Comment by SXX
4 years ago
It's funny to see anyone here could find this acceptable. I wonder what's comments would be after Apple start to scan phones for anti-censorship or anti-CCP materials in China. Or for some gay porn in Saudi Arabia.
Because you know in some countries there are materials that local government find more offensive than mere child abuse. And once surveillance tech is deployed it's certainly gonna be used to oppress people.
> Because you know in some countries there are materials that local government find more offensive than mere child abuse. And once surveillance tech is deployed it's certainly gonna be used to oppress people.
In Saudi, Bahrain, and Iran there is no minimum age of consent – just a requirement for marriage. In Yemen, the age of consent for women is 9 (but they must be married first). In Macau, East Timor, and UAE, it's 14. [1]
I would allege that in all of those states they would probably find the perceptual hash of government criticism far more important to include on the "evil material" database than anything else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Asia
Won't anyone think of the children! And Tim Cook personally promised to not look at anything in my unencrypted iCloud backup, they really care about privacy!
And you can be sure that there's no way for the PRC, that already runs its own iCloud, to use this. America's favorite company wouldn't allow that.
> I wonder what's comments would be after Apple start to scan phones for anti-censorship or anti-CCP materials in China.
I'm cynical enough to wonder whether this isn't their actual commercial reason for developing this, with CSAM being a PR fig leaf. Apple is substantially more dependent on China than its major competitors.
Exactly, now Apple has this tech, shady governments know they can mandate Apple to use it for their own databases and Apple will have to do this if they want to keep operating within a territory.
If you don't, you are suspicious.