And once they've normalized "your computer will spy and inform on you", is there any reason to think that won't expand to things which aren't colloquially "computers" but in fact are now computers?
What about "smart houses"? All your IoT toys are computers. Once phones, laptops and PCs as mandatory reporters has been normalized, is there any reason to think all the other microphones and cameras already in people's houses won't become mandatory reporters too? If they make it illegal to disable client-side scanning on computers, might they also make it illegal to remove the crime-detecting cameras in your own home?
Modern cars already narc on people, logging and uploading GPS traces that can be fed into police dragnets, just like phones. Cops can ask for a log of who's been inside a 'geofence' and where does that data come from? Phones and cars reporting on their owners, generally without their owners knowing anything about it. The 'slippery slope' isn't actually a fallacy if you have enough datapoints to legitimately draw a trend line. And I think we certainly do.
> We presented participants with a reminder of death and a critique of their in-group ostensibly written by a member of an out-group, then experimentally decreased both avowed belief in God and out-group derogation by downregulating pMFC activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation. The results provide the first evidence that group prejudice and religious belief are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, and point to a shared cognitive mechanism underlying concrete and abstract decision processes.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26341901/
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151014084955.h...
Cars logging their location history and police getting that data: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/04/01/these...
Geofenced dragnets: https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/05/geofence-warrants-and-t...
Eerie, isn't it?
Also what if some hackers put something on my phone to intentionally trigger this in order to blackmail me or ruin my reputation?
This is the thinking behind NSA's 'Nobody But Us' saying. If you hoard 0day, assume someone else will discover it given enough time.
Yet we have learned nothing from KGB, STASI, CIA etc.
> Also what if some hackers put something on my phone to intentionally trigger this
"We just found 5 gramms of Mary jane in your pocket".
Religion will come back. "Repent or god will punish you" /s
I think this is the case, except it’s a feature not a bug. The predictable characters will shoehorn in the concern angle[1].
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocal...
So they move the scanning to the device.
It honestly seems to me like they thought they could negotiate a middle ground without pissing off the Feds or the customers, but they maneuvered it quite badly.
Oh cool, didn't know that. It's this new "advanced data protection" feature that makes everything in iCloud e2ee except the classic mail/contacts/calendars combo that wouldn't really work with that. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 is a nice resource on this, and I wish more companies would publish things like this.
I'm a bit too chickenshit to try it, as losing my devices is all too likely, but I'm glad it's available for those who need it.
Not capable of what, running software? Communicating with a HTTPS endpoint? Having library code? Running stuff in the manufacturer's interest rather than your interest? All those things happen already in some form or other, and there isn't a cutoff to make the phone incapable of it without hobbling the phone.
> "That's one big step closer to the described full-private scanning (and just a flag flip away)."
iPhone already does scan offline private photos for face and object recognition purposes. And run big blobs of unknown Apple-provided code. It's only your trust in Apple that makes you think it doesn't report anything back now - and nothing at all stopping them from being arm twisted by the authorities to make that scan for something the government dislikes and report on it, as you say a flag flip away. It already does send your location and your surrounding WiFi signals and your voice when you use Siri unless you toggle the privacy settings, and that all came in quietly on regular updates.
Apple walked a fairly narrow line when they announced it, and when they publicly stated that if the authorities asked them to extend the scope of the scanning that they would refuse.
I don't know why they chose to do it on the endpoints rather than in the cloud, but acting like doing it on the cloud would give you any level of protection from them putting intrusive software on your phone is not reality. (Same with Google, Samsung, et al).
Not loaded with trained models on illegal content and wired up to alert the authorities if it finds a match, with presumably several teams within Apple built around that feature. I'm thinking about a lot more than the technical aspects of this.
> It's only your trust in Apple that makes you think it doesn't report anything back now
Yeah, exactly. I trust them enough right now to run tons of stuff without my knowledge on my phone. I don't have the time or knowledge to audit my phone, even if it were Android. If they announced that new feature is going live like it's a thing customers are meant to be ok with, I'd trust them a lot less.
It's a slippery slope that ends up with your phone/computer snooping on texts, call contents, or anything else and then submitting your "crimes" to the authorities.
> "Such an expansion would use the exact same justification as the iCloud-bound content scanning."
One of the justifications was that Apple are/could be legally responsible for criminal images hosted on their servers, that exact same justification wouldn't apply to offline content scanning.
> "It's a slippery slope that ends up with your phone/computer snooping on texts, call contents, or anything else and then submitting your "crimes" to the authorities."
Not "crimes" in quotes, crimes without quotes. Generally people think law enforcement is important, especially regarding crimes against children. "A slippery slope" which leads criminals being punished is not the argument winning logical fallacy you think it is. The argument against it is around invasion of privacy, rights not to self-incriminate or to remain silent, ownership of device and software, freedom from unreasonable search without prior evidence, whether you can be found guilty by algorithm, et al.
You're missing my point. Content scanning will start with the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse[0]. Then it'll move on to "crimes" like blogging about a public figure[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... [1] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1316/BillText/Fil...
There was no way to separate the private photos from iCloud-uploaded photos. It was all-or-nothing, like Android permissions: “Allow govt to scan all your private pictures, or do you wish to have no backup?”
I was perfectly feasible to design the ability to have private photos, but Apple chose not to. Or Apple, in collaboration with the government, chose not to.
(Yes it was feasible to design the ability to have a local photo store which isn't uploaded to iCloud, separate from other photos which are, and call it "private photos", but that's another matter).
Yes there can be private conversations between two people, but there can't be private conversations between two people where one of them isn't trusted but can hear the conversation and simultaneously, what, can't hear it to keep it private?
> The media erroneously reported [a statement from September 2021] as Apple reversing course.
Linking to an article from December 22, 2022 in which Apple is quoted as literally saying “We have further decided to not move forward with our previously proposed CSAM detection tool for iCloud Photos.”, ie actually and literally reversing course.
If this person cannot comprehend an article, should I trust that they actually checked that what they were seeing was what they were paranoid about?
Btw, the screenshot shows an interaction with api.smoot.apple.com, which is known to be used for spotlight and related services: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8479958 ; mediaanalysisd is used for visual lookup, where macOS tries to identify landmarks and other items in an image to help you find more information about it (https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/tests-confirm-mac...).
In short, paranoid people are good to use as indicators for further investigation, but are rarely to be trusted as sole sources—even less so when they attempt to ascribe intent.
Your note about that domain is interesting though. I don't regularly use Apple devices, so I'm not particularly concerned by that anyways.
Since late 2022 Apple has enabled Advanced Data Protection, which encrypts all photos before they’re uploaded to cloud storage. With ADP on, my photo library is “private” not just in the common-language sense (it contains extremely personal data I have not shared with others) but also in an opinionated technical sense that these files are accessible only to me. If Apple’s CSAM scanner was deployed today, it would be scanning those photos in cleartext on your phone before unreadable data was sent up to the cloud. You could argue that Apple was saying “hey, it doesn’t matter whether we can read the private data you’re storing, the price of sending even unreadable encrypted private data to our infrastructure is that you must run local software that scans the private photos on your phone,” but I think it’s extremely important to say it this way and not play language games. Apple was going to mandate local scanning of private photos as the cost of using their infrastructure even to store opaque private bits.
> "If Apple’s CSAM scanner was deployed today, it would be scanning those photos in cleartext on your phone before unreadable data was sent up to the cloud."
Or enabling Advanced Data Protection could have disabled the scanner, we don't know. Even if it went the way you said, you could still not use iCloud and have private photos on your device, whereas your phrasing is trying to imply that there would be no option to do that.
I guess back in 2021 we had to pretend to believe things like that, because Apple hadn’t yet announced ADP and was refusing to admit they planned an encryption rollout. But they’ve gone and rolled ADP out now: we can stop pretending to believe silly things. Obviously ADP was being planned, and obviously the CSAM scanner was intended to work with it. It got dropped due to the public backlash. A relatively short 16 months later ADP rolled out without it. End of story.
If it pleases you to believe that Apple designed a scanning system that just happened to work with encrypted backup, but intended to turn it off for users who enabled encrypted backup… go ahead and believe that. I would just say, in the most polite way, that maybe if the positive case for Apple’s CSAM proposal requires one to believe such unlikely things, perhaps it is not a very strong case at all.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
It did a great job at freaking people out hearing about their photos getting scanned and it could be defeated by making a 1 pixel change to any photos a pedo would hide on their phone (since any changes to the image would totally change the hash).
This isn't the way those hashes work. A 1 pixel change would still hash similar enough to be matched. Maybe there are adversarial 1 pixel changes that could break the hashing, but I doubt it.
Even cropping, watermarks and other manipulations like that would still match. "Perceptual hashing", very different to cryptographic hashing. It's basically checking if an image looks "similar enough".
I believe this is why they needed multiple matches, because otherwise there must have been too many false positives.
This may be too oversimplified, but imagine that in a series of CSAM images, there might be, for example, a wall or furniture or something, that could appear similar enough to a wall in one of your own photos. That's a match, off to the gulag with you!
So the lesson is clear - avoid Google as much as possible and use services from separate companies. Email from one company, Chat/IM from a different one and so on. So that if one of your accounts gets suspended for one reason or another - it would not affect the rest.
It's nice how iPhones do the neat AI photo search and montages all client-side, with my Mac backing things up. They're really catering to the less common use case there.
This is how most rights get taken away, not just encryption. Also, we're talking about countries that already have pretty restricted speech. Encryption has to consistently remain popular to survive there, and there are plenty of ways to undermine that.
Were there a shred of consistency in actually advocating for children's quality of life, I could forgive those who are duped by these underhanded tactics. As it stands, there's no actual concerted "save the children" bandwagon that we're being invited to hop on to.
Maybe one should be created, with a prioritized list of issues, and loudly inform people that if issues at the bottom are being prioritized the proponents may have other motives than the ones they claim.
If there were a political bandwagon around ranking child death causes, I'd probably still not trust it, and I view murder differently from accidents anyway.
Clearly nobody is suggesting that on average men flock towards more dangerous higher paying professions which until recently also meant higher wages.
Wouldn't want people to make the connection between risk and reward as a factor in economics.
Plus what does this have to do with mortality in children again?
But yes, the transition between CEO and homeless is surprisingly sudden. It’s indeed a risky job.
Are you sure about that? In the US, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death among people aged 1 to 19.
It's got nothing to do whether the law would be actually effective at curbing such abuse, whether it will have harmful (seemingly-) unintended consequences, whether other solutions would be more effective or have less potential for unintended consequences, or whether the problem is actually widespread enough to even worry about compared to other risks that affect children.
Unfortunately this is uncomfortable for some people (understandable, it's pretty awkward to talk with a 7yo about sex), but it's what politicians should be pushing if they were really about "saving the children". Monitoring cell phones is not it.
There is already snooping software on most company devices: Microsoft software and Google software and the Western internet.
It's already snooping on everybody for the government (through at the very least NSA).
It already makes sure the traffic is (hopefully/maybe) only encrypted for everybody else.
This goes for the EU as well. Most Western countries legalized and extended what Snowden revealed about government surveillance.
It's already being used in a dragnet surveillance thought police type of way for decades. At least no doubt in my mind. Call me paranoid, don't care.
Let's just agree it's a problem everywhere?
Let's just not, because the ones carrying the baton of "liberty" are the ones that ought be measured by that same stick
China or other countries do not fall on the hypocrisy of saying that your info won't be part of the dragnet, this is not the case with said western govs which then proceed to decry the evil non-western countries for doing the exact same thing and expecting their populations to somehow do something about it¿? ¿? ¿ It is indeed nauseating
In some places they say you are free and have rights, but you don't.
In other places you know you don't have certain rights and act accordingly, because people are not stupid, if they know there's a potential danger ahead, they become more cautious (or they carefully comply, because there are no alternatives).
I would say the first group of counties is more dangerous, because it gives people a false sense of security, lowering their natural defenses, while corporations profit from knowing everything about them, things they said they should never have had access to in the first place, because you have rights, right?
the west talks big, but in reality western countries are the biggest slimiest dirtiest hypocrites the world has ever known
Is the problem that people can send encrypted things back and forth to each other? Requiring that companies put snooping software on their device is basically the thought police. Not hyperbole but the actual thought police. Today it’s saving the children, tomorrow it’s basically any problem the governments of many nations want to try to solve.