Comment by willis936
4 years ago
>So... all your hashes will be uploaded to the cloud?
That isn't how I interpret "client-side".
The privacy implications are far more subtle.
4 years ago
>So... all your hashes will be uploaded to the cloud?
That isn't how I interpret "client-side".
The privacy implications are far more subtle.
It's still really, really bad.
It always starts with child porn, and in a few years the offline Notes app will be phoning home if you write speech criticising the government in China.
This technology inevitably leads to the sueveillance, suppression and murder of activists and journalists. It always starts with protecting the kids or terrorism.
Perceptual hashes like what Apple is using are already used in WeChat to detect memes that critique the CCP.
What happens on local end user devices must be off limits. It is unacceptable that Apple is actively implementing machine learning systems that surveil and snitch on local content.
> in a few years the offline Notes app will be phoning home if you write speech criticising the government in China.
A totalitarian autocracy like China does not need this technology to search for wrongspeech, sadly. You are of course aware that all Chinese iCloud users get their data stored in a special set of datacenters that Apple actually doesn't control.
The problem is, that this will be done in other, (currently) freer countries. Eg. Reddit has removed a lot of anti-china posts in the last few years. And of course, local leaders will use this to find anti-local-leader stuff on their citizens phones too.
This seems to be done voluntarily by NVIDIA, at least partially. While in Seattle I set up geo-blocking on my LAN as an experiment. Later when I tried to create an NVIDIA account I couldn't because it was attempting to store my PII at nvidia.cn. When I changed the url to nvidia.com everything worked just fine. I've always wondered what non-evil reasons one could use to explain that choice by NVIDIA. Ping was at least 2x longer to .cn.
I agree with you 100% — the only solution I’ve found workable is limiting my use of the technology itself as much as possible.
Or regulation saying that this is illegal, because it invades users privacy too much.
5 replies →
You could you exclusively free software instead. It respects your freedoms.
> It's still really, really bad.
The OP still addresses the inaccurate statement (presented in the form of a question for plausible deniability).