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No, that's not how it works.

Your photo will be reduced to a single numerical fingerprint. That fingerprint will be compared to a list of fingerprints for known images without any context about your image.

You should actually READ the article.. specifically where they talk about threshold matching. If it was as simple as hash matching, you could change ONE BYTE and entirely change the resulting hash, making the database matching useless.
 
The poimt is apple sniff and run tasks without permission.
Apples low reaction to the pegasus hacks show this company dosent care anymore about user security.
Another example many zero day explosits found from Google researcher and other. Not from aplle.
 
I think it's important to clarify one aspect of this security software: it fails once in one TRILLION accounts.
Pretty safe and accurate, if you ask me.
I think one in a trillion is going to turn out to be very wrong. It's probably going to be more like one in a trillion multiplied by a trillion multiplied by a trillion (10^38 or more).

Point is this is probably safer and more accurate than the human mind can comprehend without some analogies. :)
 
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I think it's important to clarify one aspect of this security software: it fails once in one TRILLION accounts.
Pretty safe and accurate, if you ask me.

No it fails the moment you leave your phone unattended and unlocked for 30 seconds and someone with a grudge can ruin your life by loading an image and clicking Add to Photos.

If Apple does this Add to Photos in Safari and other apps needs biometric authentication as it will become a far greater danger to the user than any banking transaction.
 
There’s a bigger chance of me breaking into your house and smashing your lockbox of Polaroids with a hammer and stealing all of them than one of your pictures being matched to the database.
Yeah but it's like they are breaking into a billion people's houses and smashing all their lockboxes -- "hashing" every object they own, and then taking back the list to their central database to see if they can find a match.
 
You should actually READ the article.. specifically where they talk about threshold matching. If it was as simple as hash matching, you could change ONE BYTE and entirely change the resulting hash, making the database matching useless.
I did, and thankfully I understood it. It's talking about a hash of the image, just not of the byte stream. It's still a hash that can't be used to recreate the image.
 
So you have no issues giving me all your passwords and/or letting me in your house to search around ?
Poor analogy, since your photos aren't uploaded and nobody looks at them. (Or even stores them!)
Yeah but it's like they are breaking into a billion people's houses and smashing all their lockboxes -- "hashing" every object they own, and then taking back the list to their central database to see if they can find a match.
That's another poor analogy, since the list doesn't go back to a central database. It's like your house itself does that comparison with a list it was given, if your house could be trusted to keep secrets.

Look, these poor analogies just aren't helping anyone understand. Questions are good, but poor analogies are just unnecessarily alarming.
 
No it fails the moment you leave your phone unattended and unlocked for 30 seconds and someone with a grudge can ruin your life by loading an image and clicking Add to Photos.
Phones have been locked by default immediately for longer than the hardware the next iOS will support.
 
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I suspect that Apple is trying to hold onto their business model. Currently Apple is under a coordinated attack from the Epic gang & the USA. Epic wants the App Store gone and the USA wants access to EVERYTHING on iPhones they seize. Child pornography is the universal excuse to tear down privacy protections everywhere. Apple is trying to appease the government, but in the process their privacy protections are becoming a joke. It’s a lose lose situation for people who enjoy Apple’s products & ecosystem.
 
This thread proves 99.99% of MacRumors users have no idea what they’re talking about.
That's why I take months or years off reading comments here, and I guess it's time to do so again. Frustrating. I wish people would be a little more curious about what goes on around them.
 
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If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.
Now Apple has proven that it CAN access encrypted stuff in iCloud, they will have given ammunition to all the 3 letter spaghetti agencies for them to have access on demand.

And the problem is who gets to define "Wrong", Republicans, Democrats, someone like Nixon, Trump ?
 
No, that's not how it works.

Your photo will be reduced to a single numerical fingerprint. That fingerprint will be compared to a list of fingerprints for known images without any context about your image. This fingerprint isn't a picture of your child bathing, and it's definitely not an image or understanding of genitalia. It t's just a number like 8BA62546-1258-4E90-9096-48EE7365ECAE. Since your photo is not on the list, nothing will happen.

On the other hand (and of course you wouldn't do this, I'm just trying to explain the mechanics here), if you sold that image online to a lot of people and it became a well known image of child pornography, the FBI would eventually add the image to their database. Apple would end up building a fingerprint of the FBI's copy of that image. If that fingerprint still matched your image, it would be flagged. Apple/LEO would be able to look at their copy of the image matching that fingerprint because they acquired the image through another mechanism. In this case, though, some other mechanism got the photo from your computer or phone into the cloud.
You are explaining the exact situation why even hash based is a no go... if that half naked picture of your kid -for whatever reason- ends up online (because your google drive, iCloud,... got hacked... because that never happens... don't be so naive...) now you suddenly have 25 flagged images in your library and Apple will go through them without a search warrant or something similar. In the worst case this whole process is flawed and you end up on the watchlist of the FBI. For absolutely no reason.

As I mentioned in my previous post, our legal system is based upon the presumption of innocence and there's also a reason why evidence illegally collected is often not recognised in court. This is very much like illegaly collected evidence as there was no search warrant in first place.
For a similar reason constitutional courts have ruled against data retention in many cases.

If you're into that kind of stuff, feel free to move to China, but in democratic countries there is no place for something like this.
 
I did, and thankfully I understood it. It's talking about a hash of the image, just not of the byte stream. It's still a hash that can't be used to recreate the image.

Nobody said anything about recreating an image from a hash.

Let's say I have a 5000x5000 pixel image, and the hash is 298c4265237bde7e8b00310afcbcc4be and I changed ONE pixel, the new hash could be a25669b97aa7d947b398df4540841475.
 
Poor analogy, since your photos aren't uploaded and nobody looks at them. (Or even stores them!)

That's another poor analogy, since the list doesn't go back to a central database. It's like your house itself does that comparison with a list it was given, if your house could be trusted to keep secrets.

Look, these poor analogies just aren't helping anyone understand. Questions are good, but poor analogies are just unnecessarily alarming.
The point I am not sure about is whether the phone downloads the entire ever-updating database. If this is the case, then your modification would be correct.

Unless the entire hash database in downloaded on to the iPhone, the phone has to hash and compile and list and then send it off for comparison.

Maybe I missed it? Is it confirmed that the entire list will be downloaded to the phone and constantly updated?
 
Google doesn't pretend to protect your privacy. And just because a practice is widespread doesn't mean it should be that way. Our use of the internet is tracked and monetized at every opportunity. Virtually no data about us, in fact almost nothing we do at this point, outside of HIPAA has any protection at all.

That it's that way doesn't mean it should have become this way.
 
Only the beginning. At some point Apple will scan the contents of Macs too, all of it, not just iCloud saved content. In the guise of protecting kids.

These searches will be extended to whatever the “greatest threat to national security” the current administration deems at the time.

Don’t get me wrong I’m all for catching predators but as others have said already this is a very slippery slope. Already big tech companies curate and censor information to fit their narratives. Now will this extend to our personal devices off their public platforms? Scary thought.
 
That's why I take months or years off reading comments here, and I guess it's time to do so again. Frustrating. I wish people would be a little more curious about what goes on around them.
This is kind of elitist, without knowing if you are elite at all. Most people are regular consumers, and I assume visitors to this site are at least power users. If we seem so ignorant to geniuses like you, and we already know more than the average, then shouldn't Apple do much much much more to explain what they are doing with people's data? I am not saying it's your job. But if people are confused about something so sensitive and important, you should put more blame on Apple, not users.
 
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Yikes!

I’m less concerned about Apple rummaging through my substantial porno pic,gif, video collection (it’s all old MILF / mature /Cougar porn anyways), and more concerned that this will snowball into looking at my alt-right meme collection for wrongthink and cartoon frogs
 
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Yikes!

I’m less concerned about Apple rummaging through my substantial porno pic,gif, video collection (it’s all old MILF / mature /Cougar porn anyways), and more concerned that this will snowball into looking at my alt-right meme collection for wrongthink and cartoon frogs
Let's hope the tech is advanced enough to "hash" your intention too or you're in trouble mate!
 
…screening technology to look for illegal images and then disables accounts if evidence of CSAM is detected…

Heh a false positive would render all linked Apple devices useless, funny. Have fun suing Apple to gain access back.
 
Let's be real about what this is: Apple is assuming the right to routinely search your phone for content that it deems suspicious (something that for example the US government would not be allowed to do due to the 4th amendment). You buy their product and in return you are treated like a suspect. They compare photos against a secret database using a secret algorithm, with no oversight whatsoever. And what prevents an authoritarian government from forcing them to add, say, politically "inconvenient" material to the database?

This makes a mockery of Apple's claims of being privacy focused. And now that they have done it everyone else will feel free to do the same. How long until MacOS and Windows scan our computers for "suspicious" material?
 
Let's be real about what this is: Apple is assuming the right to routinely search your phone for content that it deems suspicious (something that for example the US government would not be allowed to do due to the 4th amendment). You buy their product and in return you are treated like a suspect. They compare photos against a secret database using a secret algorithm, with no oversight whatsoever. And what prevents an authoritarian government from forcing them to add, say, politically "inconvenient" material to the database?

This makes a mockery of Apple's claims of being privacy focused. And now that they have one it everyone else will feel free to do the same. How long until MacOS and Windows scan our computers for "suspicious" material?
You’re using your computer wrong, Nazi! We have locked your accounts, clones your hard drive, and encrypted your entire system to prevent your access. Also, your Apple Card is frozen.
 
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