Comment by sushiburps
4 years ago
Apple has through side channels leaked iCloud is the largest open host of CSAM among big tech. It's the only large provider that hosts images that doesn't automatically scan. The only difference is Apple wants to do it while leaving your photos in the cloud encrypted. This isn't rational, it's an anti-Apple culture war position.
This entire argument is based on the premise that Apple only scans photos that the user has requested to be uploaded to iCloud, and will continue to do so.
I don't think many people believe that anymore. Not even the Apple's goodwill, necessarily - but that, once the system is in place and normalized, the governments won't mandate it and extend its scope by legislative fiat.
Are the photos in iCloud actually encrypted, though? As far as I’m aware, a government agency can subpoena them already. I’m not sure I agree with the slippery-slope argument, but I’m still failing to see how Apple’s current security model prevents them from performing the hashing on iCloud servers and avoiding all this drama.
And there's no reason they can't scan the images on their servers.
Can you point to any examples of these leaks?
(Edit: Thanks for the links.)
It’s not a leak. It’s an observation from evidence that came out during discovery in the Apple vs. Epic trial that’s being reported now that it’s useful context: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/08/19/apple-e...
https://www.theverge.com/22611236/epic-v-apple-emails-projec...
#71, from the Epic v. Apple anti-trust trial discovery.
That's referring to iMessage. Predators grooming children is not something the on-device photo library scanning is going to fix.
They could let users report such messages to Apple, but that requires having a team of humans to review iMessage reports.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_phot...
I'd much prefer they scan their shared albums on the server.