Comment by Grustaf
4 years ago
Edward Snowden just went full Stallman. Take a good idea and ride it over the cliff of sanity.
Of course privacy can't be absolute, we live in a society. Be realistic. Focus on evil things. If you think Apple have an evil plan, sure, but most people who object don't even think that.
And for a tech spy he seems to not understand tech. "What if some evil regime wants Apple to scan for anti-government propaganda". Well then they won't be using the CSAM system that's for sure, they can just scan the images directly, either on iCloud or on device. Co-opting the CSAM scanner is probably the most impractical way imaginable to spy on Uighur separatists.
Let me see: Who I will trust more about "security" or "privacy"?
Some guy on hackernews, full with well payed Apple employees or renowned spy?
Hard thing to do? Right?
I'm not saying you should "trust" me, or anyone. Just consider the facts:
A)
- Apple have complete control over the hardware, the OS and all the most popular apps, including Photos and Mail.
- They also have complete control over iCloud, which is not encrypted
- They can and do scan your photos and emails so that they can classify photos, find possible appointments, emails etc, and now they even OCR your photos.
B)
- They are now building a very high profile, limited and locked in system that relies on hashes, external databases, a large number of matches, human review etc.
Do you really think they would use B if they, the FBI, the Chinese government or whoever, would want to spy on users? For all we know they are already spying, it would be completely trivial to do so. Clearly system B is a complete red herring when it comes to spying. They don't need it.
The point is not to lose yourself in the technical implementation.
Design of the system is corrupt, implementation is done in a way to hide this with layers of complication and false "privacy" for "normal" users.
For me and many other people there is difference in knowing that Apple is the only responsible part in a contract and on other hand adding third party private corporation (funded by DOJ with more than 30 million dollars), which will "provide" the hashes and because of the sensitive nature of hashed material nobody will have access for auditing.
Nobody in their right mind believed Apple about "privacy". The difference here are that this is intrusion on my property from assumption that I am guilty until proven innocent.
A lot of normal people, without technical knowledge can see that this is a big problem.
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