An open letter dated August 6, 2021 that’s against Apple’s privacy-invasive content scanning technology in which security & privacy experts, cryptographers, researchers, professors, legal experts, Apple consumers, and others decry Apple’s planned move to undermine user privacy and end-to-end encryption has already gathered thousands of signatures.
Dear Apple,
On August 5th, 2021, Apple Inc. announced new technological measures meant to apply across virtually all of its devices under the umbrella of “Expanded Protections for Children”. While child exploitation is a serious problem, and while efforts to combat it are almost unquestionably well-intentioned, Apple’s proposal introduces a backdoor that threatens to undermine fundamental privacy protections for all users of Apple products.
Apple’s proposed technology works by continuously monitoring photos saved or shared on the user’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac. One system detects if a certain number of objectionable photos is detected in iCloud storage and alerts the authorities. Another notifies a child’s parents if iMessage is used to send or receive photos that a machine learning algorithm considers to contain nudity.
Because both checks are performed on the user’s device, they have the potential to bypass any end-to-end encryption that would otherwise safeguard the user’s privacy.
Immediately after Apple’s announcement, experts around the world sounded the alarm on how Apple’s proposed measures could turn every iPhone into a device that is continuously scanning all photos and messages that pass through it in order to report any objectionable content to law enforcement, setting a precedent where our personal devices become a radical new tool for invasive surveillance, with little oversight to prevent eventual abuse and unreasonable expansion of the scope of surveillance.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has said that “Apple is opening the door to broader abuses”:
It’s impossible to build a client-side scanning system that can only be used for sexually explicit images sent or received by children. As a consequence, even a well-intentioned effort to build such a system will break key promises of the messenger’s encryption itself and open the door to broader abuses […] That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has said that it is “deeply concerned that Apple’s changes in fact create new risks to children and all users, and mark a significant departure from long-held privacy and security protocols”:
Apple is replacing its industry-standard end-to-end encrypted messaging system with an infrastructure for surveillance and censorship, which will be vulnerable to abuse and scope-creep not only in the U.S., but around the world,” says Greg Nojeim, Co-Director of CDT’s Security & Surveillance Project. “Apple should abandon these changes and restore its users’ faith in the security and integrity of their data on Apple devices and services.
…The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s statement on the issue supports the above concern with additional examples on how Apple’s proposed technology could lead to global abuse:
Take the example of India, where recently passed rules include dangerous requirements for platforms to identify the origins of messages and pre-screen content. New laws in Ethiopia requiring content takedowns of “misinformation” in 24 hours may apply to messaging services. And many other countries—often those with authoritarian governments—have passed similar laws. Apple’s changes would enable such screening, takedown, and reporting in its end-to-end messaging. The abuse cases are easy to imagine: governments that outlaw homosexuality might require the classifier to be trained to restrict apparent LGBTQ+ content, or an authoritarian regime might demand the classifier be able to spot popular satirical images or protest flyers.
Furthermore, the Electronic Frontier Foundation insists that it’s already seen this mission creep in action: “one of the technologies originally built to scan and hash child sexual abuse imagery has been repurposed to create a database of “terrorist” content that companies can contribute to and access for the purpose of banning such content. The database, managed by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), is troublingly without external oversight, despite calls from civil society.”
Fundamental design flaws in Apple’s proposed approach have also been pointed out by experts, who have claimed that “Apple can trivially use different media fingerprinting datasets for each user. For one user it could be child abuse, for another it could be a much broader category”, thereby enabling selective content tracking for targeted users.
The type of technology that Apple is proposing for its child protection measures depends on an expandable infrastructure that can’t be monitored or technically limited. Experts have repeatedly warned that the problem isn’t just privacy, but also the lack of accountability, technical barriers to expansion, and lack of analysis or even acknowledgement of the potential for errors and false positives…
Our Request
We, the undersigned, ask that:
1. Apple Inc.’s deployment of its proposed content monitoring technology is halted immediately.
2. Apple Inc. issue a statement reaffirming their commitment to end-to-end encryption and to user privacy.Apple’s current path threatens to undermine decades of work by technologists, academics and policy advocates towards strong privacy-preserving measures being the norm across a majority of consumer electronic devices and use cases. We ask that Apple reconsider its technology rollout, lest it undo that important work.
MacDailyNews Take: Read the full open letter, which we have signed, here.
Apple was adamant about not opening 1 phone that would open all for u.s. police/fbi to solve murders/crimes, yet child molesting/rape/kidnapping/trafficking is different? quite an ethical debate here. is all crime or selective crime deserving of privacy or opening it up for any hacker/gov?
if it’s one’s own dead or trafficked family member/friend, or if one is blindly (falsely) “patriotic” one will choose anti-privacy, but for the rest of citizens it’s pro-privacy.
Yes indeed, remember the letters penned by Cook in defiance of government agencies asking for backdoors to catch terrorists and criminals? The righteous stand by Cook to protect user privacy?? Certainly we ALL SUPPORTED.
So what changed, Mr. Cook? Doing this in the holy name of protecting children when way too many of them are not mature enough enough for technology. Parental controls suddenly break and are not working? Parents out at the casino gambling not watching their kids?
This a total COLLAPSE and complete REVERSAL from Apple principles betraying privacy and opening up our phones to any nefarious characters in the wild.
If he does not reverse course, Tim Cook should immediately RESIGN! He is not protecting ANYONE — just the opposite proposing to make all users VULNERABLE. If he persists, the billions of users make your feelings known and stand up to what Apple morphed into under this SJW tyrant Cook — BIG BROTHER…
MDN, time to delete another off-topic posting. You know how to do it.
The American experiment is failing. The freedom in America, as founded, is RARE and UNIQUE in human history (hence American Exceptionalism) , but poorly- or non-educated people are just frittering it away in the name of “safety.” Those intent of destroying America use “safety” against CSAM, COVID, etc. as the excuse to whittle away your freedoms until America is no longer free.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” — Benjamin Franklin
“The very sort of environment that we’re creating by having so many people vaccinated with a vaccine that doesn’t kill off the virus, it actually can lead to a more potent virus,” said Rogan, who was referring to a peer-reviewed paper published in 2015.
“Anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts.”
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. ― Ronald Reagan
In some countries, which haven’t created a generation of abject, drooling idiots like the U.S. union-dominated public “education system,” they understand what the establishment is trying to impose:
The vaccinated in Italy burn health passports in protest:
https://twitter.com/BBR4369/status/1423371634220675072
https://twitter.com/HotepgodDrelly/status/1422621854020161538
Leftists, Democrats, and Establishment Globalists have turned their backs on religion, but the human soul knows there is a greater force and hence searches for God.
Leftists, Democrats, and Establishment Globalists like Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc. have substituted “Climate Change” for “God.”
“Climate Change” is the “God” of Leftists, Democrats, and Establishment Globalists. This is why they hated Trump so much. Not for the mean tweets, but for canceling the Paris Agreement, an international treaty, immediately upon assuming office. It was among the very first travesties into which their installed puppet Biden re-entered – illegally, of course (treaties like this require congressional approval in America).
With “Climate Change” as their “God,” it’s no leap to imagine that a few short years from now, when people start dropping like flies (perhaps from mutated super variants of COVID created by widespread global vaccination schemes), the Leftists, Democrats, and Establishment Globalists will of course claim “there is no evidence that these deaths were caused by the vaccines” (they won’t mention the deaths were caused by what the vaccines created). They may even prop up and trot out their bureaucrat idol Fauci to nod for the cameras, if he lasts long enough.
This is why throwing open the U.S. southern border to unvaccinated COVID-infected illegal aliens and shipping them around the country is A-OK, but actual citizens need to double mask while alone in their homes and present their vaccination “papers” to go anywhere. They want the Democrat votes and don’t really care about COVID spreading or the peasants’ freeedom.
Wine glasses will be clinking, cigars will be lit, and the globalists will be congratulating each other on such a successful global depopulation campaign – all done in the name of their “God,” “Climate Change.”
Farfetched? Far stranger things have happened in human history (for those relatively few of us who know and understand history).
Wake up, unsophisticated peasants, you basket of deplorables, you!
Perhaps before jumping to conclusions, you might want to read Apple’s take on this:
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
Ooh, Apple says it’s not a privacy violation, nothing to see here. What a shocker!
Only sad simpletons like TxUssr lap up Apple’s pablum and back the destruction of personal privacy.
Exactly Sarah. The Leftists are masters of semantic word games and tortured definitions. But we are onto TxUseless, Cook and the rest of woke ilk and smarter truly woke people are not buying it…
Why would you assume that concerned people have not read Apple’s take on it? How about people having read it and concluding that it does not, or not sufficiently, lessens their concerns?
In the same vein one could say that people who are not concerned about Apple’s move have not read the critics take on this. That would be equally premature.
My concerns are about moving goalposts, mission creep, database manipulations, governments interference’s, et cetera. Moving goalposts on Apple’s side (compared to a few years ago) already got us to this point, and what I have read from Apple does not reassure me at all.
The big change with regard to before, including other companies, is that the checking software now moves from server to client side. That is new, and the sea change. I have no issue with server side checks, even without legal requirements, and even including checks other than child abuse. Fine, the server company sets the rules.
But client side checks is a whole different ball game. Especially if the owner of the device has absolutely no control or independent verification possibility on what that software now or later all does one ones device.
One thing I wonder about is that CMAS-checks for pictures in iCloud Photos already happen server side, where Apple can even see the picture if desired. So why go all the trouble to move that to client side, where Apple still can see the picture if desired? That is no improvement at all from a CMAS-perspective, The big change is the future potential for broadening the scope of that software, and I believe that that is what it is all about in the longer term.
There are also glaring lacks of independent checks and balances, and independent oversight on various parts of both the database and the client side checking software. It is all just “Trust me Bro”. I don’t have that kind of trust for any company or government.
I am generally concerned with the slow but steady move to a surveillance type of society, so what Apple proposes here only gets me more concerned. Power structures always seek increasing their control, and always design the fitting narratives to that. Both looking world-wide now and in history, true freedom is always on the defensive. So I am very concerned indeed.
Why go all the trouble to move that to client side, where Apple still can see the picture if desired?
First, this is not a NEW or “big change” in the software. When you look under the “Persons” category in Photos on your iPhone, you are looking at the results of a scan of all the photos in the app’s database to compare them with an image of (for example) your Aunt Effie. Any junior-high Swift coder could add a feature to flip a flag on the metadata to identify images of Aunt Effie before they are uploaded.
Comparing the photos with a known child sexual abuse image and setting a flag on the probable matches is exactly the same process. It is not new “checking software.” Apple is no more likely to misuse that feature of every Mac and iDevice today than it was when it developed the technology many years ago. Again, this is not some deep, dark, esoteric technology, but something that already exists in broad daylight and could be “broadened” by anybody who has a copy of Xcode and access to the code for Photos or another image management system. The genie is out of the bottle and can only be regulated, not eliminated.
Second, Apple CANNOT see the picture if desired on the client side. “Client-side” means it is happening on your secure device and nothing is being communicated to Apple except the pictures that YOU chose to upload to their server. Before, they had to look at all the images on the server side; now they only have to look at the flagged ones and only if there are multiple flagged images in the upload.
Third, it moved the process to the client side (the individual device in your personal possession) because Apple felt that was LESS intrusive than doing it on the server side (a device you share with millions of other users and thousands of employees). Now you want them to apologize for trying to do you a favor.
What sort of “independent checks of the database” do you have in mind? It was not developed by Apple, but by agencies that focus on the issue of trafficked and exploited children. These are not “baby in the bath” pictures, but depictions of children being raped and tortured. Obviously, Apple cannot post all those pictures on a public website so you can review them at your leisure to see if you agree that they are, indeed, child sexual abuse material. Who, besides the experts, would you trust to do that review for you?
TxUssr: “Who, besides the experts…”
As always, you prostrate yourself to “the experts.”
Experts can be cajoled to bend data. See “The Coming Ice Age, oops, we mean, Global Warming, uh, make that “Climate Change.” Faked “hockey stick” and all that. When gubmint grant money depends on “research” that reinforces the narrative, and when research that proves otherwise is dismissed and its authors shunned, your “research” will – ta-da! – reinforce the narrative.
Hint: “Climate Change” is a wealth redistribution scheme to take money from the haves and give it to the have-nots to squander (see the corrupt money pit called Africa). It’s socialism, which is why the likes of Tim Cook are all in.
The COVID “experts” have told us many things, most of which were wrong, and not just slightly so. From the numbers to the timeframe to the masks to the vaccines – on and on and on with wrong “expert” information.
That you continue to defer to the so-called “experts” is hilarious. You are a true moron.
The march of science never stops offending you, does it?
The latest international climate change report came out today and guess what? The hockey stick has only gotten more obvious in the data going back 2000 years.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/08/key-takeaways-from-the-new-ipcc-report/
I live in a region with 2.4 million inhabitants with several large hospitals that have a total of 200 ICU beds. As of this morning, only six beds were available.
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/08/09/austin-icu-bed-capacity-covid-hospitalization-school-start/5522072001/
Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States and has the largest medical complex in the world. At one point last week, they were having to send pediatric COVID-19 patents by air ambulance to a hospital 150 miles away because there were no pediatric ICU beds available.
https://abc13.com/houston-coronavirus-11-month-old-girl-with-covid-baby-treated-at-hospital-150-miles-away-hospitals-running-out-of-space-for-patients/10933199/
TxUssr,
Dummy, the IPCC “report” is propaganda:
“Rather than conducting its own research, the [IPCC} panel evaluates studies by thousands of scientists from around the world. The idea is to gauge which findings represent the most solid guidance needed for policymakers, governments, businesses, and individuals to address climate change.”
The idea is to FIT AND ADVANCE THE NARRATIVE to continue chugging from the public funding firehose and promote global wealth redistribution.
Carbon dioxide is food for plants and trees.
Here, try to learn something useful for a change:
Read “Unsettled” to temper your confidence. Please.
Information so dire…f’g A.
I bet you are still driving your car, using an a/c and, if not for Covid, air travel is still a consideration?
The hypocrisy of the AGW scare mongers is astounding. We’ve got 8-10 years before no return and the ones propelling the narrative live like the 8-10 yr proclamation is untrue, a joke, or best adjusted to 80-100 yrs.
These same folks have a propensity for inconsistency (lying) as they politic their, “I aim to save the World.” For reference, see Covid and, or contact Barack. He’s the Man for all the needed hope and change.
That is really terrible news about ICUs in Texas. How about Ice Cream Joe stops bussing in infected illegals. Not only do they occupy our hospital beds, be we have to pay for them, as well. You concerned about that, TX?
In related news, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (Socialist Party – Michigan) danced maskless at crowded indoor wedding party in a county where the revered, esteemed and highly regarded CDC calls for masks indoors. ANOTHER one to jot down in my calendar.
You know, as much as you guys post, you would think you could get the facts right once or twice. In the first place, the emergency proclamations in Hidalgo County and the border cities quite specifically say that they are having trouble handling the number of legal new arrivals. The so-called “illegals,” except for minor children, are being summarily sent back across the border by the hundreds of thousands. Those who remain are applicants for asylum who are legally—repeat, legally—in the country pending adjudication of their claims. That isn’t on Biden, but on the federal laws and treaty obligations created in prior administrations.
Second, the new arrivals are being tested for SARS-CoV-2 as soon as they are admitted. There is an effort made to isolate the 15% or so who test positive. That is difficult thanks to sheer numbers, but they are not the major factor in the local Covid caseload. For reference, 15% is substantially the same positivity rate as for natural-born US citizens in Hidalgo County. It is also essentially the same in Dallas County, 446 miles from the border. My county, largely composed of Good Ole Boys and their female kin, has a 19% positivity rate.
The rate of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths along the border as a whole is much lower than those rates in some other parts of Texas and other states. The largest border city, El Paso, currently has one of the lowest case rates in the state. Houston and Austin, which have very few recent immigrants, are being swamped with cases. As the Medical Director for Hidalgo County puts it, “This is not an outbreak among immigrants. It is an outbreak among the unvaccinated, some of whom are from over there, but most of whom are from over here.”
Gentlem-n, start your (search) engines:
Did the CDC mess up Covid numbers in FL? Or is that just “the march of science”?
Were the 599 fully vaccinated, sophisticated, but maskless and unsocially distanced guests at O’s 60 outdoor indoor party who arrived via private jet concerned about the march of global warming science?
Were the mayor of DC, Naddler, Pelosi, AOC, the 26 Texas Dems who fled to DC and Tlaid concerned about the deltaPLUSpornLAMBDA variant? Haven’t they ALL been seen maskless around DC? Is DC a CDC “orange zone” (whatever that means)? They don’t act very concerned. Do they know something that we don’t?
Are (not ‘were’) the fully vaccinated, maskless, unsocially distanced illegals pouring over Biden’s open border contributing to US Covid cases? Or are they helping reduce cases?
Were the 599 fully vaccinated, sophisticated, but maskless and unsocially distanced guests at O’s 60 outdoor indoor party concerned about the march of the deltaPLUSpornLAMBDA variant?
Meanwhile, there are calls to fire unvaccinated Americans AND put them on the terrorist no fly list. Cut their utilities? Freeze their bank accounts? Hmm… what is wrong this picture? Could it be… the march of science?
** 601 if you count the Big O and the Mrs
From TxUSSR
“The so-called “illegals,” except for minor children, are being summarily sent back across the border by the hundreds of thousands. Those who remain are applicants for asylum who are legally—repeat, legally—in the country pending adjudication of their claims. That isn’t on Biden, but on the federal laws and treaty obligations created in prior administrations.”
Except for children, the “so called illegals” (because they are illegal) are being sent back by the “HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS.” Wow! You mean HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS have entered. Is that some kind of record for an installed administrations first six months?
How many “so called. illegals” entered in other administration’s first six months? In other administration’s first four years?
Obviously there is something VERY WRONG with the current occupier of the non-BIPOC House.
You mean HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS have entered. Is that some kind of record for an installed administrations first six months?
No, it is not a record. To date in 2021, the US has stopped 445,000 unique individuals, which is 7% less than in the same span of 2019 (when Trump was President). There were a half-million or so second and third arrests of people in 2021 who had already been deported, and who were then deported again.
“That isn’t on Biden, but on the federal laws and treaty obligations created in prior administrations.”
I’m sure you mean, “That is on Biden.” Was he not a member of a prior administration for EIGHT years? What did he accomplish in eight years?
“Federal laws” Wasn’t Ice Cream Joe at Senator for 36 years? Didn’t he vote for anything in that time? Any accomplishments? Get anything done?
What has Biden and his fake administration done to slow the flow of illegals into the US? Anything at all? Go Google that list of talking points.
I’m sure Trump isn’t responsible for problems at the border. How do I know? Cause he is a racist. He hates BIPOCs. So, I’m fairly certain he was not a “wide open border” kind of KKK guy. I remember very clearly how evil he was. He was always being mean down at the border. So mean! Am I right? (check CNN.com and CDC.gov for fake science, daily talking points and skewed data).
Speaking of data… the the CDC ever get those FL covid case numbers worked out? There were claims that CDC data for FL, of allll places, was in error. Imagine that
Hey First, that doctor in the video you posted talks real good. Uses some really big words, too. Any chance you have a link to all the peer reviewed articles that he sides in his talk? I just wanna make sure he’s not a quack.
Thank you very much.
As I recall, somebody on here posted several anti-CDC speeches by Dr. Stella Emanuel (also retweeted by President Trump and Don, Jr.). It turned out that she believes that most “female troubles” come from the semen of demons injected during erotic dreams.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm
https://liveandlocalacadiana.com/a-video-has-surfaced-with-real-source-data-science-from-a-school-board-meeting-in-indiana/
https://hancockcountypatriots.blogspot.com
Sides —> cites. iOS auto correct.
It says nowhere that Apple can not see non-flagged uploaded pictures in the new situation if they so desire, it is merely a promise of some sort. They can change that on their side without anyone knowing about it.
Privacy is not really improved, nobody I know expects stuff in the cloud to be 100% secure.
It can save Apple some costs perhaps in scanning only for flagged pictures instead of all of them, but it does not in any way improve the fight against child abuse. If earlier on the server side 100 uploaded pictures were checked and for some reason 2 got detected and were reported, that will now still be the case: 100 client side pre-checked and 2 flagged and reported when uploaded. So that does not move the needle one bit. So there is no gain whatsoever on the side of fighting child abuse.
But it does come with ever increasing potential for scanning abuse, mission creep, government interference’s and all those things, none of which concerns are addressed.
Yes, scanning techniques are not new, but what they scan for whilst on ones own device should be transparent and a matter of choice for the owner of the device.
And yes, perhaps there was earlier not enough concern for these matters. But that does not nullify any current concerns. Opinions can change and improve.
Independent checks in my country can be by parliamentary institutions for example. We also have a national chamber for financial auditing and one for all other sorts of auditing. The public can raise concerns to these public bodies via parliament, and initiate investigations if deemed desired.
Again, the potential for abuse, by both third parties and mission creep on Apples side, keeps getting larger. I see that as a legitimate cause of concern if we want to halt the move towards a surveillance world. I am glad many public organizations share those concerns.
If desired….???? Mmmmm
Thanks for your link. Sorry, I’m in a bit of a jam right now. Still stuck in traffic after leaving O’s unmasked, socially undistanced, bring your fully vaccinated passport, deltaPLUSpornLAMBDA variant infected, middle finger to Ice Cream Joe’s fake m-dates BIG 60 party! I’ll have to check out your link later. I’ll write it down in my new calendar.
The move to add systematic surveillance to their products is where Apple looses the grassroots of the moderate left, true classic liberals and the younger generations; (why do you think Snap Chat is the number one App with young people ?).
And since Apple has already alienated the moderate and far right, the only people that will be left cheerleading for apple is big tech/government/police state oligarchy and of course Apple’s move has full support of the criminal (ethic genocide, organ harvesting, slave labor) CCP Chinese government.
Tim cook’s Apple is effectively making the majority of the world fear and hate the sight of any product with the Apple logo on it. Mask mandate nothing, hey bro you can’t come to the partly with your snitch phone.
Apple will be shunned by Gen Z and Gen A. They just shoot themselves in the foot and once the stock starts to drop the exit out of AAPL will be catastrophic. Apple loses its cool forever, Great time to sale the sale out!
Another important concern is the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) online. CSAM refers to content that depicts sexually explicit activities involving a child.
To help address this, new technology in iOS and iPadOS* will allow Apple to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos. This will enable Apple to report these instances to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC acts as a comprehensive reporting center for CSAM and works in collaboration with law enforcement agencies across the United States.
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.
Using another technology called threshold secret sharing, the system ensures the contents of the safety vouchers cannot be interpreted by Apple unless the iCloud Photos account crosses a threshold of known CSAM content. The threshold is set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and ensures less than a one in one trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account.
Only when the threshold is exceeded does the cryptographic technology allow Apple to interpret the contents of the safety vouchers associated with the matching CSAM images. Apple then manually reviews each report to confirm there is a match, disables the user’s account, and sends a report to NCMEC. If a user feels their account has been mistakenly flagged they can file an appeal to have their account reinstated.
This innovative new technology allows Apple to provide valuable and actionable information to NCMEC and law enforcement regarding the proliferation of known CSAM. And it does so while providing significant privacy benefits over existing techniques since Apple only learns about users’ photos if they have a collection of known CSAM in their iCloud Photos account. Even in these cases, Apple only learns about images that match known CSAM.
Who controls the NCMEC database? How secure is the NCMEC database?
Whoever controls the NCMEC database controls 1+ billion iPhone users.
Did Tim Cook ever take even a basic history course when he was studying to become a Compaq parts orderer who’d one day cajole a sick, dying Steve Jobs into making yet another bad CEO pick?
No, copying and pasting Apple’s propaganda materials doesn’t make you sound smart.
OK, even for the MDN readership, it is a bit of a stretch to suggest that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is part of a leftist conspiracy to deny our civil rights. Yes, they are devoted to restricting the liberty of those who should be in prison, rather than raping and torturing children or helping to finance those crimes by buying child pornography. Are you suggesting that is a bad thing?
To repeat the standard line around here when it comes to investigations of Hilary Clinton, Black and Muslim activists, and elections you don’t like, “What do they have to hide?” And yes, I agree that liberals use the same line about Trump’s tax returns and those who oppose an independent investigation of the Capitol invasion. That does not change the reality that people with no secrets are not quite so compulsive about keeping secrets.
Assuming that there is a huge conspiracy out to get us should not be the fallback position in political debate, whether the alleged plot is “a vast right-wing conspiracy” or otherwise.
Are we talking about the same Capital INVASION? The one that was worse than 9/11? The same invasion where non-BIPOC Ashli Babbitt was shot by high ranking BIPOC Capital officer who cannot be named in the name of transparency and openness? The same invasion that Pelosi will investigate down to the tiniest detail (expect for who, how and why Ashli was killed)? The same INVASION that will be independently investigated with the same openness and transparency as Pelosi’s fake Trump impeachment trial that was held literally in the Capital basement behind closed and guarded doors where Republicans were barred from asking any questions? That invasion? If so, yawn.
It’s just the kind thing Chairman Xi of the CCP would like to see installed for monitoring citizen compliance to party policy.
Here is a company that has built its reputation based on promise of ‘privacy at all cost’ who is now, in your face, telling u that their software will come with a built in mechanism of surveilling the content in your phone!!!🤯.. yes, it is photos now… but look past and beyond that……
2nd… turn off iCloud… that breaks the ecosys. another huge marketing point of Apple.!
3rd.. no icloud… no need for extra storage anymore.. hurts their services revenue… a shot in the shareholders foot!
I would not be surprised if there will be a class action lawsuit from …shareholders /etc as this is not in anyway to their interest!….and is against all Apple stood for .. principals we believed in invested in and chose to pay premiums for… all gone !
I for one wont upgrade to 15….
This is total betrayal and hypocrisy on Apple side!
Hope you are listening TIM ORWELL COOK!!