Who do you think has 30 or more CSAM images on their phone?
But let's also be real about something else. Think of the Venn diagram of child abusers and people who share CSAM online. Those circles are not identical. Not everybody with CSAM is necessarily a child abuser. Worse, how many child abusers don't share CSAM online? Those can't ever be found by Apple-style invasions of privacy, so one has to wonder if we're being asked to give up significant privacy for a crime fighting strategy that may not even be all that effective.
The cynic in me is also wondering what fraction of people working at places like NCMEC are pedophiles. It'd be a rather convenient job for them. And after all, there's a long history of ostensibly child-serving institutions harboring the worst kind of offenders.
> a crime fighting strategy
Is it a crime fighting strategy? I thought it was just about not making their devices and services into aids for these crimes.
> The cynic in me is also wondering what fraction of people working at places like NCMEC are pedophiles.
Good question. What has that to do with this?
And how many children can really be helped in this way? Surely the majority of child abuse happens independently of the online sharing of CSAM.
And is that really worth the suspension of important civil rights? That is really what this discussion is about. Nobody is arguing against fighting child abuse, the question is about how, and about what means can be justified.
Does it? I see no reason to assume that.
> And is that really worth the suspension of important civil rights?
No civil rights are being suspended. It’s not about that at all.
CSAM scanning is sold as beneficial, while in reality it won't do shit while it opens dangerous precedence backdoors!
They're not going to find predators, all they are going to find is people incompetent enough to have years old (otherwise how would it end up at NCMEC?) CSAM on their iPhones and dumb enough to have iCloud backup turned on. To catch actual predators they would need to run AI scanning on phones for all photos and risk a lot of false positives by parents taking photos of their children on a beach.
Plus a load of people who will inadvertently have stuff that "looks" like CSAM on their devices because some 4chan trolls will inevitably create colliding material and spread it in ads etc. so it ends up downloaded in browser caches.
All of this "let's use technology to counter pedos" is utter, utter crap that is not going to save one single child and will only serve to tear down our freedoms, one law at a time. Want to fight against pedos? Make photos of your airbnb, hotel and motel rooms to help identify abuse recording locations and timeframes, and teach children from an early age about their bodies, sexuality and consent so that they actually have the words to tell you that they are being molested.