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Can't say I consider this to be a wise move on Apple's part !

Clearly a (potential) Pandora's Box !

Agreed. I applaud the intent but what happens when there’s an inevitable bug that causes somebody who did nothing wrong to have the cops show up at their door with a warrant? This is a little to Big Brother for me. I’ll shut off iCloud photos. I only recently turned it on anyway.
 
Eff everything about that. Obviously anybody who produces, shares or consumes CP needs to be fed feet first into a woodchipper. But Apple scanning the content of what I've got on my phone or sending or receiving is burning the house down to catch a spider.
And yeah, somebody's gonna squawk "hurr durr, slippery slope argument amirite". Damn right, slippery slope. That's not a slippery slope anymore, that's free fall. What WILL be next? Pictures of guns? Since both Apple and Google removed the Gunbroker app already, that wouldn't surprise me. Getting swatted by Apple because you shared something a "person" reviewed (we all know how well that works at FB, YouTube and Twitter) and found objectionable?
 
Scanning my photos for kiddie porn has no effect on my privacy, since I don’t have any kiddie porn.

Have you ever heard of a bug? The moment there is one, and there will be some, then you could get the cops knocking on your door with a warrant to search everything you have assuming you do have it and you are a low life, treating you as such. No thanks.

Not to mention what might happen if the government decides it wants to force Apple to use that tech for more questionable purposes. The way the government spied on all of us after 9/11 should show you that even with the best of intentions there are bad apples everywhere who will exceed their authority. Again, no thanks.

A wise man once said “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
 
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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!
Except this tool can track any crops, color adjustments, pixel changes, rotations, and any manipulations. So there is SOME leeway here. Which can lead to adult/legal subjects maybe in a similar "pose" and "lighting" and "angles" can be mistaken.
 
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.

^^ This -- Exactly right.

Anyone one really sick and deep into child porn and abuse material isn't going to be putting it in iCloud anyways.

All the downstream impacts of normalizing this sort of invasion into user data is the real story and problem here.
 
Have you ever heard of a bug? The moment there is one, and there will be some, then you could get the cops knocking on your door with a warrant to search everything you have assuming you do have it and your a low life, treating you as such. No thanks.

Not to mention what might happen if the government decides it wants to force Apple to use that tech for more questionable purposes. The way the government spied on all of us after 9/11 should show you that even with the best of intentions there are bad apples everywhere who will exceed their authority. Again, no thanks.

A wise man once said “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Not just a bug. A hack as well.

Could be a sophisticated one carried out by a state entity taking some control over the scanning feature and using it as a way to spy one someone.

But it could also be people with bad intentions tricking users into saving a child porn picture in their iCloud library without really realising what they are doing, to cause them problems.
 
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The only problem I have with this is that it can be turned off, but I understand why that’s the case.

Apple isn’t policing what you store on your device, only what you upload to their cloud servers.

There are no doubt slippery slope arguments to be made, but at the end of the day every one of these sickos who gets caught and locked up makes the world a better place. I’m willing to give up a slice of my privacy to make that happen.

And if I’m not, then Apple Photos clearly isn’t for me.
That's your only problem? That it can be turned off?? What about someone being falsely accused? That sounds like a bigger problem to me.
 
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I can't wait to see the reaction on here one day when copyright holders are forcing searches for their material inside user data.

Sounds outlandish now -- but setting bad new norms like this is exactly how we get there.
This is actually the first thing I thought about when I read about this feature.

You liked the proof of concept which does pictures scanning based on hash values? What about scanning your whole online drive and email account with hash values for all copyrighted material on this planet?

Don’t worry, if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to fear …
 
So the pervs can just keep the photos locally or use another cloud service to get around this? Seems like it will be pretty easy to defeat then.

Edit: From the EFF

 
New way to hack people…
Construct fake images that hash out to the CSAM and save them to their photos with a malicious app.. then they get too many vouchers, manual review confirms the hashes match and reports the user… Or did apple just confirm that manual review means Apple employees can look at peoples iCloud photos??? Cause they aren’t encrypted?
 
I'm starting to wonder if that icloud "hack" of all those celebrity nude photos from 7 or so years ago was actually a result of exactly what's being outlined here... for all we know this system has been in place for many years and it's just being revealed publicly now under the "think of the children" guise that is always used when handy.
 
Remember when Apple wouldn’t help get data off that Terrorist iPhone? They screamed about privacy. Now they are going to actively scan your data. Today for pictures, tomorrow for gun information, for religious information, for health information, for political support. Between them, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and a few others, they can paint a pretty good picture of you, what you do and support, who you have contact with, what you buy, where you go, etc. Not always a good thing.
 
If that were to happen I’d be here railing against it.

But as long as they’re just helping catch these sick freaks they have nothing but my support.
You missed your line in the sand being crossed within the last 24 months then….

We don’t even know what we are losing anymore. We seem to cheer on the enforcement now.
 
Not just a bug. A hack as well.

Could a sophisticated one carried out by a state entity taking some control over the scanning feature and using it as a way to spy one someone.

But it could also be people with bad intentions tricking users into saving a child porn picture in their iCloud library without really realising what they are doing, to cause them problems.

While possible, it strikes me as similar to when people claimed that robbers would go around cutting off the thumbs of iPhone 5s users to unlock their phones. Apple is not the first company to do any of this. It evidently wasn’t an issue or concern when other companies like google before them did this. So why it suddenly the end of the world now when Apple is involved?
 
This isn’t about what might happen somewhere someday, this is about catching purveyors of kiddie porn, right now, here, today.

And if some country has those sorts of laws you mention and I am in violation of those laws then that’s a country I won’t be visiting.
While possible, it strikes me as similar to when people claimed that robbers would go around cutting off the thumbs of iPhone 5s users to unlock their phones. Apple is not the first company to do any of this. It evidently wasn’t an issue or concern when other companies like google before them did this. So why it suddenly the end of the world now when Apple is involved?
Because they are supposed to respect our privacy more than the others…..even if it poses no threat in theory to our privacy. It’s about respecting their customers. We didn’t sign up to have a constant forensic analysis of our yoga pants pics and vaccine memes performed and shared with “don’t worry we’re just kiddy porn cops…” goons from the government

I’d be very interested in seeing how slightly changing the crime rationale affects the response from people. For example, change kiddy porn to vaxx denier memes, and if this is ok. Or election doubters?

Is it ridiculous to wonder if even discussing this gets us placed on a list, or scored on an existing one?
 
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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
Thank you for pointing this out. Not only is it a warrantless search (to which corporations apparently hold no accountability), but there is a presumed guilt in the entire customer base for what is admittedly a very horrible crime. If the police pulled you over, where you broke no law, just to search your car for opiate drug-running, they'd be violating your civil rights. Your personal property cannot be searched without a warrant or probable cause. Getting corporations to perform such searches is just waiting to be abused even further. Thinking that "I have nothing to hide" only works until the next new search looks for something that you are guilty of, and that could be something as simple as speech.
 
The only problem I have with this is that it can be turned off, but I understand why that’s the case.

Apple isn’t policing what you store on your device, only what you upload to their cloud servers.

There are no doubt slippery slope arguments to be made, but at the end of the day every one of these sickos who gets caught and locked up makes the world a better place. I’m willing to give up a slice of my privacy to make that happen.

And if I’m not, then Apple Photos clearly isn’t for me.
Great that you want to give up your privacy for that and you’re free to do so.

But that doesn’t mean that everyone should and it is just as respectable if someone chooses to support the use of end-to-end encrypted services for privacy.
 
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