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A comment on Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources. Parent comment

Re:Apple's child protection features spark concern within it... by foobiekr on Thursday August 12, 2021 @11:16PM (#28164997)
To me the issue is that it makes no sense: if it's just scanning iCloud photos, ___why does this feature need to exist at all__?

Apple is saying this: "we need to scan your phone because we need to look for this material, and by the way, we're only scanning things _we've been scanning for years already_"

Basiclaly, everything else aside, in the current state of things, this feature makes no sense. They are not scanning anything they weren't scanning already (literally, everything on iCloud) so why did they bother?

A bunch of people are making speculative claims that Apple is doing this to enable encryption of data in iCloud, but there's no reason to believe that's true. Apple certainly hasn't mentioned it.

So .. why?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple's child protection features spark concern within it... by AnonC on Thursday August 12, 2021 @11:49PM (#28165208)
> A bunch of people are making speculative claims that Apple is doing this to enable encryption of data in iCloud, but there's no reason to believe that's true. Apple certainly hasn't mentioned it.

There is nothing surprising here. Apple never mentions things unless it’s ready for release or is just about to be released. It’s just how Apple works.

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Re:Apple's child protection features spark concern within it... by Ceiling on Friday August 13, 2021 @12:32AM (#28165476)
Here's my hope: E2E encryption. Maybe the government is throwing a fit about Apple harboring potential CP on its server if it's E2E encrypted, so apple says, "fine well review it prior to upload, and then E2E encrypt the upload itself"

I can hope, I guess...

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Re:Apple's child protection features spark concern within it... by spuz on Friday August 13, 2021 @03:26AM (#28166405)
> "we need to scan your phone because we need to look for this material, and by the way, we're only scanning things _we've been scanning for years already_"

As far as we know, Apple is not already using their decryption keys to decrypt images upload to iCloud and compare them with known images. That's according to this blog post that claims Apple make very few reports to the NCMEC:

https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Apple's child protection features spark concern within it... by browningstreet on Thursday August 12, 2021 @11:36PM (#28165100)
And, it’s absurdly defeat-able. Which means there’ll be an escalation. Whether in v2 or beyond, this will get worse / more intrusive.
[ Parent | on HN ]