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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

This is the most honest take on this that I’ve seen. The slippery slope arguments don’t make sense, nor does the risk of false positives.

But the idea of being suspected even in this abstract way, because of something other people do, is at the very least distasteful, bordering on offensive.

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> distasteful

This is the word that most captures my feeling not just around the feature but how it was rolled out as well. Reading the PR announcement and then the leaked memo just felt - quite distasteful.

There are a number of things Apple has done and continues to do that fit into that category for me personally - the fact that iOS is so locked down for example.

But this really takes the cake. It's like someone at Apple dialed up the distasteful to 11 and let loose.

The whole industry does distasteful things but this is a harbinger of our inability to trust them at a deeper level. Not just Apple.

> The slippery slope arguments don’t make sense, nor does the risk of false positives.

Yeah no, there are about 1b iphones in use, even a ridiculous low amount of false positive would be a major pain in the ass for a lot of people regularly.

The slippery slope argument is totally valid, whatever legal safeguards you have today might not exist tomorrow, but the tech will stay here forever.

I actually fail to see how your second sentence support the first. Treating everyone as a potential suspect of a crime (which isn't even wide spread in the first place) is a major slippery slope. Today it's "for the children and only in the US" tomorrow it might be "find me pro Palestinians pictures of people living in Israel". Nobody can predict what apple stance will be in 25+ years

I agree with this take, but the slippery slope arguments do make sense, as exemplified by any spying technology ever. Once a capability exists, it's too enticing not to continue expanding the scope.

Exactly.

Selling dev consoles on ebay or drugs on the darkweb? We'll take the picture in the listing and find out who took it.

Can't find any matches? This is too ineffective. We'll need Apple to store all hashes on all devices for 6 months.

The slippery slope argument makes a LOT of sense.

Nope. This would be an illegal search under the 4th Amendment.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/12/a-38-year...

Not everyone in the world is protected by the US Constitution and although Apple is initially only rolling this out in the US there is no doubt it will be rolled out in other countries sooner or later.

Parallel construction is how rules are circumvented

I would not say the slippery slope take doesn't make sense. It is perfectly possible that had no one cried out about this change then the next change would have been:

Large government to Apple: "Please now also create a hash on each photo metadata field including date/time and location. Let us query these. AND BTW, this change must be kept secret. Thanks."

That’s not at all how hashes work here.

I know that is not how it works currently, I was merely suggesting how something could change.

> Large government to Apple: "Please now also create a hash on each photo metadata field including date/time and location. Let us query these. AND BTW, this change must be kept secret. Thanks."

How do you know this hasn’t already happened? What does it have to do with the CSAM technology?

How do you know the invisible pink unicorn doesn't exist? You don't, but going after the known bad things is the most effective action you can take. You certainly don't ignore known bad things just because there may be even worse unknown things.

Right, but this isn’t a bad thing. The bad things people are claiming are things they imagine could be done in the future.

Exactly like an Invisible Pink Unicorn.

If you go after imaginary bad things, you will never stop. That is the problem with paranoia.

> it is possible that had no-one cried about this change,

The “UK porn filter” has already been extended to all sorts of “« extremism online »” (to no effect in the capital of knife attacks, it seems — as usual invasive police rights do not equal a reduction of criminality) and it’s already being proposed to be extended to:

- Online Harms

- Online Safety Bill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_blocking_in_the_United_Kin...

Right. My argument against the slippery slope argument is not that governments won’t make demands.

It’s that if they do, this technology is irrelevant.

How do the slippery slope arguments not make sense? This is a capability that:

1. Did not exist prior (scanning stuff on the endpoint)

2. Has a plausible abuse case (the same system, applied to stuff that isn't CSAM)

I find this very compelling, especially in the shittier regimes (China...) that Apple operates in.

Neither 1 nor 2 are in fact true. Spotlight indexes all kinds of metadata, as does photos search. Adding an agent to upload data from these is easier than extending the CSAM mechanism, and the CSAM mechanism as is is not all that plausible to abuse either technically or socially given how clear Apple’s promises are.

Why should Apple's promises be taken at face value? Doubly so in a world where they can be compelled legally to break those promises and say nothing (especially in the more totalitarian countries they willingly operate in and willingly subvert some of their other privacy guarantees)?

What stops Apple from altering the deal further?

And if you have an answer for that, what makes you believe that 10 years in the future, with someone else at the helm, that they won't?

Your device is now proactively acting as a stool pigeon for the government where it wasn't prior. This is a new capacity.

And it's for CSAM. For now. The technological leap from locally scanning just the stuff you upload, to scanning everything, is a very simple change. The leap from scanning for CSAM to scanning for some other perceptual hashes the government wants matched is very simple.

What stops them from altering the deal is that they have said they won’t, and there really is no evidence to believe otherwise.

If they do, then they do. There are never any guarantees about anyone’s future behavior. However just saying ‘what stops you from becoming a thief?’, does not imply that you will become a thief.

There is no new capability other than what they have said. They already had far more general purpose mechanisms for analysing and searching your files already in the operating system.

The leap from doing spotlight indexing to searching for the keywords ‘falun gong’ or ‘proud boys’ in your files is also simple. So is the leap from searching your photos locally for ‘dogs’, to searching locally for ‘swastikas’ and reporting back when they are found.

If they decide to build some spyware, there is no need for it to be based on this. It’s a red herring.

> the CSAM mechanism as is is not all that plausible to abuse either technically or socially given how clear Apple’s promises are.

That’s the problem: Apples promise means nothing exactly because it’s so easy to abuse.

Apple says they will refuse when asked to scan for anything that is not CSAM. That’s one of those nice ‘technically true’ statements lawyers like to include.

Apple will not have to refuse anything, because they won’t be asked.

Apple doesn’t get a huge pile of CSAM images (obviously), they get a list of hashes from a 3rd party. They have no way of ensuring that these hashes are only for CSAM content. And when ‘manually’ checking, they aren’t actually looking at potential CSAM, they are checking the ‘visual derivative’ (whatever that means exactly), basically a manual check if the hashes match.

So yes, they would technically refuse if asked to scan for other material, but they will just accept any list of hashes provided to them by NCMEC (an organization created by the US government and funded by the US DoJ) no questions asked. The US government could include any hash they wish into this list without Apple ever noticing.

> And when ‘manually’ checking, they aren’t actually looking at potential CSAM, they are checking the ‘visual derivative’ (whatever that means exactly), basically a manual check if the hashes match.

The visual derivative is enough to tell the difference between a collection of CSAM and say documents, or pictures of protests.

It can’t be abused without Apple’s involvement.

> The visual derivative is enough to tell the difference between a collection of CSAM and say documents, or pictures of protests.

How would you know ? They have never given details on what this 'visual derivative' actually is. If it's detailed enough to recognise it as CSAM, then Apple isn't allowed to look at it.

That’s a fair point.

However this is moot anyway. Using this mechanism to search for things other than CSAM would be unconstitutional under the 4th amendment.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/12/a-38-year...

Apple very recently promised that “what happens on iPhone stays on iPhone”. At literally the same time, they were building a system that was designed to break that promise. Why should we believe their new promises when their last promise was disingenuous?

https://9to5mac.com/2019/01/05/apple-privacy-billboard-vegas...

How does this break that promise? Nothing leaves the phone unless the user chooses to upload their photos to a cloud service.

That setting is on by default.

> The slippery slope arguments don’t make sense

Yes, they do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28160092

No they don’t. Searches for things other than CSAM would be inadmissible under the 4th amendment. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/12/a-38-year...

That article is very obviously not about what is being searched for. It's about who it is being reported to. For example, if Apple one day decided to detect unauthorized copyrighted media, they could report it to the RIAA. The RIAA is independent of the government, thus the 4th amendment is not violated.

So then you must agree that the fears of government overreach are unwarranted. Given that’s what most of the complaints here raw about, that’s a big deal.

> For example, if Apple one day decided to detect unauthorized copyrighted media, they could report it to the RIAA. The RIAA is independent of the government, thus the 4th amendment is not violated.

It’s true that Apple could decide to implement any search or scanning mechanism at any time, and report anything they like to anyone they want to. So what? This is true of anyone who writes software that handles user data.

What does that have to do with the CSAM mechanism? It seems like an unrelated fear.

> What does that have to do with the CSAM mechanism? It seems like an unrelated fear.

He CSAM mechanism proves that Apple can and will go this route, even if users are against that.

The CSAM mechanism proves that Apple will send information to the RIAA or another non-government entity?

How exactly does it prove that?

But only because Apple is doing the searches on device. If the searching is done in the cloud, the third party doctrine means that the US Government could demand anything and the 4th Amendment wouldn't apply.

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