It’s eye opening how naive some people on HN are despite decades of evidence that things are always twisted in favor of more government surveillance especially outside of the US.
Apple’s whole marketing scheme was that they protected privacy. That was their market differentiation. So no, it wasn’t like this before and this is why so many people like myself feel betrayed by Apple. This is what most of the outrage is about. The largest most profitable company in the world was selling their products saying they believed in privacy and now created a Trojan horse wrapped around CSAM that can be used by governments to spy on whatever is in our phones and I guess our laptops too. Maybe not today. But in 10 years? Yes definitely. They have already bent to government pressure since 2016 what would stop them going forward? Nothing. Tim Cook doesn’t want to go to Guantanamo for defying a government order.
If they were going to implement a government scanning tool it could be done much more simply. And they would if legally required, or turn down some of their largest markets.
This is a step too far (on-device vs in cloud) but all of the “but what if the govt…” is ridiculous because that happens anyway if the govt wants it.
You point that it "could have" been done more simply is completely irrelevant.
This "much more simply" mechanism is exactly what was created by Apple. It's done right now, and there's no need to worry about how much more simply they COULD HAVE.
It's a fait-accompli. The government wanted it, and now they have it. Now they can scan individual phones for whatever they want.
You keep saying they can scan for whatever they want but that’s not true, today, by Apple’s description.(which is all we have to go by and is what you are mad about)
Yes the government could order them to change the system. They could also order Apple to create the system in the first place without all the indirection, safety vouchers, human review, etc which make it inefficient as a direct surveillance tool.
Since when has the government acted so transparently?
They could simply tell Apple that this is for CSAM so that people would support it, and then change it later after everyone is is acclimatized to it and forgot about it.
Which is exactly what had happened. And exactly what will happen in a few years.
You sound like a government plant trying to gas light people into thinking this isn’t a big deal. It is a huge deal and it’s not as simple as saying “the government could have asked for it much simpler!” This is them asking for it, plain and simple, and Apple delivering on it.
I didn’t say it would be transparent or public. I’m a government plant for saying the government could just tell Apple to scan for whatever they want without messing with the CSAM stuff? I’m saying governments are already capable of ordering this kind of thing, gag orders included, so this specific tech implementation doesn’t really change that. And yes that’s bad and scary and we should probably try to prevent our governments from doing that.
But no, I don’t believe that a government could “fool” Apple by adding non-CSAM images to the database. The review step would catch that.
I don’t like on device scanning in principle and in precedent. I’m just saying this specific tech stack doesn’t seem like it would be useful for your surveillance scenario, and most of your criticisms don’t seem to be based in having read how this system actually works.
I’m AGAINST this system, I just wish the discussion here weren’t so full of misinformation and bad assumptions.
