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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

If I go on 4chan and an illegal image loads and caches into my phone before moderators take it down or I hit the back button, will Apple’s automated system ruin my life?

This kind of stuff absolutely petrifies me because I’m so scared of getting accidentally scooped up for something completely unintentional. And I do not trust police one bit to behave like intelligent adult humans.

Right now I feel like I need to stop doing ANYTHING that goes anywhere outside the velvet ropes of the modern commercial internet. That is, anywhere that cannot pay to moderate everything well enough that I don’t run the risk of having my entire life ruined because some #%^*ing algorithm picks up on some content I didn’t even choose to download.

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> If I go on 4chan and an illegal image loads and caches into my phone before moderators take it down or I hit the back button, will Apple’s automated system ruin my life?

No, only if you save multiple CSAM images to your photo library and have iCloud Photo Library turned on.

for 4chan maybe that's true but I'm not sure what about some public whatsapp group? I have been part of few public hiking/travelling group and even though I have most of them muted (to avoid distraction) all pictures end up in my Photos 'Recent' Album.

You can turn that off in Settings -> Chats -> Save to Camera Roll

But what if you don’t realize you can do this or you forget to? This should be off by default if you ask me.

If you see something, say something, and report the person sending that stuff.

Okay. For now. But it’s a trivial change to begin reading my cache.

The technical details and current policies don’t really matter. The bigger picture is terrifying.

Sex crime accusations, even if nobody is convicted, completely ruins lives. I don’t want a robot on my phone doing that.

I don’t think it’s as trivial as you suggest, but yeah they could do that – they always could have made changes to flag crime or give access to criminal’s devices but they still refuse to do so.

The barrier for being accused by someone who matters is quite high, you’d need to breach a certain threshold of material. That material is then manually reviewed by a human and only then if it appears to be CSAM do they refer your details to the police. The police would then presumably also check the material is bad before arresting you and ceasing all your devices.

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