Apple Delays Rollout of Controversial Child Safety Features to Make Improvements

[mzeb]

Whoever is in charge of Apple communications/PR should be fired. This and the developer settlement have been a complete cluster you know what.

Nah, this one belongs to a director of engineering in my mind along with a project and/or product manager. This was poorly executed from the get go and they should have seen this push back when the design for the feature was reviewed. The communications/PR side of it shouldn't need to understand the tech at this depth and should rely on the product team. That said, I guess you could argue that their damage control wasn't great but the usual Apple response to pushback is "you're holding it wrong" so I dunno.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Incredible "conclusion" by Gruber
This guy is so far up Apple's a** it's incredible.

What a bizarre way to back into finding a positive spin for Apple.

If Apple were "looking for feedback to consider", they should have been working with any of a variety of privacy and security oriented organizations in advance of the announcement of CSAM on device scanning.

 

[dk001]

It's just hard to imagine that the product development meetings on this weren't filled with people screaming "have you lost your damn minds?" I really want to know the backstory of how this ever got to this point.

That would be very interesting as it would also answer the question “why this solution?”.

 

[SFjohn]

I wonder how many additional children will be victimized from now until then? Apple the greatest company in history with the greatest humanitarian intentions forced to deal with grandstanding ignorant politicians and self centered selfish advocacy groups. It’s unbelievable!

Uh, NONE. People that enjoy looking at CSAM will just turn off iCloud photo sharing. It’s everyone else that’s in danger.

 

[januarydrive7]

Well, you don’t really need to justify it with “what if” scenarios. We already know totalitarian governments like China and the United States of America will, and do, use every tool available to spy on its citizens.

Then this CSAM technique shouldn't matter at all. They have tools built into iOS for years now that can do better than the reported CSAM technique is capable of.

 

[JMStearnsX2]

Just do it on the servers.... Good grief

 

[dk001]

I believe the less emotionally-charged pushback from the security community has been exactly this. This was a huge blunder on Apple's part IMO, and some who enjoy their fame (lookin' at you, Snowden) (or five minutes of it [
Kulshrestha and Mayer]) capitalized to ignite a frenzy of emotionally-driven rhetoric. Any technique like this with noble goals should, IMO, be open-sourced for as much wide-spread, openly invited scrutiny as possible.

Just not sure how well the terms “Apple” and “open source” get along in the same sentence.
That has been one of the issues with this mess.

 

[dk001]

I get it that CSAM within the Apple ecosystem is probably a problem, possibly even a problem aggravated by Apple's heretofore good privacy practices. That said, on-device surveillance, even surveillance with as many privacy protections as Apple tried to build into their recently-announced-but-now-delayed system, is a non-starter for me... if they eventually go forward with this I'm out, full stop. I'll switch to LineageOS or a PinePhone, and fall back to FreeBSD. I have firsthand experience with US intelligence hacking a computer I was using because of my political views in the early 2000's; it was crude back then, but it happened.

I think that Apple need to go back and re-visit what is the problem they're trying to solve here? Since they have said that the scanning/hashing occurs prior to upload to iCloud it seems reasonable to assume that their goal is to disrupt sharing of CSAM. It seems to me that would most likely be happening via Shared Albums in Photos; I would be fine with server-side scanning of Shared Albums, since that is what every other cloud vendor is already doing. I really do think that in this deeply polarized modern environment (red vs blue, vaxxed vs. unvaxxed, etc) the slippery slope argument really does apply - at some point on-device scanning for CSAM will turn into on-device scanning for evidence of wrongthink.

That’s pretty much what the current Cloud scanners; Google, DropBox, MS, etc… , are doing - they are scanning on share.

 

[Barry O'Bummer]

Too little, too late. Trust has been broken and this whole stunt has deeply damaged Apples reputation for focusing on privacy.

 

[fishmoose]

Then this CSAM technique shouldn't matter at all. They have tools built into iOS for years now that can do better than the reported CSAM technique is capable of.

Do they? Do you have any sources to back that up? Zero days - yes. Tools built into iOS by Apple I’m not so sure.

 

[jackal123uk]

Due to the way the hashing algorithms work, it wouldn't be possible to get "less exact" matches. Loosening the algorithm would just result in more false positives, which would end up being completely unrelated photos.

Yeah that was the point I was trying to make, although less eloquently - in order to ensure you get a specific photo you would have to 'loosen' so far that you most likely end up with everything.

Thanks for the rest of your reply too - I was worried I was missing something really simple and that old age was beginning to erode my faculties but I'm pleasantly reassured.

 

[velocityg4]

It's a small victory. It shows they're at least listening. If you want it to be permanent. Then that means you need to double your efforts. By pressing them with even more e-mails, tweets, calls, &c.

 

[saudade]

YES!

“Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor – or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedom that my country was busily dismantling.”

Ed Snowden, Permanent Record, pp. 208–209

Do you know why snowden the traitor can’t leave russia?

 

[dwsolberg]

Good. I'm glad they're rethinking this.

 

[IIGS User]

Improvements?

Delay?

My hind quarters. There will be no improvements, and the delay is permanent.

This turned into such a PR disaster, this is how corporate back tracks without absolutely demolishing the stock price and making the management look like a bunch of buffoons.

DOA. You’ll see air power, on a notch less phone with Touch ID for $50 before this rises from the grave…

 

[dk001]

Do you know why snowden the traitor can’t leave russia?

I know what has been published by ES, media, and a couple of Governments.
What were you alluding to?

 

[DeepIn2U]

Seeing this banner makes me realize what hypocrites Apple have become planning to roll out this CSAM scanning system. It is a poor technological world we live in.

I think ... like yourself, @TheYayAreaLiving and many others may need or SHOULD continue to push on social media and directly to Apple (company feedback and executives) how false such pretense such screenshots like this is now perceived.

I WANT children being abused to be saved, re-habilitated and loved in fully good homes and in society! period. But personal data that does NOT violate the fabric of humanity shouldn't need to be circumvented to help us rid this world of child pornography, mutilation, etc.

 

[DeepIn2U]

BREAKING: Company executive defending company decisions.

that's normal ... it was the LOOK on his face and the slight shake IN the video that was a bit ... off. Sure I don't know Craig F. but the camera person of the interview REALLY focused on it.

 

[jimbobb24]

I wonder how many additional children will be victimized from now until then? Apple the greatest company in history with the greatest humanitarian intentions forced to deal with grandstanding ignorant politicians and self centered selfish advocacy groups. It’s unbelievable!

This is weird. Apple isn't Batman. Why do they need to become any type of "crime fighter". Collectively we have many avenues for fighting the scourge of child pornography - groups that society can restrain by long established common law and legal avenues. Corporations are not restrained by our collective understanding of privacy or law. They should not enter avenues where their lack of legal guide-rails can easily lead them into trouble.

 

[RedWing512]

Then this CSAM technique shouldn't matter at all. They have tools built into iOS for years now that can do better than the reported CSAM technique is capable of.

Exactly. Apple already scans images on the phone for content. That is exactly why you can search for a particular subject and it finds relevant photos from within your library. If Apple and the government want to do the things that many people here accuse them of wanting to do, the technology has been there for a while. There's no need to go about using this overly complicated method of hashing and scanning and hashing and scanning some more.

 

[fishkorp]

No one should ever call Edward Snowden a privacy advocate. Call him what he is: a treasonous snake who put the lives of 10’s of thousands of Americans and allies in danger.

He’s also not nearly as smart as he wants people to think he is.

 

[januarydrive7]

Just not sure how well the terms “Apple” and “open source” get along in the same sentence.
That has been one of the issues with this mess.

Well, most of Apple's ecosystem is built on open source, and several of the frameworks and toolkits they've invented (or had their fingers in) are open source as well.

FreeBSD, Darwin, swift, WebKit, LLVM, ...

The list goes on and on --- "Apple" and "open source" go quite well in the same sentence.

Would be fun to train a word2vec model and see what vector math we could do to see just how far off Apple(s products) are from "open source."

 

[januarydrive7]

Do they? Do you have any sources to back that up? Zero days - yes. Tools built into iOS by Apple I’m not so sure.

If you have a i-Device, open up your photos app and look at the search icon on the bottom right (at least on my iPhone). Upon click it, you'll see a prompt to search for <Photos, People, Place...>. Go ahead and search for something. On same i-Device, from the home screen, swipe down, and start typing something --- results show up nearly instantly. The fact that you can search for these things is a result from your phone scanning your content and semantically tagging it. This is all built into iOS.

 

[CosmoCopus]

There’s more to this than just “child safety “ in my opinion.

 

[ian87w]

Good.
Apple cannot even put their own advertised feature of universal control ready, yet they wanted to shoehorn this?
Get your priorities right Apple, you're not moral police.