Apple kills plans to scan for CSAM in iCloud

Re:Apple kills plans to scan for CSAM in iCloud by Valakas_ on Thursday December 08, 2022 @08:04AM (#33907431)

I think the issue here is that CSAM is and often was used as an excuse for invasive privacy breaking measures. Nobody can "not" think of the children, so whenever someone would argue against a measure, all they can say back is "so you don't care about children then?"

And people start getting tired of this serious issue being used, not because the people who want these measures passed care, but because of whatever agenda those people are actually interested.

It is precisely because it is so severe, that it is difficult to say no to measures in favor of it. But that same fact, is abused by people with bad intentions.

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Re:Apple kills plans to scan for CSAM in iCloud by strogonoff on Thursday December 08, 2022 @11:02PM (#33917274)

I have no desire to promote privacy invasive measures, but like the comment that started the thread: we have to acknowledge the horrible epidemic of this abuse and that the measures proposed would have been effective against it. We should be mindful that detecting and, upon human review (can’t believe how much disinformation was spread on this front), reporting CSAM would have been a good thing if it was entirely side-effect free.

However, we (as a crowd) have decided that those side-effects would be even worse than CSA itself. And perhaps we were right, but it should weigh on our consciences as we were the utilitarianist arbiters that decided individual suffering was not significant enough, and we should not rest as if we’ve “won” because a big problem (to solve which Apple seemed even willing to put its reputation on the line) remains unsolved.

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