Perhaps they don't want people to use their devices for child abuse? Radical idea I know.
The stated reason they do it this way is to protect privacy. Presumably a lot more people would complain if they scanned the camera feed.
The police in America have proven repeatedly that they will ignore individual freedoms to look indiscriminately for people doing bad things.
Apple creates a tool that enables pattern matching without consent. But they promise they won’t use it for more than CSAM, and that only they will hold the keys.
Okay so imagine that your HOA enacts a rule they’re now allowed to review all of your purchases by comparing known hashes used by drug lords to determine if you are cooking meth in your basement. And if they find a match, without your knowledge, they will report you to the police who will have a defensible justification for a warrant to come enter your house and look for meth lab stuff. Sounds fine as long as you have nothing worth hiding right? Might as well let them just go through everyone’s house preemptively looking for meth labs and skip the hash checking right? Oh you don’t support that leap? Don’t worry, others do.
If HOA means home owners association, I don’t see the connection. They can’t influence Apple either.
There is no manual review of the image by Apple employees. What is viewed is a derivative image, which is scaled down and blurred. It would be trivial for someone to use legal pornographic images and put it through a NeuralHash collision generator, which upon viewing the scaled down derivative image, would look like CSAM.
There's also the fact that iOS exploits are so plentiful that they're cheaper than Android exploits.
Because that requires possessing illegal images, while legal pornography that also happens to cause a hash collision with NeuralHash doesn't.
Again, no one at Apple is reviewing the source image. They're reviewing obfuscated derivative images, and then informing law enforcement if they suspect they're illegal images.
What law enforcement then does is get warrants for all of the accused's electronic devices and raids their home and workplace in order to collect evidence.
It's another version of SWATing. Sure, eventually the authorities might find out that the accused isn't actually a mass shooter or holding hostages, but by then the damage is already done.
And are you really saying that the images Apple reviews are so blurry that they can’t review them? That seems like a very stupid system.
In any case, your scenario sounds pretty far fetched. Even if it actually works, I wouldn’t say it’s a major blocker.
Because they have a reasonable suspicion that they're illegal images, and it's quite literally job of the police to collect evidence to determine whether or not a suspect can be charged with a crime or not.
> And are you really saying that the images Apple reviews are so blurry that they can’t review them? That seems like a very stupid system.
Are you saying that Apple built a system that can detect CSAM, and then chose to build a system for distributing and viewing said illegal material, considering that the acts of distributing and viewing CSAM are both very, very illegal?
Again, it isn't Apple's job to determine what's CSAM or not, that's the job of the police and courts. Apple's obligation is to report what they believe could be CSAM to authorities, who will take the investigation from there.
I'm saying that I'm pretty sure they will not turn you in to the police for possession of child porn without being damn sure that's what it is. How do you think the other FAANGs do it? I have never heard of anyone falsely reported for CSAM by Facebook for example, have you? Why would it be different for Apple?
I really don't think you are being honest about this.
Of course they don't care about CASM to switch their business model to do this legally... And their valuation will crash if their balance sheet expands so much and management would be fired.
In this case it IS linked to iCloud though, as you probably know. Images are only scanned on their way to iCloud, and they won't be scanned if you don't use iCloud.
They think this is some kind of new system that gives Apple new access to things. It's not. They access they have here is nothing compared to what they have always had.
They can and do scan all your messages and photos already, locally, for features such as photo classification and making reminders from emails.
Apple could spy on anything they want, without this system. And this system is an incredibly impractical way to spy on people.
It's also pretty obvious that they wouldn't tell us if they were planning to spy on us, they would just do it.
In short: I have no idea if Apple spies on us, but I can say for certain that they will not use this system for it.
In this case the company retains direct control over your property, and changed what it does after you bought it and paid for it.
I think having these for-profit busybodies butting in how you can live your life is a great threat to invidividual liberty.
The same will happen with physical devices that you bought - a car, an electric bike, a smart coffee machine. Imagine a car detecting you are smoking dope, or taking an issue with your trip to the abortion clinic.
You think it's not gonna happen, its too absurd? I just had to sign a 42 page lisence agreement to ride a bike.
You can even store copyrighted porn, they won’t try and stop you.
If a car could detect if the driver was smoking dope that would be excellent. I don’t think you have the right to drive around blunted.