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Comment by toxik

4 years ago

If the details of the "hashing" scheme used is publicized, I imagine it will be near trivial. It's a long-standing problem in computer vision, to find a digital description of an image such that two similar images compare equal or at least similar.

State-of-the-art for this field is deep learning, and a /huge/ problem with the DL approach is that you can generate adversarial examples. So for example, a picture of a teacup that is identified by /most/ networks as a dog. It's particularly damning, because it seems like you don't have to do this for particular deep networks, they get tricked the same way, so to speak.

Since this algorithm presumably runs on-device, I am sure it won’t be long before someone has reverse engineered it…

  • Indeed, at which point we’ll know if Apple has implemented an obviously broken solution which opens us up to egregious government surveillance, or whether that is all just speculation without a factual basis.