haha okay then
Thanks for sharing (and educating me
). Really helpful and interesting
Last edited:
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.
Craig Federighi Acknowledges Confusion Around Apple Child Safety Features and Explains New Details About Safeguards
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
). Really helpful and interesting
They knew there would backlash (or in Apple-speak, "misunderstandings".) They figured they could just slip it into a larger update and most people would be distracted by other features. Then it got leaked so they figured they could put out a PR statement and it would blow over by the next day. People are still angry more than a week later, so they figure good ol' Hair Force One can put a nice a spin on it ("on-device spyware is actually more private!"). Keep up the anger folks. If the outrage continues into next week we'll see the new FUD they put out.
The public are also very angry that Apple are refusing to come clean about all of this. The PR spin that Apple is astill pushing is being easily seen through. People realise no one is perfect and accept apologies for mistakes. What people do not stand for, is stubbornly trying to justify your mistakes with PR spin.
I agree with everyone here. Keep up the anger. Force Apple to deal with the situation. We all know Apple will not willingly do this, only by force.
I agree with everyone here. Keep up the anger. Force Apple to deal with the situation. We all know Apple will not willingly do this, only by force.
Last edited:
I'm blown away - not in a good way - how many people I'm running into that are ok with basically all/any means to find "illegal content" people might have.
Do we really have so many people ready to start living in police state (more than we already have in so many places)?
It's so naive to align with that view...for all it takes to have a "problem" is a differing view on what is "illegal" or even "objectionable" down to simply "not what a certain entity wants to exist"
I just honestly don't think people think it through to the endpoints enough.
Do we really have so many people ready to start living in police state (more than we already have in so many places)?
It's so naive to align with that view...for all it takes to have a "problem" is a differing view on what is "illegal" or even "objectionable" down to simply "not what a certain entity wants to exist"
I just honestly don't think people think it through to the endpoints enough.
It's "illegal" to have certain drugs in many places.
I'm also not in favor of just doing "search and seizure of the whole population" to "find the illegal drugs!"
It's just crazy thought to be going down these paths.
I'm also not in favor of just doing "search and seizure of the whole population" to "find the illegal drugs!"
It's just crazy thought to be going down these paths.
Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, has today defended the company's controversial planned child safety features in a significant interview with The Wall Street Journal, revealing a number of new details about the safeguards built into Apple's system for scanning users' photos libraries for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).
Federighi admitted that Apple had handled last week's announcement of the two new features poorly, relating to detecting explicit content in Messages for children and CSAM content stored in iCloud Photos libraries, and acknowledged the widespread confusion around the tools:
The Communications Safety feature means that if children send or receive explicit images via iMessage, they will be warned before viewing it, the image will be blurred, and there will be an option for their parents to be alerted. CSAM scanning, on the other hand, attempts to match users' photos with hashed images of known CSAM before they are uploaded to iCloud. Accounts that have had CSAM detected will then be subject to a manual review by Apple and may be reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
The new features have been subject to a large amount of criticism from users, security researchers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Edward Snowden, Facebook's former security chief, and even Apple employees.
Amid these criticisms, Federighi addressed one of the main areas of concern, emphasizing that Apple's system will be protected against being taken advantage of by governments or other third parties with "multiple levels of auditability."
Federighi also revealed a number of new details around the system's safeguards, such as the fact that a user will need to meet around 30 matches for CSAM content in their Photos library before Apple is alerted, whereupon it will confirm if those images appear to be genuine instances of CSAM.He also pointed out the security advantage of placing the matching process on the iPhone directly, rather than it occurring on iCloud's servers.
When asked if the database of images used to match CSAM content on users' devices could be compromised by having other materials inserted, such as political content in certain regions, Federighi explained that the database is constructed from known CSAM images from multiple child safety organizations, with at least two being "in distinct jurisdictions," to protect against abuse of the system.
These child protection organizations, as well as an independent auditor, will be able to verify that the database of images only consists of content from those entities, according to Federighi.
Federighi's interview is among the biggest PR pushbacks from Apple so far following the mixed public response to the announcement of the child safety features, but the company has also repeatedly attempted to address users' concerns, publishing an FAQ and directly addressing concerns in interviews with the media.
Article Link: Craig Federighi Acknowledges Confusion Around Apple Child Safety Features and Explains New Details About Safeguards
Federighi can spin this anyway he wants. I don’t care how ”good” of a cause this is. This is still warrantless searching. If Apple or anyone else wants to know if there is anything illegal on someone’s phone, they can do it the proper, legal way. By getting a search warrant from a judge. End of story. Otherwise, get out!
OK so does this do an exact match or not? If it does an exact match, good luck with that as pedophiles avoid the system by changing pixels. Also if that were true, then why the need for the threshold? What Apple has released already doesn't really match Federighi's statement. It sounds like they are doing an approximate match based on perceptual features, so the question is not whether there will be false positives, or how often false positives will be flagged up, but whether false positives will always looks like the CSAM images (e.g., having certain poses, exposed skin, etc.), in which case they will be sensitive pictures of people. And thirty false positives is potentially nothing given that people often take multiple pictures of the same event/scene.
I am not confused*, I am concerned. And the concerns I have covered here apply only if the system works as planned, and is not corrupted, as it almost certainly will be, for far less noble purposes than detecting child porn. Apple has just demonstrated to every authoritarian government on the planet that their new chips plus a software framework can be used as an extension of an AI agent that can perform surveillance about virtually anything. Good job Apple. Idiots.
*Other than by seemingly self-contradictory statements Apple has made and their lack of transparency about the algorithm.
We understand it just fine. That's not the problem. So sad to see Federighi trotted out to defend this cluster. They know that he is the favorite of Apple fans. Sad to see his rep tarnished. The sooner they backtrack, the less damage there will be. However, at this point, the damage will be substantial no matter what.
I can't say it any better than this post on social media: "So Apple still tries to defend their on-device surveillance with the standpoint that people just don’t understand what #spyphone is about. We do understand and you’re wrong."
I can't say it any better than this post on social media: "So Apple still tries to defend their on-device surveillance with the standpoint that people just don’t understand what #spyphone is about. We do understand and you’re wrong."
“Degrade encryption”. That’s false. End to end encryption isn’t broken at any point. They use on device intelligence to keep encryption intact
I’m tired of companies talking down to their customers. We are not as dumb as you think. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Apple is confusing confusion with irritation.
That explanation only told us how the system works. It is a good video.
However the video says little about the issues with the system will be sorted out. Rene in this exact same video even tried to defend Apple by saying - "E2EE was never possible because people keep forgetting their iCloud passwords, so CSAM is not at all different to that".
Rene's videos are amazing for the technical content they deliver. However he does not hold Apple to account when needed. He will defend Apple to the bitter end. If anyone watches his videos, need to realise the technical information on the videos is great, but Rene has his biases as well.
It obviously won’t stop that many pervs. But even if they only catch a few, I’ll be happy. The real point is for Apple to keep their immunity from liability intact. Nobody can expect them to forfeit immunity, that would be business suicide
Child s*x abuse is HUGE, a lot bigger than people seem to think. Most (like 70%+) of women have been abused s*xually as a child, almost half of men. Child s*x trafficking is bigger than adult s*x trafficking and barely legal teen p*rn is the most popular.
Child labor is bad but it doesn’t compare at all to how bad child s*x abuse and trafficking are.
Do I agree with csam in general? I’m iffy on the whole thing but it’s not surprising at all that people are ok with it.
Last edited by a moderator:
They’ve been scanning your photos with on device intelligence for years. And foreign governments know that already
iSpy, with my little eye, Apple's next step to harvesting ever more user data to monetize.
How about neither. The better option is for the police to actually do their job and get search warrants before they search anything, hashed or otherwise.
Apple says that this feature is more private because they don't have to scan all the photos in iCloud, like the other cloud storage providers do. They are ignoring something big here: there is no law that they must proactively scan iCloud for CSAM. They don't have to do any of this, and they shouldn't. They should E2EE iCloud, and if the FBI is what is stopping them, it just proves that Apple can't be trusted to stand up to the government.
They can spin the PR any way they'd like. Apple can even do a complete 180.
The fact of the matter is the code is written, it exists, and it can/will be on your device whether Apple says it is there or not. Trust eroded.
* we're not doing the Thing *
.
.
.
* does the Thing *
The fact of the matter is the code is written, it exists, and it can/will be on your device whether Apple says it is there or not. Trust eroded.
* we're not doing the Thing *
.
.
.
* does the Thing *
Or take Apple to court. I hope someone does this.
How does something that is so narrowly scoped help at all really?
This will catch - perhaps...
Pedophoiles who use Apple Products and store CSAM in their camera roll and also use iCloud to collect known CSAM, who also have more than 30 photographs of known child pornography and who are going to read all of this news and still carry on as usual.
Last edited by a moderator:
I know exactly how it works from an Engineering standpoint and I still don’t like it.
Having a back door, is a back door, is a back door.
Your phone will snitch on you, will snitch on you, will snitch on you.
A personal device must be absolutely trustworthy for you to hell and back.
This is a bad precedent and will have unimaginable consequences down the road.
It will be like boiling the frog with warm water.
When rights are taken, for whatever justified reasons there may be, even temporarily, are seldom given back.
Having a back door, is a back door, is a back door.
Your phone will snitch on you, will snitch on you, will snitch on you.
A personal device must be absolutely trustworthy for you to hell and back.
This is a bad precedent and will have unimaginable consequences down the road.
It will be like boiling the frog with warm water.
When rights are taken, for whatever justified reasons there may be, even temporarily, are seldom given back.
Absolutely, totally agree. But that doesn't address the question if the government is forcing this.
Google does this, Samsung does this, EVERYONE DOES THIS. So people saying it degrades Apple somehow aren’t paying attention. I don’t remember this uproar when Google started their version of this program.