It's not their device to scan.
"Client side scanning" (both in general, and in the recent Apple kerfuffle) is talking about a network client, that will be talking to servers that are owned by "them." If they wish to enforce rules over what is stored on their server then to enforce that right, the only two choices are to disallow E2EE or to perform client-side scanning.
Really client-side scanning is only up for debate when E2EE is used. The Javascript that checks validity of forms before you submit them is a form of client-side scanning, but most of the time[1] nobody cares because it's data that you intend to send to the server anyways.
1: Inadvertent pastes into fields that phone-home for e.g. autocomplete can reveal otherwise private information, so "most of the time"
And personally, I know this won't affect me. I don't own such content. I don't use the cloud without encryption first (thanks Cryptomator). However I just hate the feeling of my own phone constantly looking over my shoulder on someone else's behalf. Is that so weird?
I have an iPhone. The Photos app keeps telling me that it's unable to upload things to iCloud because my account is full.
I never turned it on. I never intended to upload any photos to the cloud.
I haven't signed into my iCloud account for years because I don't use it. Nonetheless, iCloud has a magical way of uploading things to something that I've literally never used.
Next you'll be arguing that people using Windows should have simply turned off online logins if they didn't want their Windows computer to phone home. Bullshit, Microsoft shoves that shit down people's throats.
So your statement of "you'd ordinarily be sending them as anyways as well" is ludicrous. That's deliberately burying your head into he sand against the fact that big business sets defaults to settings that users often have no idea were set or are buried behind huge warnings against turning them off.
There's definitely no way a new version could patch your system and turn something on without your knowledge. No, there's absolutely never been a situation where some new setting has shown up and you didn't know what it does or inspected what it was set to by default. And there's absolutely no way you could have restored a backup and not had all of your settings transfer over correctly. No, there's no way you'll ever turn the setting on and forget that it's on when you plug your device into some network. And you know you will never be the victim of any malicious activity that could screw you over in some way. You've never had some app automatically connect to something that you didn't know it could even connect to. You'll never have someone else pick up your phone and take random pictures or recordings that you don't know about because those would never get automatically uploaded because, of course, you didn't turn on that setting for yourself. You'll never have to worry about your battery going low because you turned on automatic uploads and not only did your upload happen but your device also scanned your uploads too. You never use your phone for work because your work definitely pays for a new device for you to use for work.
Gosh it sure is weird hat so many people don't want client-side scanning. Scanning your device before uploading anything is just a very reasonable thing to do.
/s
People not being able to understand the devices they use is why devs have gotten us to this point. People are too uneducated to do proper back ups, so some enterprising people came up with a way to do that for you. Peeps still get it wrong. Some other asshats come along and take advantage of uneducated people, and do malicious stuff. Fuck 'em. We should just end the cloud because we as a society can't handle it or the responsibility of operating our own equipment. /s
You're wrong because at the very minimum it means that my device's battery isn't consumed for the scanning.
Further, enabling uploading won't work if the cloud account is full (as is currently the case).
Turning off connectivity prevents the upload and scanning from occurring.
> Turning off connectivity prevents the upload and scanning from occurring.
Client side scanning which happens as part of the upload, so these apply to that as well as to server-side scanning.
So your complaint is only "battery life"?
No. Way to miss the forest for the trees. Go read the whole thread.
You either misunderstand it or are deliberately being misleading about it. The only complaint that you have made which stands is battery-life.
I'm speculating here, but I wonder if part of your experience is based on the fact that you're a long time user. Features like auto-uploading to Photo Library are new, and Apple is generally decent about informing you of new features before opting in.
Brand new account setups are a different story. You're encouraged to use all of the latest/greatest stuff (and why not, current topic notwithstanding?).
Bottom line: it's extremely easy for an average user to start uploading their stuff without really realizing it.
I'm not the unsuspecting dupe that devs are targeting to get a new user tricked into something. I'm very much aware of the shenanigans devs try and pay attention to that shit from the go.
Having said that, I do read the crap and choose no where necessary. People just haphazardly pressing okay to get to new shiny almost deserve whatever they've agreed to. I say almost because these dialogs can be worded like "Vote No for Yes" kind of BS.
If you're one of the asshat devs FUCK YOU for making this a thing we even have to discuss in the first place. Edit: Royal You Devs
And yeah.. The cloud is just someone else's computer. Would you store all your stuff on your friend's computer? Well most people store everything they have on the computers of people they don't even know...
As an example of this, I never once opted into any kind of data sharing, set telemetry to the lowest allowed setting, and don't remember ever signing into a system-wide Microsoft account, yet when I eventually discovered deeply hidden privacy options I found that my MS account had a log of every single application I had ever used on my W10 laptop.
It implements the feature of pressing Win+Tab to see open programs, and then scrolling down to see previously open programs.
Now I get that they need to check that I have a valid license. Fair enough. Anything beyond that should be opt-in.
The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that what is stored on their server is statistically uniform binary white noise. If they wish to enforce that, there are a plethora of server-side tools (like the Diehard test suite) with which to do so.
You can disagree with that (and there are many good reasons to do so) - but “it’s encrypted so it’s fine” isn’t going to convince anybody who matters.
Might just throw my phone in a campfire.
It’s always been the case that your neighbors or friends or employers or whatever would judge you as they saw fit for whatever they might see or find out about, or even overhear from the local loudmouth/busybody. Regardless of what was found in a court of law.
The challenge now is our ‘neighbors’ are now whichever nosy random person in the entire world that cares to look instead of just the local gossip circle, and the gossip is recorded nearly permanently and is indexed in an easy to find way decades later. :s
As to if this means people will stop being less judgmental since everyone is likely to have something shitty posted about them at some point? History or the current circumstances don’t seem to be pointing to ‘yes’ right now.
But at some point, either everyone is going to stop sharing the smell of their farts every morning, or folks are going to have to stop caring, or we’ll literally not be able to be friends with or employ anyone.
Even putting aside how much of a stretch that is, how is anybody else supposed to know which service you use? It's your personal files. That nobody else should have access to them is the point.
It's not as if Apple or whomever should be providing anyone with a list of their customers, as that should cause you to not use them too. As far as I know they don't currently make their customer list public.
What would you think about someone that you were talking to that showed you something on their phone (a restaurant listing you were both thinking of going to, or something on Maps), but then a Parler notification popped up? What if they were married and Grindr or Tinder or whatever notification popped up?
Would you judge them? Would you expect many other people to judge them, even if you don’t?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Apple’s products would be problematic that way. But a big reason why is because they have and likely will continue to make decisions like the one we are discussing.
If they went full end to end super privacy, then got named by the feds repeatedly in whatever the next big csam/terrorist/whatever scandal, that could change, and that is even assuming Congress people don’t join in the action, which they’ve already shown an interest in doing.
Even if Apple wasn't scanning anyone's files, >99% of their users would not be pedophiles and no one would have any reason to assume that they were.
> If they went full end to end super privacy, then got named by the feds repeatedly in whatever the next big csam/terrorist/whatever scandal
The main effect from getting put on a list like that is to gain credit with privacy-conscious people for standing up for their users. Nobody says "oh no, I better stop using my favorite full disk encryption because it hasn't got any known backdoors in it."
> that is even assuming Congress people don’t join in the action, which they’ve already shown an interest in doing.
At which point you have government action and can bring out the constitutional arguments etc.
And none of your personal lack of being a witch is going to help you when you get the reputation as the ‘weird dude that uses that child porn storage app’.
I guarantee you 90% plus of the population, once they learn what Tor is, will have the reaction to Tor. And it’s a matter of time until it gets enough press for that. Same with anything that does what you describe (proper end to end, we don’t care what you store, and we don’t have the keys so pound sand LEO).
When something is low key/under the radar, it can be a healthy witch-hunt-free zone that also isn’t filled to the brim with witches. But something at the scale Apple is at can’t, and even Parler (which didn’t start that way) got too much visibility and ended up as you describe and got shut down.
The privacy conscious folks may nod their head and know, but most folks don’t get it, and if it gets widely used, it will be attacked this way by authority figures. The ‘think of the children’ routine is used a lot because it does work on the majority of the population.
As I said, Apple isn’t there yet, and likely would never be close - because they’re going to do things like they are now to avoid the Public backlash.
And as long as they put enough of a veneer on it, the vast majority of folks won’t think twice about continuing to use them (95%+ of current customers at least). Most of the market will continue using Android which is 10x worse near as I can tell.
The ‘mistake’ they seemed to have made here is being a bit too obvious about it and not keeping up the veneer well enough.
Overall, I suspect we’ll be seeing some move back to on-prem for a non-trivial percentage of folks because of this and other things going on. That said, I’m sure cloud will continue to grow exponentially because most folks just don’t care enough to pay to do otherwise.
This only happens when you start off with zero users and having an anti-witch-hunt policy is the only thing causing you to gain users, specially because they're disproportionately witches. Because without that policy the service would still have zero users.
It doesn't apply to any service that already has a large number of non-witches or has any effective means of also attracting users who are not witches.
> I guarantee you 90% plus of the population, once they learn what Tor is, will have the reaction to Tor.
Tor has a specific marketing disadvantage because by its nature it defeats most forms of tracking and advertising, which makes it adversarial to media companies who profit from tracking and advertising. This is why all the stories are about "the dark web" and not about that thing that helps dissidents in China and Iran evade authoritarian censorship.
It's also hard to get ordinary people to use it, and thereby understand that the technology itself isn't anything nefarious, because there is a noticeable latency cost to using it that most people aren't going to like.
None of this applies to a generic hosting services making it so they can't read their customers' personal files.
> When something is low key/under the radar, it can be a healthy witch-hunt-free zone that also isn’t filled to the brim with witches. But something at the scale Apple is at can’t
This is completely the opposite. It's the things at the scale of Apple that can do it because there aren't enough witches in the world to make a userbase the size of Apple's be more than 1% witches.
It also works for everyone as long as everyone does it, because then "no witch hunts" is common practice rather than something that makes you attract a disproportionate number of witches.
> even Parler (which didn’t start that way) got too much visibility and ended up as you describe and got shut down.
Parler was clearly the app that gained users by having a policy against witch hunts. It only started gaining a significant number of users when the other platforms started carelessly banning large numbers of users for alleged transgressions that were in many cases facially absurd, but it also attracted the people who were banned because they were actually bad.
And even then, it wasn't the users who abandoned them, it was Apple and Google and Amazon. Apple is obviously not going to do that to themselves.
0: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On....
Stallman was very, very right.
If you wanted to store photos in icloud on a Windows machine, you'd be using the Apple icloud client. Apple has at least some control over what software they write and ship does[1]. They can break 3rd party clients almost at will, so if they choose to be hostile to 3rd party clients that control is fairly strong.
Arguing over what amount of control Apple should exercise over what software runs on a device purchased by a consumer is mostly orthogonal to arguing over what amount of control Apple should exercise over what software can connect to their servers.
1: On a general purpose machine, debuggers and emulators can influence what software does, obviously, so the control isn't absolute.
The argument over whose computer it is applies pretty similarly. My computer is not part of their infrastructure, and they should only be controlling the software on their infrastructure.
Maybe it would be nice to have a tool that would allow you to see exactly what data the client side scanner is “allowed” to “see”?
It means precisely that Apple has no technical capability to remotely access the device.
It means any (consented) Apple software update leaves behind no hooks or backdoors that enable subsequent, remotely-initiated access.
It means there verifiably exist no code paths that allow remote exfiltration of data, other than those that pass through consent dialogs. The basic distinction between legitimate OS functionality, and malware.
It's not as if Apple's marketing doesn't heavily emphasize the "private", "E2E encrypted" aspects already.
So somebody else has to do housekeeping and hand-holding. That's where apple comes in again, or better, stays for convenience sake.
And to not complicate their own day, Apple just does it the same for all.
It is hardly difficult to draw a distinction between ensuring a field looks like an expected datatype and ML analysis guessing at photo content.
In fact, trying to construct an argument conflating the two pretty much immediately runs in to the fact that one is adversarial, so it only works if you studiously ignore intent.
The other distinction is, if a client-side form validator detects a problem with the input, it tells the user so they can fix it, whereas if Apple's system detects a problem with your input, it potentially tells the police without giving you a chance to delete the maliciously-generated false positive files you've unwittingly received.
What I mean is that client side form validation is typically part of a cooperative process - I want to buy something at your store, you want to sell it to me, and smart client side validation can make that faster/easier if I typo something it can catch. It is (or at least should be) mostly aimed at helping the user; your parsing for security is (should be), as you note, on the server.
Scanning photos for [CSAM, thoughtcrime memes, poor taste, whatever] doesn't make the user's life easier, is not something anyone asked to be subjected to, and potentially can lead to a very negative outcome for them.
That's the distinction I was getting at, and yes, your second point is directly relevant there.
No it isn’t. It’s my device. I get to decide what runs on it.
So the core of the problem is that they want to enforce rules over what is stored on their servers, even in E2EE form. They could just allow regular E2EE, where they ignore the content that they don't know and push back against politicians who think they are entitled to all data. They chose to push back against user's privacy instead.
What if I have a file on my phone that is already encrypted before I upload it to icloud and it gets encrypted a second time? Apple would have no knowledge about its content. Would they have to scan all my other devices too?