While some folks have legitimate concerns about any scanning, the majority of pushback isn't about the fact that scanning is occurring. It's about the fact that the scanning occurs locally on your device, which is meaningfully different, and rightly raises a million and one concerns about the future of such a feature.

The pushback is about the continued erosion of boundaries between what is "mine" and what is in Apple's purview.

Questions/criticisms about security theater aside, this is the difference between the TSA looking in my bags when I get to the airport vs. the TSA having the ability to look in all of my suitcases while I'm still at home.

One might immediately respond "but they can only look when you intend to take that bag directly to the airport to fly", to which I say "it's really fucking creepy that they can look in my bag while it's still sitting in my living room".

This is not equivalent to existing server-side scanning.

I hate analogies, but this one is spot on.

But it’s not “scanning” on your device. It’s uploading a hash at the same time as the photo, and the server then does additional work to determine if it’s a match or not.

Scanning implies you’re going over all my files with some frequency and then acting upon some violation. Here the system is designed so the device doesn’t know when the server has found a match or not.

> It’s uploading a hash

And where did that hash come from?

Your device computed it during the upload process.

And that computation is something that did not exist prior to the introduction of this feature, nor is that computation useful for anything other than the operation of this feature.

You can split hairs over terminology and call this "scanning" or "analysis" or "inspection", but the end result is the same. Your device is now computing information with the sole intent of using that information to make a judgement about the content you're uploading and about you/your account.

Without that "scan/inspection/analysis", the server-side process can't do anything on its own.

It could do all the same stuff because it’s getting the unencrypted photo currently. So it seems therefore that this is being done to allow for full encryption or to have that database of hashes more restricted by how they’re slowly distributed. Why else?

I don’t think it’s splitting hairs — semantics matter. Scanning your system for illegal stuff has a very different connotation, and if you read the comments on HN, even in this more technical audience there’s a lot of confusion and incorrect understanding. People are still thinking this is being implemented outside of iCloud photos, for instance. Go read all the browse cache worries in comments.

> Scanning your system for illegal stuff has a very different connotation

And yet, when you examine the end-to-end system, this is exactly what they're doing.

If I have a long, flexible piece of wood that's capable of bending, and a very strong string, and a dowel rod, feathers, and a sharp piece of metal, I can claim that "I just have a flexible piece of wood" or "I just have feather".

But if what I really possess is an unassembled bow, and upon assembly I can use it to fire arrows, suddenly I have a weapon. It would be disingenuous to claim that the individual parts I have are all harmless when their sole intent is to be used in combination in a manner that can inflict harm or death.

> So it seems therefore that this is being done to allow for full encryption

And to what end? What value would such a feature provide when the first end has been compromised?

I'm not sure what you mean by an unassembled bow here, or more specifically, what the bow is that you're referring to. People have worries that this could lead everything from to identifying dissidents that might be in possession of specific photos to identifying copyrighted materials on your device whether they were going to iCloud or not.

The construction of the system negates both of these things. It matters if it's tied to iCloud or not. Otherwise it is 'scanning' your system, which in this case, isn't something that is actually built anymore than it could be built at any time. It's not like Apple can't build whatever software/hardware it wants or needs. This was just as true before as it is now.

To me the bigger issue is the worry about what hashes will it be... will that expand past the intersection of two CP databases. Maybe? Maybe not? But that risk was the same before (or even worse since it could have been done fully in secret and targeted to specific individuals or regions) on a pure server-side solution. All this work isn't being done just to save some CPU cycles in Apple datacenter.

>And to what end? What value would such a feature provide when the first end has been compromised?

I don't understand your question, and I don't fully understand your compromised position. If the concern is finding all kinds of bad things on your phone independent of this CP thing, that always could have been the case and what was built isn't enough for that (it's hashes not classifiers, the db is distributed to the entire world and verifiable that its the same on all devices, you could always see the network traffic despite turning off iCloud services, etc).

> I'm not sure what you mean by an unassembled bow here, or more specifically, what the bow is that you're referring to.

Throughout your responses, you've downplayed the nature of the on-device "scanner/analyzer/whatever" and have seemingly implied that because that one component is pretty innocuous on its own, it shouldn't be a big deal.

"The bow" here is the end-to-end solution Apple is implementing. The point I'm trying to make is that the on-device component must be judged based on how it interacts with the whole system and should not be downplayed just because it appears innocuous in isolation.

> I don't understand your question, and I don't fully understand your compromised position.

Generally speaking, E2E encryption means that the owner of the data holds the keys and nothing else can read that data except for the owner.

In the system we're discussing, any subsequent application of "E2E" encryption would be meaningless, because Apple stands between you (the first "E") and their servers (the second "E").

> It's about the fact that the scanning occurs locally on your device, which is meaningfully different

Yeah it IS different, most people feel much better about things that happen on device.

Since this only happens for photos on their way to iCloud, in your analogy it would be like searching the bags when you put them in the cab to go to the airport.

Furthermore, it would be like TSA had a machine that could search your bags for guns, without any human even seeing an x-ray of them. Plus the machine would need 30 gun alerts before it takes any action at all.

I don't know about you but I would not have any issues whatsoever with that.

> Since this only happens for photos on their way to iCloud, in your analogy it would be like searching the bags when you put them in the cab to go to the airport.

I think this would be more like if the TSA installed scanners in everybody's houses that scan everything as you put it in your suitcase. Yeah, it only scans things on the way to the airport, but the scanners are in my house. I don't want them there. My house is my domain.

It's the same way with my phone. I don't want the government/Apple evil detector running on my phone. I know that a false positive is unlikely and I know that Apple and the government have made very clear they will only look for Real Evil. I still don't want the scanners on my phone.

> most people feel much better about things that happen on device

This indicates you may be misunderstanding why people generally feel better about things happening on device.

Apple's own tagline "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." includes a very strong hint. That hint is:

> Stays on your iPhone

Nothing about the features we're discussing here stay on your iPhone. Doing something locally is no longer meaningful if the express intent of doing that thing is to phone home when certain conditions are met.

Do you want to bet?

Even more funny, as Apple's method of scanning the photos you upload to it's online server is much more private than Google or Facebook's method.

Apple can't see the results of the scans until a threshold of 30 matches is reported by your device. To protect against false positives, Apple's servers have no idea a single match has occurred until you cross that threshold.

Google and Facebook see the results of each individual CSAM scan performed on their server and retain that data where it's open to misuse by anyone who can issue a subpoena.

We've seen Google's data horde about everyone lead to abuse before.

>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

Right - but without getting into the merits of apple's approach - what is the support for this claim that apple has worse reputation here than facebook etc?

I see the links to EFF groups which have (repeatedly) gone crazy over this. But the broader public? Are we even clear that the public doesn't like the new features (snitching on porn going to kids / CSAM detection)?

These types of things tend to be pretty politically popular. In other words, if govt does get involved - will it actually block apple from blocking porn sent to children to help prevent apple from "destroying" their users trust? How does that even work politically?

I get the HN crowd is majorly against this in aggregate - but that is not the general public (and obviously not all HN folks are making the kinds of claims we are seeing get upvoted here - destroyed all trust, committing felonies etc).

IMO, the degree of violation has a lot to do with the history of each of these companies up to today.

Drawing a somewhat crude analogy, if a person is a serial cheater in their relationships, and they are known for such cheating, and they don't really claim to be anything but a cheater, it doesn't really surprise anyone when they cheat.

If someone agrees to be in a relationship with such a person with the full knowledge that they tend to cheat, that person cheats, no one is very surprised.

On the other hand, if someone is known as "generally a standup individual", and they're generally seen as trustworthy, reliable and faithful, and someone starts a relationship with that person, the degree of betrayal when that "trustworthy" person cheats is much greater than the betrayal of the serial cheater.

Basically, Google/Facebook haven't built their business on claiming to care about privacy. Apple has. Even if Apple does exactly the same things that Google/Facebook are doing, it's a greater betrayal.

Interesting - the sales numbers for the new iphone will test these claims very concretely indeed given this massive betrayal!

Either they will flop as people reject apple for this betrayal, or they may be amazing if it turns out these claims of worse than google and facebook are totally false.

You seem to have concluded that sales numbers somehow change the nature of what Apple is doing here.

Good sales numbers would be a strong signal that users don't care (or don't understand). This doesn't change the fundamental issues with these changes.

We are getting lots of claims that apple has "destroyed" it's reputation. Other comments say that apple has "destroyed" is brand.

This is a very significant set of claims, because apple's brand is KEY to what apple offers, what they charge, and what they sell.

In other words - $X in parts cost $Y with the apple brand on it - because of users trust in apple.

This is why brand surveys are done. You can see that brands (alone) make a huge difference in pricing / sales power vs basic functionality (sometimes ridiculously so in things like handbags).

You are making my point for me. It is possible - very possible - that despite the outrage on HN at these efforts around child porn, the demands that govt criminally prosecute apple etc, that in actual fact users may not care or may LIKE these types of features, and that similarly, govt may not prosecute apple for the supposedly felonies they are committing but will LIKE what they are doing here and thank them for it.

In the end apple may not have "destroyed" users trust so that they are seen as worse than facebook (!!) but may continue to be trusted (at least as much as facebook - which is NOT AT ALL), and be able to sell products at a premium etc.

When you say Apple is worse than facebook - that is a VERY strong claim. Do folks on HN not understand this? When folks claim apple is committing felonies those are strong claims. So you need some strong evidence.

Apple is a business - they may decide they want to take an anti-child porn stance. Is this bad for business? We will see. They will make the argument I'm sure that they will continue to do privacy as well - but the balance there is different than what HN wants, but may be fine by users.

It just gets a bit tiring hearing that apple is destroyed (which comes up in lots of ways) when my own read is they are long way from being destroyed.

Consumers happily spend money on

- Cigarettes

- Gambling

- Loot boxes (more gambling)

- Micro transactions like gems

- Unproven miracle cures

The existence of a market and the purchaser's willingness/happiness with the product do not confer value judgements onto the products they're purchasing.

You seem to be arguing that consumer sentiment trumps all, and that if customers are still buying, then everything must be ok.

> Is this bad for business? We will see.

We will see, but this is not the most important metric to track. Half of the people I know won't even comprehend the change, and even fewer will understand the farther reaching consequences if we do indeed slip down the slippery slope that everyone worries about.

If at the end of the day, we're at the very bottom of that slope, and dissidents are getting arrested pre-emptively for views that don't align with their governments, no one will care that "Apple users were still happy to buy the phone".

You must evaluate these kinds of solutions / policies on their merits (and downsides), not solely on their popularity.

In a world where every consumer is well educated and can understand the nuances of this change, then I'd be more open to your position. Since we don't live in that world, I stand by the comments above.