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Comment by jachee | Hacker News Reader

> …your phone is constantly scanning your photos to check for signs of homosexual behaviour. Forgetfully take a selfie with your boyfriend, it gets flagged…

Except that’s not what this is doing.

For all intents and purposes, “scanning” is just hashing content before it’s uploaded and comparing that hash to a known database. So, unless your picture had been hashed and flagged before (And if you just took it how could it have been?) then there’s nothing for it to match.

Don’t just conjure FUD from a contrived worst-case scenario.

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The hash matching part of this is a red herring. The real issue is that if a hash matches, there's now a mechanism to upload the image in question from your phone, unencrypted, without your consent. What assurance is there that the hidden upload mechanism can't be used to upload other files on demand? If a mechanism is built into the OS that can exfiltrate files on demand, what's to say there even has to be a hash match? Or that iCloud has to be active? What's to stop any government from going to Apple and saying "we know you have this ability, give us all this user's files." Nothing.

The exfiltration mechanism is the problem. If this were saying a hash match could be used to obtain a search warrant, that would be bad, but it would be far less egregious a breach of security and privacy than Apple adding a backdoor to just grab anything it likes.

It’s not a “hidden upload mechanism”. It’s a hash-and-flag system on top of the extant “upload to iCloud” function.

Apple will already have the data. You’re already consenting to that when you enable iCloud Photo Library (the only place this is being implemented).

But all uploads to iCloud are [edit: will be] encrypted. This system includes another, separate mechanism to upload a file unencrypted, not to iCloud, but to some other system where humans can review it. So it's not using the same functionality as a normal upload. The file doesn't have to have been uploaded to iCloud yet, or ever, to be copied off the phone using some other method. The whole point is that they don't want unencrypted copies being uploaded to iCloud, so they can't review what was uploaded via the iCloud route. Therefore they want some other method of checking your files locally - which means they need a backdoor to copy them without your permission.

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