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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

This is on your device, not hosted by a third party (and therefore not a third party liability). Kind of like if your microwave was checking that there wasn't any illegal activity happening in your home and phoning home if it has a suspicion.

As others mentioned, privacy erosion only goes one way. This is a frontier being breached, i.e. searching your physical device without a warrant, and as usual in the name of CP (the alternative typical pretext being terrorism). It won't take very long before this gets extended to any illegal activity. Gay dating was an illegal activity until not so long ago. This sort of chinese-style monitoring is not desirable in any way, and I find it appalling that Apple seems to want to be the sponsor.

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No it’s not. Read the article: the proposed mechanism is implemented as part of photo upload to iCloud.

The title says "scan US phones", the article is behind a paywall.

https://archive.is/https://www.ft.com/content/14440f81-d405-...

Thanks. The article confirms the title, this is not about content uploaded to the cloud:

Apple’s system is less invasive in that the screening is done on the phone, and “only if there is a match is notification sent back to those searching”, said Alan Woodward, a computer security professor at the University of Surrey. “This decentralised approach is about the best approach you could adopt if you do go down this route.”

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14231090022805135... and https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/14231094582936289... kind of sums it up. Clearly there is an intent to progress to more than just what's been shared with iCloud. Otherwise there'd be no need for software on the devices themselves at all.

That is not the only explanation. Involving the device could be considered better because it doesn’t require Apple to build infrastructure to scan all your photos in the cloud, which could be more easily repurposed without user consent.

They scan photos in the cloud now. And do you think Apple will announce and let users opt out of client side scanning changes?

As far as is publicly known, only iCloud Mail was being scanned before this announcement. This is consistent with the lack of overall CyberTip reports from Apple historically (orders of magnitudes lower than comparable platforms).

Articles said Apple scanned iCloud photos last year. I see some of them were updated to be less specific.

The slant I took from that thread is this is the way to comply with known-bad-hash matching requirement while preserving E2E encryption for cloud-stored content: checking hash at an end.

Don’t need to MITM when you put an M at an end.

iCloud photos aren't E2E encrypted now. This could be a way to add E2E encryption while preserving the current level of surveillance. Except the article said Apple can decrypt suspect photos. And it isn't a legal requirement apparently.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28077619

> According to people briefed on the plans, every photo uploaded to iCloud in the US will be given a “safety voucher” saying whether it is suspect or not. Once a certain number of photos are marked as suspect, Apple will enable all the suspect photos to be decrypted and, if apparently illegal, passed on to the relevant authorities.

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