Apple’s response: the people complaining either don’t get it or are for child molesters.
Fuck this.
They didn’t address any specific concerns at all, other than acknowledging that some people had them.
Yes, good point. The headline should read: Apple addresses the people with concerns around new Photo scanning…
If this goes in as described I am out of the Apple ecosystem, and I’ve purchased a new iPhone every year since they came out.
An even better headline would be “In internal memo, Apple ignores concerns around new Photo scanning and congratulates its development team.”
I think Google already does this, and not just for child abuse, but just for regular movies.
One time I was testing some video processing projects, and using the Spiderverse movie as test material. So I pulling down the video file from my personal GDrive, 100% not shared, totally private Google Drive, logging in directly from the VM, and the it refused to download it because the hash matched some blacklist. Then I zipped up the file and it was fine from then on. For Into the Spiderverse!
Yeah, Dropbox does that too. But my issue isn’t with cloud services, it’s with what happens on my personal phone.
Hmmm, so with Apple’s big push to become a content provider of movies and tv shows, what’s to stop them from doing this same thing to find pirated copies of their content and then acting on it?
Oh but they’ve assured us that they will only scan for specific images that they get from legit sources.
Until they also start offering pirated-content search as a service to content creators, too, since they clearly have the tech to do it.
And then they’ll search your contacts to see if you have any in there that offend any nations or other authorities.
Or FISA courts.
The EFF, which knows a thing or two about this, has strongly condemned the move.
Great. I get my first iPhone ever and they start going all Big Brother on us. I mean, I barely take pictures with my phone at all, other than my dogs, but this whole thing seems pretty awful in general.
From the NYT story:
So Apple’s defense against the slippery slope is that if, for example, China tells them to flag memes about Hong Kong independence or Xi Jinping/Winnie the Pooh, they will simply refuse. Well, that’s great. Except, I mean, they won’t. China won’t take no for an answer.
So what will Apple do, give up on China? Give up on selling to that giant market? Give up when all their devices are manufactured in China? Not a chance in hell.
Maybe Apple would tell Saudi Arabia to GFY and refuse to flag gay porn. But they cannot do that with China. It would be suicidal.
What are you going to? Android? Google is far more intrusive than Apple.
Slippery slopes and all that, I am just have a hard time finding the outrage on all of this.
I thought Jon Gruber’s take was pretty good.
Gruber’s take was completely accurate and non-controversial. If implemented as Apple says it will be, these changes are fine. Nobody’s trying to protect the pedos. He didn’t address the slippery slope at all, except to note that Apple said they would refuse government requests to expand to other types of content illegal in their countries.
But I just addressed that. Apple cannot refuse China. All their devices are built there. China is unique in that respect.
Apple also cannot refuse the USA, of course, and we have been known to abuse such powers, just nowhere near what China will do.
The slippery slope already existed. World governments already knew Apple could do this and have been pressuring them to do so. They didn’t suddenly find out this is a new thing. Google, Microsoft, Apple, and everyone else could already do all this slippery slope without saying a word. Apple was the one company not scanning for child porn, they agreed and now everyone is outraged. All this other stuff was already possible, it doesn’t mean Apple is going to go from scanning for child porn to outing gay people in the Middle East.
We are acting like this is some new thing that everyone just found about and now Apple is going to go crazy filling you storage with hashtags, scanning your phone for pirated videos, and outing gay people. They could have done this years ago if they were going to.
On China, yeah they have already established that Apple will roll over them.
The genie’s out of the bottle. If people don’t like it they’ll get the phone from Pedophone, like the right wing chat app users.
Child pornography is so repulsive a crime that those entrusted to root it out may, in their zeal, be tempted to bend or even break the rules. If they do so, however, they endanger the freedom of all of us. - RAKOFF, District Judge.
Maybe Siri can be always listening trying to figure out if it hears screams or gunshots; surely only criminals will be scared, right?
But, then, we should’ve all learned to not use the cloud and turn off tracking with the NSA kerfuffle, which is still trivial to do. And Google still allows you to delete all that you don’t turn off/block.
That’s incorrect. This is new. Nobody did client side scanning before this. Of course every cloud service scanned uploaded files.
The line is pretty blurry on device vs cloud on phones. And you can turn it off.
It’s a completely solid line. One is on your device before you upload the pictures, one is afterwards, when the pics are on their servers. Former isn’t OK, latter is.
I think Gruber’s take may be correct, in that Apple is trying to enable end-to-end encryption and they view this as a way to defang cries about that enabling kiddie porn, but they simply did not think the implications through.
Once you have a mechanism to scan files on users’ devices, governments will force you to use it for anything they deem illegal. Toddler twiddling, great, nobody wants that. Al-shahab communications, sure, they kill people. Terrorism is universally bad.
But what if Israel wants to ban BDS lit, or Germany Nazi memes? BDS stinks of anti-semitism, but it’s debatable. Nazis are bad, mmmkay, but should Apple facilitate banning free speech? And then you come to authoritative governments banning protest lit, and China banning Tiananmen square, and Islamic countries informing on gay people.
And sure, Apple’s mechanism only scans when you try to upload to iCloud. But once the mechanism for scanning files locally on devices exists, China will tell them to scan everything. It’s China, we know that. They can’t say no to China. And once they say yes, Russia will tell them to scan for Chechnyan separatists. Ukraine will tell them to look for Russian propaganda. Where does it end?