Re:There’s a crack in the iPhone foundation and it could get...
by kmeisthax on Thursday August 12, 2021 @02:44PM
(#28159922)
Congress has already gone a few steps into your hypothetical. The EARN IT Act[0] proposed to ban E2E encryption based entirely on making companies criminally liable for any CSAM they can't scan for. While EARN IT wasn't passed, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple sees the writing on the wall and figured they'd get out ahead of things.
I also feel it's important to note that every major image host is doing the same thing Apple is doing, but server-side on unencrypted images. What Apple is planning to implement is, out of context, an improvement; in the same way that Google's FLoC is an improvement over ad tracking based on third-party cookies. Get a trusted client to cooperate in some smaller act of self-surveillance and we don't need the server to do full take.
That being said, I don't think we even need to rely on governments threatening Apple into doing surveillance. The scanning scheme relies on paying human moderators to basically look at CSAM all day and check if it's a valid match. Big tech moderation is already understaffed and overworked as is - so it's almost certain that the people involved will just forward everything as their sanity degrades. Apple will almost certainly wind up accidentally or unknowingly forwarding along bogus CSAM reports, no coercion required.
I also feel it's important to note that every major image host is doing the same thing Apple is doing, but server-side on unencrypted images. What Apple is planning to implement is, out of context, an improvement; in the same way that Google's FLoC is an improvement over ad tracking based on third-party cookies. Get a trusted client to cooperate in some smaller act of self-surveillance and we don't need the server to do full take.
That being said, I don't think we even need to rely on governments threatening Apple into doing surveillance. The scanning scheme relies on paying human moderators to basically look at CSAM all day and check if it's a valid match. Big tech moderation is already understaffed and overworked as is - so it's almost certain that the people involved will just forward everything as their sanity degrades. Apple will almost certainly wind up accidentally or unknowingly forwarding along bogus CSAM reports, no coercion required.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020