get an image in there, and then it gets scanned by iCloud. This is not some new theoretical attack - and in fact, this would be the "hack" for the new one as well since it requires iCloud sync to trigger anyway.
Of course generating an adversarial image is not the final step, the hacker still need to place it in the victim's account somehow, but it's easier now because the image looks legit.
This is different. This is your own device doing that thing, out of your control. Alright sure, it's doing the same thing as the other server did and under the same circumstances* so maybe functionally nothing has changed. But the philosophical difference is quite huge between somebody else's server watching over what you upload and your own device doing it.
I'm struggling to come up with a good analogy. The closest I can really think of is the difference between a reasonably trusted work friend and your own family member reporting you to the authorities for suspicious behavior in your workplace and home respectively. The end result is the same, but I suspect few people would feel the same about those situations.
* There is no inherent limitation for your own device to only be able to check photos you upload to iCloud. There is however such a limitation for the iCloud servers. A very reasonably and potentially functional difference is the ability for this surveillance to be easily expanded beyond iCloud uploads in the future.
Now what's going to happen instead is the computer will report me to its real masters: corporations, governments. How is this acceptable in any way?
Far more likely Apple takes a bunch of hashes from a third party in the law enforcement side of things (ie cops) and trust that the third party is definitely giving them hashes to protect against the Very Bad Thing that Apple's customers are worried about.
Whereupon what you're actually trusting isn't Tim Cook, it's a cop. I'm told there are good cops. Maybe all this is done exclusively by good cops. For now.
Now, I don't know about the USA, but around here we don't let cops just snoop about in our stuff, on the off-chance that by doing so they might find kiddie porn. So it should be striking that apparently Apple expects you to be OK with that.
It _does_ make sense client side if you view it being done server side as a blocker for E2EE on iCloud. There is absolutely no world where Apple could implement that without keeping the ability to say "yes, we're blocking child porn".
Wasn’t yesterday’s version of this sorry about how Apple is implementing this as a client side service on iPhones?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
I don’t know if the implication there is “don’t use the stock Apple camera app and photo albums”, or “don’t store any images on yours Phone any more” if they are scanning files from other apps for perceptual hash matches as well…
Apple's explanation:
<quote> Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device matching process is performed for that image against the known CSAM hashes. This matching process is powered by a cryptographic technology called private set intersection, which determines if there is a match without revealing the result. The device creates a cryptographic safety voucher that encodes the match result along with additional encrypted data about the image. This voucher is uploaded to iCloud Photos along with the image.
Using another technology called threshold secret sharing, the system ensures the contents of the safety vouchers cannot be interpreted by Apple unless the iCloud Photos account crosses a threshold of known CSAM content. The threshold is set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and ensures less than a one in one trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account. </quote>
With the proviso that you have to trust the code they push onto your device actually does what they claim in the paper.
But it does, on the face of it, prevent the "cops adding the latest cop on black person murder viral image to the CSAM content hashes and easily seeing who has it on their device and when it showed up there" concern. They are at least going to need to add enough _other_ hashes to the list to get everybody with their target image over the threshold, then get it past whatever Apple has in place for their manual review and "visual derivatives". And surely that sort of abuse of the system would set off alarms instantly at Apple when a big list of hashes of images that are common enough to all push BLM activists and sympathisers over the CASM count threshold.
(I also wonder what those "visual derivatives" they get are, and how well they are going to work to filter out false positives, and how Apple are going to take care of whoever ends up doing that review work. While I have a fairly positive impression of the care and effort Apple put into ensuring my privacy, I have a somewhat less positive impression of how they treat outsourced or low-skill workers. I won't be _too_ surprised to hear the same sort of horror stories about both the work, and the management overseeing the workers that do this sort of job at Facebook... I can't imagine a worse job description than "review images to check if they are real child sexual abuse images", and doing that for minimum wage and no benefits with supervisors threatening to fire you if you take toilet breaks or miss your 150 images an hour targets - is sadly something I totally expect to read about in a year or two's time.)
>That’s very different from authorities taking a sneak peek into my stuff.
To be very blunt:
- The opt out of this is to not use iCloud Photos.
- If you _currently_ use iCloud Photos, your photos are _already_ hash compared.
- Thus the existing opt out is to... not use iCloud Photos.
The exact same outcome can happen regardless of whether it's done on or off device. iCloud has _always_ been a known vector for authorities to peek.
>I’m big Apple fanboy, but I’m not going to carry a snitch in my pocket.
If you use iCloud, you arguably already do.