Apple Delays Plans To Roll Out CSAM Detection in iOS 15 (techcrunch.com) 61
Apple has delayed plans to roll out its child sexual abuse (CSAM) detection technology that it chaotically announced last month, citing feedback from customers and policy groups. From a report: That feedback, if you recall, has been largely negative. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said this week it had amassed more than 25,000 signatures from consumers. On top of that, close to 100 policy and rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, also called on Apple to abandon plans to roll out the technology. In a statement on Friday morning, Apple told TechCrunch: "Last month we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features."
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All you've said is: "I cant beat 'em in an argument so I hope ArMy GuYs can defend me!"
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All you've said is: "I cant beat 'em in an argument so I hope ArMy GuYs can defend me!"
Indeed. Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. Also, violence destroys societies.
Might have been the plan all along (Score:1)
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Just like their cpu throttling code.
Yes, I'd much prefer that my phone would shut down unexpectedly.
Re: Might have been the plan all along (Score:2)
Congratulations for falling for a false dichotomy. You're in good company, I guess.
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Did you ever trust them? For example, I knew right when Sergey and Larry showed up at my university to give a talk aimed at hiring people that they basically had founded a cult and that "don't be evil" would not last. The "creepy" vibe was really strong there.
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Username checks out!
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Oh, snap! My whole life?!
OK, critical thinking test, how much of your life do you need to spend sucking on the slashdot comments to even have an opinion on that?
For some reason, you seem really hurt by comment. Exceptionally hurt. Why is that?
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Five seconds, douchebag: https://slashdot.org/slash-sta... [slashdot.org]
Get a fucking life
Everyone hated it (Score:5, Interesting)
CSAM was the thing that finally united the most die-hard Apple hater with the most vigorous Apple evangelist - I did not see a single person outside Apple supporting CSAM, and in fact everyone I ever saw hated it, and hated that Apple was doing it.
Glad to hear Apple is listening to reason - and customers.
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I think there are valid arguments to be made for it—mostly in the interest of self-regulating with a "privacy preserving" feature so that they don't have more draconian measures imposed on them—but I didn't see a single person unequivocally supporting this. All of the support I saw was heavily qualified. Even my statement that I think there are valid arguments to be made is heavily qualified.
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similarities.
entering my phone is a lot like entering my home.
have the enableers of csam really thought this through
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I am pretty sure Apple did this under coercion. They cannot be that stupid. At the very least, if this had been their own idea, they would have tested it on a selected user group under NDA and would have seen this would cause a major uproar. I also have a deep suspicion that they sabotaged their own announcement as far as they dared without being obvious about it.
Now it is important to keep the rejection of that idea going strong.
Overall it is good to see that the "think of the children" fallacy is loosing
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One wonders if Apple did it on purpose.
You have to remember, Apple is the only cloud provider not actually scanning cloud-stored photos for CSAM. Every other cloud provider is.
The question then becomes, if the images are stored encrypted on your servers and you can't view them, how do you scan for them? They don't exist anywhere other than the devices the users own in any viewable format, so you pretty much have to push the image scanning to just prior to image upload.
One could argue Apple simply wasn't pla
Re: Everyone hated it (Score:2)
Where is the opposition to Google/Microsoft ++? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the opposition to the vast number of actors already using this?
PhotoDNA - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - PhotoDNA is an image-identification technology used for detecting child pornography and other illegal content which is reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) as required by law. From a database of known illegal images and video files, it creates unique hashes to represent each image, which can then be used to identify other instances of those images ... It is used on Microsoft's own services including Bing and OneDrive,[4] as well as by Google's Gmail, Twitter,[5] Facebook,[6] Adobe Systems,[7] Reddit,[8] Discord[9] and the NCMEC
Where are attacks on Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Adobe, Reddit and Discord?
Where are the demands that Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Adobe, Reddit and Discord stop doing this?
Where are the declarations that - danger danger - governments could poison the database of hashes to track whistleblower material shared by Gmail?
Just to preempt that criticism - for Apple, this would only have applied if photo sharing with iCloud was turned on, and it would have required a large number of matches before any flag was given.
Re:Where is the opposition to Google/Microsoft ++? (Score:4, Insightful)
none of those other assholes even pretended to care about our privacy. part of apple's pitch was: we care about your privacy. thats why the apple hate.
Re:Where is the opposition to Google/Microsoft ++? (Score:5, Insightful)
None of those other services made your personal device scan for content locally and report back to the mothership
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None of those other services made your personal device scan for content locally and report back to the mothership
Indeed. And that is the real difference here. Of course anything loaded into some cloud gets scanned. That is why you should, for example, always encrypt backups going to hardware not under your control. But scanning on _your_ device is on a different level, and fortunately many people realized that.
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Just to preempt that criticism - for Apple, this would only have applied if photo sharing with iCloud was turned on
Re:Where is the opposition to Google/Microsoft ++? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there is a difference in perception (if not a practical given how locked down iOS is) that those are third party services. People get that 'cloud is someone elses computer' on certain level. Independently if they think its right or not - or if its true or not - most of the public probably assumes google can sift thru the content of your gdrive or mailbox.
On the other hand people still think of the phone in their pocket that they paid nearly a $1000 belongs to them! They think what is on it is an should be private, and don't like the idea of anyone outsider be it algorithm or human reviewer (remember 99.9% of the public does not understand this technology) belongs sifting thru it.
They also worry that it could be abused (rightly). What will happen to them if they guy they just let go at work gets a burner phone and starts texting them pictures snapped in the locker room at the public pool? Will they suddenly find them selves being perp walked before the news cameras?
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the phone in their pocket that they paid nearly a $1000 belongs to them!
This is still true. You have the choice to upgrade to IOS 15, or any other release that includes the surveillance software.
You also have the choice toâ¦. (Score:2)
Re: Where is the opposition to Google/Microsoft ++ (Score:2)
Re:Where is the opposition to Google/Microsoft ++? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I will spell it out for you.
There are so many attack vectors that could potentially destroy the life of an iPhone owner that it's not even funny.
I am not a Cybersecurity expert, but here you have a couple I have devised on my own:
1. I know your phone syncs with iCloud. If I have temporary (about one minute should be enough) physical access to your LOCKED phone, I can take pictures of CSAM imagery, for instance, from the screen of another device. Next time you unlock, those get copied to your library, synced with iCloud, and your life is destroyed;
2. I know your phone syncs with iCloud. I know you have auto-download enabled on IM (Whatsapp, for instance). I send you 30 images of CSAM in the middle of the night, so you don't actually see them, and then delete them from the Whatsapp chat. They get automatically downloaded to your gallery, synced to iCloud. You wake up the next morning with a SWAT wake-up call. Your life is destroyed.
Two examples I just came up with. I can probably create a couple more, again, with no cybersecurity/hacking/whatever expertise.
Scared already?
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I am an IT Security expert, and yes, both scenarios are entirely plausible. You may get exonerated in both cases, but at least in the US that will be after you lost your job, your family and your reputation. There are also realistic scenarios where it becomes highly unlikely that you will get exonerated.
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Having said that, it still is a major security hole and (if it works - I don't have an iPhone to test this with) it could obviously be used to cause major headaches to the iPhone's owner. Just not as "fully automatically"
Re: Where is the opposition to Google/Microsoft ++ (Score:2)
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Only MEGA, a New Zealand company started by a German expat, uses end-to-end encryption effectively.
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Chaotic . . . (Score:2)
fact - it was a 'casual' announcement with few details
I asked at the announcement, 'what does this mean'? If it's going to alert the user of problematic images, in the same way it alerts you of bad/compromised passwords . . . maybe it's not a bad idea. I know I'd prefer some kind of litmus test I could run to see results of a law being applied to
But think of the children! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty much. Calling this "critical" is an instance of the "Big Lie" technique. The only people this would ever have been caught would have been people that did this by accident or had that CSAM put there by malicious actors to destroy their reputation. As such, its value to protect children is somewhere between zero and somewhat negative. On the non-stated part, however, namely making it acceptable to scan user devices without consent and court order, it would have been disastrous.
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
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There’s nothing insightful about this.
Apple’s system is far less intrusive, and far harder to abuse, than what every other cloud storage vendor does. If you consider CSAM to be a problem, then Apple is not the bad guy here. Or rather, they are dramatically less of a bad guy than every other cloud storage vendor.
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If it can be used against CSAM, it can be used against (say) Hong Kong freedom material. If governments know that Apple has the capability, they will pressure Apple to use it for political purposes.
Shh! Don't let the bad governments know they can ask Apple to do things they won't want to do! The world would be a terrible place if they found out, thank god they don't know! We're so much safer if they don't know Apple could detect things in images. Boy we really dodged a bullet on that one.
There's more (Score:1)
What Apple isn't disclosing is there internal atmosphere about this and the increase in customers who disabled iCloud, which will hurt their bottom line.
Apple, please stick to innovation -- stop pandering to gov't agencies, it's old -- we're tired of it.
Hate to “whaddabout”, but (Score:2)
Every other cloud provider does vastly more intrusive scanning of content, with no safeguards at all. Apple has been punished for being open about what they’re doing, and trying to build in safeguards.
Re: Hate to “whaddabout”, but (Score:3)
Not on the client side, they don't.
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The problem is that with a cloud service, there are access logs. If somebody hacks your account and uploads illegal content, the cloud provider has a record of the IP that will not trace back to you. Here, there is not obviously anything that would exonerate you. Cell phones don't do much local logging.
With this, anybody who hacks your consumer device can place illegal content on it. What do you do when you get an email that says, "We have hacked your device. Send us a bitcoin or else we'll transfer illegal
Still burning (Score:3)
I already explained Apple's management will not be able to turn their back on this, since it would make them vulnerable to attacks that they don't care about children's' sexual safety.
The only way for Apple to definitively solve this is to encrypt iCloud storage end-to-end so they don't get difficult questions from government and politicians why there's CSAM on their servers and why they're not doing anything about it. If everything's encrypted no one knows whats on the servers, so no hard questions.
No one's asking Mega whether there's CSAM on their servers (I'm pretty sure there is) because no one knows.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Cool story - now enlighten us: have you just reduced your interaction with all aspects of the modern world to posting to Slashdot with 14 year old PC running Linux from Scratch in your mom's basement via your neighbor's unsecured wifi or which of the nearly universally worse for your privacy options, even Apple announced this BS, have you moved too?
I am not excusing Apple here in anyway. Its just sometimes I read stuff like this and I wonder about the people who claim to be voting with their feet/wa
Everything had the green light. (Score:2)
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How about the - only pedos post things anonymously. Only pedos try to defend that stuff.
It's too late (Score:2)
It's too late, now. Th damage has been done. Apple has already shown that it can and will install intrusive software on iPhones at-will. Software that is mysterious and opaque in its form and function, whose decisions cannot be scrutinised or questioned.
It won't be long until a totalitarian government with a large market share will insist Apple uses the same software on its citizens phones, and of course they are looking for bad people.
COVID-19 has shown just how risk-averse a population of "good people" ca