Hashing expert here. Here’s where you miss the mark. You are essentially saying their entire argument is moot because they don’t understand hashing.
You're right that understanding hashing isn't important, here. But you're missing the mark on what the issue is. Specifically, the hashes have to be agreed-upon from competing jurisdictions. "banned memes" would have be banned in non-cooperative (politically, etc.) jurisdictions for the hashes to be included in the scan --- so, it doesn't matter if e.g., Russia bans memes against Putin, unless the U.S. also bans those memes. This is the type of safety mechanism the researchers who spoke out against this said would need to be required for this type of system to remain safe against government abuse.
Based upon what Apple claims they are doing, behind the scene.
As much as I would like to see Apple to reverse its course and take a strong stance on privacy, I'm afraid the genie is out of the bottle - if only because Apple's implementation gave governments around the worlds ideas (as far as I know the concept has been picked up by politicians both within the EU and in the UK).
It's likely mothballed to a locked room that says do not open until 2025 at the earliest. Seriously all traces of it was removed from Apple's site some time ago.
My understanding (and I'm also not an expert in any of this), is that the pictures that they have in the CSAM database being used for this scanning purpose, are much, much worse than any picture a well-meaning parent would take. Yes, the pedophiles might end up with bath-time pics of kids scraped from Facebook. They won't be caught by having those, they'll be caught because of matches to extremely graphic pictures of child sexual abuse. The agencies involved are not looking to "catch" and prosecute people who have pics of their kids in the bath, it's not worth their time. They're going after the actual pedophiles.
No idea what you’re talking about. I never said podofile… 🤷🏻♂️ Maybe you need to check a dictionary. Clearly you’re confusing children with podiatry. Weird….
Kind of funny that your whole comment is bashing "ignorant" people when you, yourself, don't actually know what you're talking about.
If they are an American data hosting company, they have not “let go” of CSAM.
They just gave up on the plan they were going to use that would allow them to encrypt ALL the images they host. If anyone uploads an image to iCloud that matches the CSAM hash, you can bet they’re going to be reported.
The proposed system would exist on-device ONLY for folks uploading to iCloud. Because, as you say, the government only has say on the images that Apple hosts and the flagging allows them to keep all the images encrypted while still informing Apple (and the government) of a potential match. For anyone not using iCloud, there would be nothing running on-device.
Fixed it for you, because THAT is what will happen. People will be arrested under false accusations. Maybe you will be among them. Me, I'm looking for an alternative to iCloud. Even if I have to build my own version.
Matter of time, yes. And, that time is probably a few thousand years.
While I know you’re likely not interested in knowing how it works, in case anyone else finding this thread is interested…
And THAT is the problem! Everybody thinks they understand how all of this will work, and then we just fall into our old, bad habit of TRUSTING THE GOVERNMENT to have our best interests at heart.
Not likely, but you’d have to have a better understanding of the method that’s currently being used by all image hosting companies to check for CSAM. You CAN look up how difficult it is to intentionally create a false match, using this method, though. Just remember that researchers are only able to create false hash matches when they know precisely down to the last pixel, the image they’re trying to match against. And none of the false matches they create, even KNOWING the original image would pass a human review.
