Apple doesn't "sneak in" stuff like this. That's complete bullshit. Could we at least discuss in good faith?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/p6hsoh/p_a...
It's like being asked to have an invasive, detailed scan of your body shown to TSA personnel (and recorded) when you fly. The motive is apparently to prevent violence. But there were still incidents on flights when that was being done. It wouldn't have caught the box cutters on 9/11. The stated motive ceases to be part of the equation for me.
There's also images that can be abusive if made public but non-abusive if kept private. For example what about a kid taking pictures of themselves nude (many kids don't have parental moderated accounts) and putting them on icloud (iphone does this automatically with default settings).
It's a complete nuthouse and there's no way to do it.
(Also don't get me started on drawn artwork (or 3D CG) that people can create that can show all sorts of things and is fully or partially legal in many countries.)
To add, there are natural neural hash collisions in ImageNet (a famous ML dataset). Images that look nothing alike to us humans.
The issue here is not the trustworthiness of the pinky swear...
In other words, a situation that seems to be a feature toggle away from becoming terrible is terrible in itself.
Editing to add: I think this will play out more like the butterfly keyboard debacle. They won’t ever really acknowledge how bad the original thing was, but they’ll return to a solution the community finds palatable (server side scanning), and wrap it up in a bow like they did with the “magic keyboard, now on our laptops”.
If you look at the tone of all of it, they also honestly felt this was the most privacy preserving way to do CSAM scanning - likely so they can enable E2EE on everything iCloud.
What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to it.
Refers to facts not in evidence.
Additionally, they have previously voluntarily declined to enable e2e on systems to aid government surveillance.
This is baseless speculation, and, given what we know about Apple's history with e2e, not only baseless but actually unlikely.
Apple has not announced E2EE for files stored on iCloud. If that is their intent, they likely would have had a somewhat improved public response by announcing it at the same time as the on-device spyware.
What they got very wrong is that this fundamentally changes the nature of iPhones -- they are no longer user agents; in fact, they're actively scanning user data on behalf of another party. That change doesn't just make people feel uncomfortable, it opens the door for untold myriads of abuses.
It's one thing if iCloud servers scan user data - those servers never were assumed to be user agents. It's entirely different when user-owned devices do this.
I'm afraid good faith is not gonna protect your privacy.
My read is that Apple is trying to placate governments by throwing them a bone without totally abandoning their privacy stance, hence the drive to put the scanning on the actual device so all your photos don't have to be shared as-is with Apple. That way they can encrypt iCloud but still keep the feds from accusing them (in bad faith) of being a child porn trading platform.
The alternative is to keep iCloud unencrypted and scan in the cloud, which is what they and everyone else already does.
One of the pieces of feedback they got though is that people are more okay with that than with scanning on the device. People expect that things that go to the cloud are no longer private unless you run some kind of local encryption that you control.
The reason they don't care about photos not sent to iCloud is the trading platform angle. It's one thing to let people store shit on their own devices. It's another thing to be a large scale and easy to use secure channel that people can use to share CP. The nightmare scenario for Apple would be to become a de-facto standard in the CP underworld for sharing content.
Sure people can use Tor, private VPNs and mesh networks, PGP, or many other things, but that requires a level of technical knowledge that greatly reduces the size of the audience.
Maybe a better alternative for Apple would be to add iCloud encryption but to stipulate that any sharing of content disables encryption for the shared content. That way they could scan shared content only. For unshared content iCloud is basically just an encrypted backup.
You would believe this if you only read/watch Apple PR and ignore reality. The actual reality is that Apple always collaborates with all governments. The reality is that Apple did not announce any new end to end encryption that would use this feature and did not promise such a feature.
In China and other more authoritarian nations that means cooperating a lot. If you don't you do no business in China. In the USA they seem to be looking for a new minimum level of cooperation, or trying to enhance privacy a little without moving the needle.
In any case this particular strategy looks like a failure in the market. They might re-engineer it or backpedal or just toss the whole idea of encrypting iCloud.
Maybe if you define privacy that Google and FB do not track you and only Apple do. You open an application on your Mac and the event was sent insecure to Apple , find a definition of privacy that is not contradictory with what Apple was doing.
Morality barely matters and legality is something easily skirted around with the right legal argument. Apple, google etc with continue working with governments so long as their profit can flow from those countries.