Comment by shuckles
4 years ago
This is a claim which should require extraordinary evidence, since Apple has very publicly resisted pressure to build technology at the government’s behest in the past.
4 years ago
This is a claim which should require extraordinary evidence, since Apple has very publicly resisted pressure to build technology at the government’s behest in the past.
It’s now common knowledge (as mentioned in the article) that Apple refrained from adding a feature at the government’s behest in the past. It’s a fine line between not adding a feature they don’t like and adding a feature they do.
This claim is often repeated but the only source for it I’ve found is reporting in Reuters citing anonymous sources. The user experience challenges of end to end encryption are immense, especially since iPhone is many users’ only iCloud client, and I find it hard to believe Apple was moments away from announcing a solution to them but the FBI pressured them out of it. That is not the extraordinary evidence such a claim needs. For example, Bloomberg reported an even better sourced story about supply chain compromises to Apple’s cloud services which has been more or less entirely debunked.
In addition, the emphasis on the on-device portion of this scanning project is evidence that Apple views losing access to iCloud data as part of its roadmap.
The Bloomberg claims were explicitly denied by Apple and several other companies. To the best of my knowledge, Apple has never publicly denied the Reuters reporting, and explicitly declined to comment when given the chance by Reuters. It’s certainly one thing to extend the benefit of the doubt to a company in a dispute with a reputable news agency; it’s entirely another thing to take issue with the claim when even the affected company won’t do so.
5 replies →
Therein lies a problem. Most people would agree that a good predictor what people will do is what they have done in the past. If you read through some of the stories ( those of Snowden come to mind ), some declassified information over the course of the past few decades, a pattern emerges.
There is no evidence, either because it does not exist or because it is hidden. The best we have is inference and whistleblowers.
That said, I genuinely think we are not being tinfoil enough these days. And that is based only on what we know ( or at least avg. citizen should know ) was already done in the past.
The PRISM revelations, to this day, are very ambiguous about their implications for cooperation. When they came out, most involved companies flat out denied cooperation. The types of data the NSA claimed to get were available by tapping into network backbones. Unless you are aware of a theory or evidence I’m not, I think it’s just as likely that the program described in the leaked slides involved unilateral or covert intrusion by the NSA rather than cooperation.
It is reasonable to be conservative about data stored in someone else’s cloud, and there is undeniable value to end to end encryption that gives you control over who can access it. That said, especially if you read Apple’s letter in response to the PRISM allegations, Apple’s behavior seems quite consistent and sincere over time: https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/.
I don’t think it’s likely they designed this feature under pressure from the government or with the intention to expand it to local data on your device.
Ok. If that is not the reason, then the question becomes what is the real reason.
Some analysts seem to think Apple should be getting into advertising business, which would partially explain some of the proposed updates. Naturally, if that were the case, it would render Apple's commitment to privacy about as useful as T-Mobile's. Then again, I might be giving Apple too much crap. Most companies don't even pretend to care.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-could-be-apples-next-...
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Perhaps. However Apple has since released two security updates to iOS but has not patched the iMessage flaw that allows Pegasus software to spy on thousands (perhaps millions) of iphones.
What are they waiting for? Hmm perhaps getting something else in place first.
You are saying known CSAM detection for iCloud Photo Library will launch before the Pegasus 0-days are fixed? The two are entirely different. If Apple was working on behalf of the government, they could’ve already shipped over the contents of iCloud for all the users targeted.
In any case, I’d happily take the other side of the bet at even odds that the security issue is patched after the child safety program goes live.
> since Apple has very publicly resisted pressure to build technology at the government’s behest in the past.
And they've also not done that. When Jobs died Apple promptly bent the knee and joined up to PRISM.
Very publicly resisted? Nope. They went along, very quietly (it was Yahoo that tried to fight back). We only found out about Apple having joined up thanks to the man that wrote this article.
How many human rights atrocities does Apple get to partake in before their credibility is shot, such that the burden is put on them instead, of proving - in such circumstances as this one - that they're not commiting more atrocities.