Oh sorry! I wasn’t meaning you were putting that word in there! I was meaning that research team was injecting their own emotion.
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My biggest worry with CSAM
- Thread starter TinaBelcher
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Destructive is usually not emotional.
A virus (pc) can be destructive.
Dynamite can be destructive.
A false accusation (pedo) can be destructive.
Depending on the topic, people can see a “destructive item / event” and have an emotional response.
So I found the article https://www.engadget.com/princeton-university-researcher-apple-csam-oped-162004601.html
Sadly doesn’t mention any technical detail of interest, but rather addressing the abuse part. This leads me to think: maybe the tool apple is developing is actually so good at doing it’s job it’s being considered dangerous rather than ineffective. And solving people’s problem is never Apple’s specialty.
This is absolutely the case. This system would be very effective. People aren't worried about it not working. They're worried about it working too well, and being used in contexts beyond CSAM.
It's a valid concern, though it's not like a government has needed to wait for a system like this to begin to take action.
Try this… (adding @macOS Lynx)
The Law and Policy of Client-Side Scanning - R Street Institute
In recent years, two unfortunate trends have converged in cybersecurity—the growth of child pornography distributed online and the proliferation of encryption systems that enable the distribution of all forms of content (both lawful and illicit) in a manner that is inaccessible to service...
www.rstreet.org
Yes, to get a file hash, you lose a lot of information. So two different pictures with a loss of information could potentially result in the same hash. This is also what scares me at some point.
BUT. Someone has to know exactly which pictures are flagged, and what the algorithm and key is to return the hash. Will someone really go this far?
ALSO. They said they won't report you right away. A human will take a look at the flagged picture first to see if it truly matches. So even if someone malicious took the effort to manufacture an image to send you in jail, it will not work.
The real problem here, however, is Apple could have access to one of your pictures that has nothing to do with that. They could have access to 1 photo of yours.
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Dedicated criminals will go very far, as far as building their own cellular networks for example. For others maybe not that much, but some level of precaution may also apply.
Human integrity here would be the key if the image does get flagged and information does get decrypted.
The threshold is 30 apparently, meaning the number would not be 1. Probably more. But I'd argue that's lower on the list of what people worried about for this feature.
NO, THEY'RE MACTHING HASH OF FEATURES OF KNOWN CSAM. THIS HAS FALSE POSITIVES. YOU THINK APPLE IS OK WITH 29 ILLEGAL PICTURES, BUT 30 IS WHERE THEY DRAW THE LINE?
Apple’s method of detecting known CSAM is designed with user privacy in mind. Instead of scanning images in the cloud, the system performs on-device matching using a database of known CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and other child safety organizations. Apple further transforms this database into an unreadable set of hashes that is securely stored on users’ devices.
Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos, an on-device matching process is performed for that image against the known CSAM hashes. This matching process is powered by a cryptographic technology called private set intersection, which determines if there is a match without revealing the result. The device creates a cryptographic safety voucher that encodes the match result along with additional encrypted data about the image. This voucher is uploaded to iCloud Photos along with the image.
This is the very concerning part. Apple has not said they will not put spyware into our iOS and MacOS devices. They have only postponed the implementation of the spyware. My feeling is, this is purely doe to the bad PR (and rightfully so) Apple has over this. Once this has died down a little, they will probably just sneak it into an iOS 15 (current MacOS also) update or the next whole number version of the OSes.
This is why I am personally hesitant to get a new Apple device because I do not want to be forced to have Apple created spyware on the device. Many others also share this concern. I guess we all shall wait and see how Apple will try to sneak this spyware into our devices. Hopefully people are as vocal about calling out this spyware for what it is then as they are now.
Concerns about potential hacking is my concern: what if someone has airdrop set up to receive airdrops from everyone and some nefarious individual drops a bunch of questionable photos to someone? I think you still have to "accept" the airdrop, it doesn't just show up but.....What if someone breaks into someones icloud account and uploads photos which get shared to the phone? I realize these are sort of out of the box events but all it takes is a clever hacker to ruin someones life for the "lulz".