Comment by WarOnPrivacy
3 days ago
> Unfortunately, instead of reading about how it actually worked, huge amounts of people just guessed incorrectly about how it worked
Folks did read. They guessed that known hashes would be stored on devices and images would be scanned against that. Was this a wrong guess?
> the conversation was dominated by uninformed outrage about things that weren’t happening.
The thing that wasn't happening yet was mission creep beyond the original targets. Because expanding-beyond-originally-stated-parameters is thing that happens with far reaching monitoring systems. Because it happens with the type of regularity that is typically limited to physics.
There were 2ndary concerns about how false positives would be handled. There were concerns about what the procedures were for any positive. Given Gov propensities to ruin lives now and ignore that harm (or craft a justification) later, the concerns seem valid.
That's what I recall the concerned voices were on about. To me, they didn't seem outraged.
> Folks did read. They guessed that known hashes would be stored on devices and images would be scanned against that. Was this a wrong guess?
Yes. Completely wrong. Not even close.
Why don’t you just go and read about it instead of guessing? Seriously, the point of my comment was that discussion with people who are just guessing is worthless.
Why don't you just explain what you want people to know instead of making everyone else guess what you are thinking?
> Why don't you just explain what you want people to know instead of making everyone else guess what you are thinking?
I’m not making people guess. I explained directly what I wanted people to know very, very plainly.
You are replying now as if the discussion we are having is whether it’s a good system or not. That is not the discussion we are having.
This is the point I was making:
> instead of reading about how it actually worked, huge amounts of people just guessed incorrectly about how it worked and the conversation was dominated by uninformed outrage about things that weren’t happening.
The discussion is about the ignorance, not about the system itself. If you knew how it worked and disagreed with it, then I would completely support that. I’m not 100% convinced myself! But you don’t know how it works, you just assumed – and you got it very wrong. So did a lot of other people. And collectively, that drowned out any discussion of how it actually worked, because you were all mad about something imaginary.
You are perfectly capable of reading how it worked. You do not need me to waste a lot of time re-writing Apple’s materials on a complex system in this small text box on Hacker News so you can then post a one sentence shallow dismissal. There is no value in doing that at all, it just places an asymmetric burden on me to continue the conversation.
1 reply →
>They guessed that known hashes would be stored on devices and images would be scanned against that. Was this a wrong guess?
> Yes. Completely wrong. Not even close.
Per Apple:
Recapping here. In your estimation:
Is not even close to
. And folks who read the latter and thought the former were, in your view, "Completely wrong".
Well, okay then.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250905063000/https://www.apple...
The actual system is that they used a relatively complex zero-knowledge set-matching algorithm to calculate whether an image was a match without downloading or storing the set of hashes locally.
That said, I think this is mostly immaterial to the problem? As the comment you’re responding to says, the main problem they have with the system is mission creep, that governments will expand the system to cover more types of photos, etc. since the software is already present to scan through people’s photos on device. Which could happen regardless of how fancy the matching algorithm was.