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Apple Confirms Detection of Child Sexual Abuse Material is Disabled When iCloud Photos is Turned Off
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Wrong. Scanning your photos IS a violation of privacy, irrespective of you owning incriminating material or not. In fact, since most people are innocent in that regard, scanning is nothing less than a warrantless search, so basically a violation of constitutional rights
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Oh, good. So all the child pornographers and abusers will just disable it, leaving only the innocent people's photos available to be perused by random strangers in Cupertino. Great feature!
Yeah. looks like they did not really think this through
Or some unexpected glitch happens that causes a bunch of photos to be erroneously flagged, and suddenly parts of your photo library are being sent away for human review. If there's something juicy in there (private in terms of nudity, not illegal), you may care when you find out you were among the 0.001% of people affected by the glitch.
Personally doesn't bother me. I lead a very boring life, I take very few photos, and what is in my library is largely either a few family photos, a few pet photos, or more commonly hundreds and hundreds of screenshots I forgot to delete. If someone has to sift through my library as part of human review, I genuinely pity them. 😀
Good! The use of hash values in comparing known CSAM is extremely accurate, and has been in use by multiple cloud providers for years now - and has resulted in thousands of NCMEC leads which have gone out to the local ICACs - which have resulted in numerous arrests and prosecutions. There's no reason to have CSAM on your phone, period. Apple, thank you.
What child porn producer/viewer would even be dumb enough to store it on iCloud?
I'm MUCH more concerned about the privacy slippery slope that this could lead to.
Dunno, I don‘t know any. But given those folks are probably not all super bright and tech savvy… maybe quite a few?
Don‘t know really
Fully agree but it is not just that.
Any user surveillance feature compromises privacy as it introduces a new attack vector. Once the feature is implemented there is a risk that a bad actor corrupts the way it works at their own benefit.
To give a simple exemple, you can think of those TSA locks on suitcases. It doesn’t infringe your privacy in an unreasonable way because you don’t carry anything illegal in your suitcase and only TSA agents have the keys strictly to carry out lawful safety inspections, right? Yes … until someone else who wasn’t supposed to manages to get a copy of those keys and opens your suitcase with them.
Back to this feature, it could for exemple be hackers who manage to trick the phone into using a different hash database which instead of scanning for pictures of child abuse is targeting images with a certain political meaning. It could also be hackers finding a way to get the phone to report its findings to a private server.
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Someone else just mentioned to me that images are not reviewed by a human. If that's the case, and the hash is all they ever need because it's so reliable, then this at least means your naughty nudes with/from the wife are not going out for human review - should there ever be a glitch. Phew 😀
Well. I would be more concerned about the images NOT showing the wife 😬😬
You should read how file hashing works and how it's used to identify CSAM. No one "peruses" your pictures. Your pictures produce a unique hash value using either the MD5 or SHA hash, which doesn't reveal anything about the content of your photo - that hash is then compared to a very large database of known CSAM hash values. If there's a match, it kicks out a report to the appropriate LE agency (in the US, it usually goes to a local ICAC).
There has only ever been one SHA-1 hash collision in history, when scientists at google and CWI Amsterdam spent a ton of CPU/GPU time trying to do it using a formula, and they were successful only once in what was nine quintillion attempts. So it's pretty accurate!
That's true, I suppose. Considering most seem to operate on the "dark web", I would have to assume they have some tech experience.
Criminals are dumb though.
I imagine most of us geeky enough to care about this kinda thing have the most boring photo libraries on god's earth. Certainly true in my case, my library is dominated by screenshots of apps/games that I was too lazy to delete.
That's what everyone tells each other in North Korea.
And you agree to let them do it when you click agree on the terms and conditions every update.
Yeah. It won‘t be either of those hashes because using one of those it would be impossible to detect images that are similar only or cropped. These would only detect exact matches, which is not what the system does
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I agree that such pictures are vile and disgusting and have no place on a sane person's phone. I think pedophiles should be put under the prison.
While I understand the purpose and manner of application by Apple in this regard, I am going to be turning off iCloud just out of principle. I am not going to run the risk of possible tech abuse whether intentional or not.
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Potentially true, depending on local laws.
Still. At least its a violation morally. No company should even try something like it. If they do, they prove to me they cannot be trusted.
While hitherto I praised Apple for protecting peoples‘ privacy at least to some extent (other than Microsoft or Google, not to mention the worst of all which is of course Facebook) I may have to re-think that position. I probably just did.
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You're missing the step where the photos are "reviewed" by Apple (i.e. random strangers in Cupertino) before being sent to law enforcement.
I am not
What's next....constant gps readings and location data being sent to the police if you are over speed limits; hackers instead of merely locking you out of files, not download these images on your devices with a bitcoin ransom; images/text that are against a political regime now result in arrest warrants....you name it
Yet you don’t invite strangers to your house of innocence.
What exactly they are doing would need to be clarified.
But the article indeed says that if flagged pictures are uploaded Apple “does a manual review” and “If CSAM content is found, the user account is disabled”.
I'm all for detecting child sexual material, but the 'manual review' part is troubling. That means they have the ability to view your photos which may be explicit and legal and then deem them not child sexual material, but then, of course, they've viewed your photos. Am I missing anything? Wow.