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Comment by JimDabell

1 day ago

Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.

It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread use today and I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it instead of knee-jerk outrage. But congrats, I guess. All the cloud hosting systems scan what they want anyway, and the one that was actually designed with privacy in mind got screamed out of existence by people who didn’t care to learn the first thing about it.

Good riddance to a system that would have provided precedent for client-side scanning for arbitrary other things, as well as likely false positives.

> I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it

I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.

We need to just keep making it clear the answer is "no", and hopefully strengthen that to "no, and perhaps the massive smoking crater that used to be your political career will serve as a warning to the next person who tries".

  • This. No matter how cool the engineering might have been, from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for… Apple was very much creating the Torment Nexus from “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.”

    • > from the perspective of what surveillance policies it would have (and very possibly did) inspire/set precedent for…

      I can’t think of a single thing that’s come along since that is even remotely similar. What are you thinking of?

      I think it’s actually a horrible system to implement if you want to spy on people. That’s the point of it! If you wanted to spy on people, there are already loads of systems that exist which don’t intentionally make it difficult to do so. Why would you not use one of those models instead? Why would you take inspiration from this one in particular?

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  • I don’t think you can accurately describe it as client-side scanning and false positives were not likely. Depending upon how you view it, false positives were either extremely unlikely, or 100% guaranteed for practically everybody. And if you think the latter part is a problem, please read up on it!

    > I'm reminded of a recent hit-piece about Chat Control, in which one of the proponent politicians was quoted as complaining about not having a debate. They didn't actually want a debate, they wanted to not get backlash. They would never have changed their minds, so there's no grounds for a debate.

    Right, well I wanted a debate. And Apple changed their minds. So how is it reminding you of that? Neither of those things apply here.

    • Forgot about the concept of bugs have we? How about making Apple vulnerable to demands from every government where they do business?

      No thanks. I'll take a hammer to any device in my vicinity that implements police scanning.

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There is no place for spyware of any kind on my phone. Saying that it is to "protect the children" and "to catch terrorists" does not make it any more acceptable.

  • Do you have any phones without spyware?

    I believe my retro Nokia phones s60/s90 does not have any spyware. I believe earlier Nokia models like s40 or monochrome does not even have an ability to spy on me (but RMS considers triangulation as spyware). I don't believe any products from the duopoly without even root access are free from all kinds of vendor's rootkits.

> The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.

But not very different to how it was actually going to work, as you say:

> If you change parts of it, sure.

Now try to reason your way out of the obvious "parts of it will definitely change" knee-jerk.

  • I’m not sure I’m understanding you.

    Apple designed a system. People guessed at what it did. Their guesses were way off the mark. This poisoned all rational discussion on the topic. If you imagine a system that works differently to Apple’s system, you can complain about that imaginary system all you want, but it won’t be meaningful, it’s just noise.

    • You understand it just fine, you're just trying to pass you fantasy pod immutable safe future as rational while painting the obvious objections based on the real world as meaningless noise.

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