TheYayAreaLiving 🎗️
Suspended
What and who gives them a right to do that? It is still invading our PRIVACY.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Outlines Security and Privacy of CSAM Detection System in New Document
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Nice.
Come back after - minimum - three years has passed, and we can see the effects and judge reality. This privacy issue is so important to me, that I don’t want to be guinea pig for Apples code quality or risk the experience of possible “unintended side effects” of any initial or sustained firmware, OS or software bugs.
I’m not buying any new Apple gear the coming years. My existing gear will be phased out over time, and not renewed. I already own recent Windows computers and recent Android (11) smartphones, and more DSLR’s and traditional cameras, than I have fingers.
My iPhone 12 Pro was convenient, when I did not want to carry a camera, or my Android smartphone, but I do not NEED to use the iPhone. Not everybody is so lucky. I have the choice.
The only really interesting thing is development in Apple sales over the next three years, and the used value for current iPhones. What panicked higher-ups say today has no real value anymore. If they were so ill prepared in designing and introducing this new “Apple feature” as demonstrated, I would not touch even their promises with a barge pole.
The only interesting thing is, if sales and/or stock values drop.
Apple has in a way burned the bridges back to their “privacy defending image”. Their problem. Tim is not the first marketing wizard in Apples history, that strayed into problems based on bad decisions. This time there is no original founder to drag back from oblivion.
Future developments will show how it goes. In three years - minimum - I decide, but then I may have become so accustomed to another working environment, that I would no longer pay extra to switch back again.
For now, Apple is history for me.
You may decide otherwise. That’s no problem of mine.
May you live in interesting times, as the old Chinese curse goes!
Regards
Come back after - minimum - three years has passed, and we can see the effects and judge reality. This privacy issue is so important to me, that I don’t want to be guinea pig for Apples code quality or risk the experience of possible “unintended side effects” of any initial or sustained firmware, OS or software bugs.
I’m not buying any new Apple gear the coming years. My existing gear will be phased out over time, and not renewed. I already own recent Windows computers and recent Android (11) smartphones, and more DSLR’s and traditional cameras, than I have fingers.
My iPhone 12 Pro was convenient, when I did not want to carry a camera, or my Android smartphone, but I do not NEED to use the iPhone. Not everybody is so lucky. I have the choice.
The only really interesting thing is development in Apple sales over the next three years, and the used value for current iPhones. What panicked higher-ups say today has no real value anymore. If they were so ill prepared in designing and introducing this new “Apple feature” as demonstrated, I would not touch even their promises with a barge pole.
The only interesting thing is, if sales and/or stock values drop.
Apple has in a way burned the bridges back to their “privacy defending image”. Their problem. Tim is not the first marketing wizard in Apples history, that strayed into problems based on bad decisions. This time there is no original founder to drag back from oblivion.
Future developments will show how it goes. In three years - minimum - I decide, but then I may have become so accustomed to another working environment, that I would no longer pay extra to switch back again.
For now, Apple is history for me.
You may decide otherwise. That’s no problem of mine.
May you live in interesting times, as the old Chinese curse goes!
Regards
Exactly, they’re not scanning iCloud anymore, they’re doing something worse which is building a technology that is capable of scanning your stuff on YOUR property irrespective of whether or not you have iCloud enabled. This sets a worse precedent than cloud scanning.
Understood, however what alternatives do we have? It is either iOS or Google-owned Android. And Google scans a lot. A more realistic option would be not updating to iOS 15, this will be very tangible to Apple, as they could see that at a certain time-point iOS 15 was installed, say, on 15% of devices vs 50% adoption rate of iOS 14 at the same time last year.
I remember back when I was still a teenager someone at school pissed at the wall in men's bathroom and they couldn't figure out who did this so every single guy at our school had to clean the mens bathroom for the rest of the year.
Apple does pretty much the same thing. We all suffer, but the thing is Apple will expand this "feature" to "obey the law". This feature gets so much talked about that all the sexual predators will switch anyways and I can't imagine a person that produces CP would trust any cloud services anyways.
I am scared. What if the government changes and this feature will 'expand' overnight and then something else will become illegal?
My great grandmother was sent to Gulag, because she had the Bible at home and you can say that this will never happen today etc and such drastic measures will never take place, but people in certain countries before the WW II thought so as well. (I've heard a lot of stories from my grandparents and we were basically raised to value freedom of speech and freedom) and I know some people will laugh at me for making such posts, but the point is: We're giving our freedom away.
And may I remind you that the 'Privacy' propaganda was the reason I switched to iPhone and Mac? That's okay, people at r/privacy made me feel better and told me that I wasn't the only one who got sucked into Apple's 'privacy' propaganda.
The sentence "What do you have to hide?" goes back to post communist world. I mean if you had nothing to hide you wouldn't have been afraid of NKVD / KGB & Gestapo etc.
Google and Microsoft can scan if they want to, but this goes back to the: "There are mass shootings in the US so the mass shootings in China are okay" kind of logic and I don't remember Google nor Microsoft promoting privacy that heavily.
Last edited:
Nope - don't have access to their code or 100% understand every last detail of the technology (just like most of the software and tech on the iPhone already). Do YOU? YOU'RE the one accusing them of wrongdoing, not I, so the onus is on YOU to prove so or at least provide some evidence. In the real world, we don't convict and hang people based on irrational suspicion fueled by paranoia, at least not in the civilized parts of the world.
Damage control. Damage control. Damage control.
As many others have pointed out someone at Apple decided the strategy for handling this would be to set the tone of the conversation around “The backlash is simply because you don’t understand the technology, idiot customer!” This is literally textbook gaslighting, a real prime example of an otherwise overused term.
As many others have pointed out someone at Apple decided the strategy for handling this would be to set the tone of the conversation around “The backlash is simply because you don’t understand the technology, idiot customer!” This is literally textbook gaslighting, a real prime example of an otherwise overused term.
So they will do a manual review after the automated system thinks it has detected 30 prohibited images. If all the data is encrypted and Apple has no way to see the images, then how do they do the manual review?
The "take away" is to never put sensitive data on a cell phone. Only use a computer that is not connected to the Internet. At work I've had access to classified documents and data and we get frequent briefing on how to protect this data. Universally the fest step is an "air gap" with no electronic links between the data and the outside world. Depending on how sensitive the data the stronger is the gap. At the top END I've had to work in a vault with a big steel door and armed guards at the low end were rules about simply keeping the material in a file cabinet when we were away from our desk. But in NO CASE COULD THIS STUFF BE ON A NETWORKED COMPUTER.
Even if your stuff is encrypted, someone might use some clever means to find the key (web cams looking at reflections in you eyeballs?). The only 100% solution is to have to zero electronic connection and also physical security of the device (hence the vault door and guards) Mp one should expect their data to be secure without these rules in place. So they should not be surprised if data is compromised.
The "take away" is to never put sensitive data on a cell phone. Only use a computer that is not connected to the Internet. At work I've had access to classified documents and data and we get frequent briefing on how to protect this data. Universally the fest step is an "air gap" with no electronic links between the data and the outside world. Depending on how sensitive the data the stronger is the gap. At the top END I've had to work in a vault with a big steel door and armed guards at the low end were rules about simply keeping the material in a file cabinet when we were away from our desk. But in NO CASE COULD THIS STUFF BE ON A NETWORKED COMPUTER.
Even if your stuff is encrypted, someone might use some clever means to find the key (web cams looking at reflections in you eyeballs?). The only 100% solution is to have to zero electronic connection and also physical security of the device (hence the vault door and guards) Mp one should expect their data to be secure without these rules in place. So they should not be surprised if data is compromised.
None of these precautions negate the fact that Apple thinks it's ok to have the phone I paid for spy on me. And sure, today it's just a list of CSAM hashes. What will it be tomorrow? What's to prevent China from telling Apple they must include hashes for known subversive images if they want to be able to sell phones in China or manufacture phones in China? Would Apple really fight back with the entire Chinese market at risk? Hell no. We've already seen the likes of Nike turn a blind eye to the massive human rights violations currently occurring in China out of fear of losing the Chinese market.
This was just a bad idea to begin with. Just because the technology exists to do something, doesn't mean that it should be done. In my mind, the ethics of this are pretty clear. It can be severely abused by authoritarian governments and there's little Apple or any other company can do to stop it. So Apple should just scrap the tech altogether.
Some things are too dangerous to exist.
This was just a bad idea to begin with. Just because the technology exists to do something, doesn't mean that it should be done. In my mind, the ethics of this are pretty clear. It can be severely abused by authoritarian governments and there's little Apple or any other company can do to stop it. So Apple should just scrap the tech altogether.
Some things are too dangerous to exist.
His, and almost everyone else's point, that you're missing entirely, is that they shouldn't be scanning (and more importantly, flagging) ANY of your content, ANYWHERE, EVER.
What they've done is built a content flagging system, that can be repurposed on a whim, under the guise of the safety of children. This feature is protecting 0 children. It's a trojan horse for any totalitarian state. Once they open this Pandora's box, there is no going back.
actually the onus is on the one building the surveillance technology which is what this is whether you like that scary term or not. I don’t need to see the code to understand that this is fundamentally something I disagree with.
Your civilised world is dying for spying on you to keep you like an ignorant accepting whatever they want.
Theres a lot of precedents about how governments spy their citizens. I mean it’s out there, you just need to read and educate yourself.
Greetings from Assange, it surely won’t be misused for surveillance.
/s
/s
You don't see a problem with a device that you paid for spying on you?
Two wrongs don't make a right. You can't undo the wrong of child exploitation by attempting to undo that wrong with another wrong (spying on people).
I am not defending Apple on this one, but how are you better off with Windows and Android privacy-wise?
Except not. The phone scans regardless, it only uploads when iCloud photos are enabled. Or at least that’s what apple has said, and apple never lies about such things right? *cough* we don’t monitor Siri recordings at all *cough*
If you haven’t read a coherent explanation of why this is a bad move, you clearly haven’t read the responses from Snowden or the EFF, both of which clearly, factually and logically lay out why this is a bad thing, both in a very coherent manner.
But if you’re the sort that is fine with a manufacturer enabled back door into your device and an active search program running within a black box on your device, functioning in a way that can’t be verified thus forcing reliance that everything is happening the way Apple says it is, then I doubt any coherent argument will sway your opinion.
Uh, "total invasion of your privacy" is the ONLY answer. I understand exactly how this works. I have to create hashing algorithms for work...for similar purposes, though it happens on company-supplied laptops.
I am NOT ok with Apple spying on me using the phone that I pay for. If Apple wants to start giving phones away, then I'd consider allowing them to spy on me as part of the bargain. But not on a phone that I paid for.
Because Android phones let you install roms with privacy in mind.
It's a problem because the reason for the scan and share is irrelevant.
yes what several people on here keep doing is proposing a false dichotomy on the grounds that scanning content is a law of nature, i.e it simply must happen. It doesn’t. Between option 1 of cloud scanning and option 2 of client scanning I pick the option 3 they don’t seem to want to acknowledge: no scanning at all with true end to end encryption baked in, no Apple access whatsoever except anonymized APIs.
Apple said at WWDC they were supporting both iOS 14 and 15. Wonder if they knew back then they’d have a mess on their hands when this came out.
The Financial Times paper broke this story. I think FT found out and reported on this before Apple was ready to discuss it and that’s why the PR from Apple has been a mish-mash of releases.
Google only scans images that are on their platforms. I can't find anything on Google's site indicating this happens on the phone. That is a BIG difference between what Apple is doing by scanning images on the phone that I pay for. I haven't researched the Microsoft side of things, but I would consider any software that looks at my content to be spyware (whether it's part of the OS or not).
This is a dangerous precedent. Apple believes they have the right to scan your content. And that is what they MUST do to generate the hash.
Apple put themselves in this position after touting whatever happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone. If they wanted to do this on iCloud storage I am fine with that, just like all the other cloud storage providers probably already do. They wouldn't even had to announce anything, they could have and most likely are already doing it. If the content is on their servers, so do the scanning there, and not on our phones that we pay $1K+ for.