This site is full of folks who sound like Republicans claiming that their personal freedom is being harmed in an attempt to do the right thing.
We must do our best to remove these images from circulation. This is a good idea. But no, people are crapping on it because FREEDUM!
Hi, I'm well to the left of Bernie Sanders. (No worries, if it soothes you, I voted for Biden.) I think this approach to combating CSAM is a horrible idea that risks opening up a can of worms which we absolutely don’t want to open, as humans. Civil liberties should be of utmost importance to people of
all political persuasions; instead we often see centrists craving simple solutions to complex problems, which almost never works for the better.
I’ve seen no one arguing that CSAM is okay or that those trafficking in it shouldn’t be brought to justice, and I’m certainly not about to, but rather only disagreement with
this approach. Apple already does this scanning server-side for iCloud Photos — which at least to me is fine — and unless they plan on end-to-end encrypting iCloud Photos, this is all for…what? It adds nothing and might subtract a lot.
It’s needlessly blurring the line between what gets processed where, forcing users to bear the computational (and, hell, monetary!) cost of content scanning for Apple’s own protection, and heavily dependent on Apple’s willingness
and ability to say no to authoritarian leaders who assuredly would love to use this for less noble purposes. We’ve already seen how far Apple’s willing to bend — backwards — to placate Xi Jinping.
Would they say no to his request to report all Winnie-the-Pooh memes to the government under the threat of no longer allowing iPhone sales in China? Remember, Apple’s privacy “principles” aren’t real — they’re marketing — and as a corporation, the only language that they speak is dollar bills.