Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

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> Run an on-device scan against a hash database. Using a technology shown to have very frequent collisions.

Google and Microsoft have been scanning everything in your account against a hash database for the past decade.

Also, unlike Apple's system which doesn't even notify Apple of the first 30 positive results (to protect you from the inevitable false positives) Google and Microsoft offer users no such protection.

>then they notify law enforcement if they get a hit. Which means even if you're innocent - all your devices get confiscated for months, you probably rack up tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, maybe lose your job, probably lose your friends and get the boot from any social organizations or groups.

Again, Google and Microsoft have already been doing this for the past decade.

>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account

https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...

Scanning content on a gmail account is not even remotely anything like scanning my device.

the photos are only scanned just before being uploaded to iCloud. If you have CSAM on your phone, just turn off iCloud sync

Also, if you plan on burying a body in the woods, make sure you turn on Airplane Mode first.

Great advice and great job repeating the manipulative framing of “if you’re not a pedophile, you have nothing to fear.”

Also, if you have anything that may be matched by unknowable and unverifiable matching hashes and algorithms provided by multiple nation states now or ever in the future, including but not limited to political activists, protests, anti-animal-abuse activists, climate activists, and select ethnicities, or copyright violations of any kind… switch off iCloud sync.

Until that switch gets ignored.

This cannot and will not be limited to CSAM. The matching is much more complicated than “hashes of existing images.”

Here’s a good in-depth interview on the tech and the issues.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZZ5erGSKgs

>framing of “if you’re not a pedophile, you have nothing to fear.”

I read it more as "if you don't like it, use another cloud storage solution"

it was a joke.

if you don't trust the switch, then why trust any switch on iOS. Why do you trust that they're not already doing it?

why are you using an iPhone?

If it's so easy to bypass then it sounds like it's a useless feature that won't prevent the proliferation of CSAM

Apple is worried about content uploaded to their iCloud.

As there is no clear legislation, every company is implementing what they feel comfortable with.

some think they wanted to add this, so that they can enable e2e encryption with iCloud at a later date.

Scanning content on-server means that a single false positive is sitting there, ready to be maliciously misused by any prosecutor who cares to issue a dragnet warrant.

These sorts of dragnet warrants have become increasingly common.

>Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all US demands

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/19/google-geofence-warrants/

It's not like we haven't seen Google's on-server data hordes misused to falsely accuse users before.

>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for MURDER and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

Apple's system is designed to protect you from being associated with false positives, until that threshold of 30 matches is reached. Even then, the next step is to have a human review the data.

Google has never been willing to hire human beings to supervise the decisions an algorithm makes.

While I’m generally unhappy that Google never supervises its AI moderation systems, in this case it’s a criminal matter.

Our police and prosecution ought to be enough review on its own. If our own elected government fails to do something so simple, I say fix the government. I don’t want to be forced to rely on the goodwill of a for-profit company.

>Our police and prosecution ought to be enough review on its own.

They are not.

>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for MURDER and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

When I said ought… I mean it in the prescriptive sense not the descriptive.

The government should be held to a high standard, and when it fails we, the people, should fix it and not turn to private companies and ask why they didn’t step up to the plate.

Apple also has been doing this for photos uploaded to iCloud as they are not currently encrypted.

> Apple also has been doing this for photos uploaded to iCloud as they are not currently encrypted.

Nope. Google and Microsoft have been scanning your entire account for the past decade. Apple has not.

>TechCrunch: Most other cloud providers have been scanning for CSAM for some time now. Apple has not. Obviously there are no current regulations that say that you must seek it out on your servers, but there is some roiling regulation in the EU and other countries. Is that the impetus for this? Basically, why now?

Erik Neuenschwander: Why now comes down to the fact that we’ve now got the technology that can balance strong child safety and user privacy. This is an area we’ve been looking at for some time, including current state of the art techniques which mostly involves scanning through entire contents of users’ libraries on cloud services that — as you point out — isn’t something that we’ve ever done

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/interview-apples-head-of-p...

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