[starwatch]

Last year Sam Harris interviewed Gabriel J.X. Dance, the deputy investigations editor at The New York Times [0]. They speak to this. It's a tough episode to listen to - they cover many uncomfortable topics along this theme.

From what I recall of the episode, porn (rightly or wrongly) is seen as opt-in for the participants. But if children are involved it cannot be opt-in and is more appropriately described as rape or sexual abuse. Thus CSAM is the preferred term.

[0]: https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/

[dannyw]

Depends on age and context doesn't it? Is a 17 year old snapchatting their private parts to her 17 year old boyfriend CSAM?

Should both parties be imprisoned and go on sex offenders registries for life?

[myspy]

According to Grubers analysis it compares the csam pictures against the library. Your 17 year old is not part of that database. Hence no hash matches.

CSAM provides a library with hashes that are compared against the photos on the phone.

The real problem comes when governments make laws that open the mechanism to different libraries of photos.

[dannyw]

That's the CSAM part. The iMessages part uses a neural network to detect explicit photos through machine learning.

What happens when Apple, or the government, mandate an expansion of CSAM into detecting new material? Apple already has built a neural network to detect new explicit material...

Also, what happens when the USG mandates that Top Secret classified material must also be added to the database? Or when Russia mandates that homosexual pornography must be added to the database?

[zimpenfish]

> Also, what happens when the USG mandates that Top Secret classified material must also be added to the database?

That doesn't appear to have happened in the 10+ years this kind of scanning has already been happening at various cloud providers - what specifically about Apple moving it down to the phone from iCloud Photos makes this more likely now?

[withinboredom]

Depends on the age of consent in both person’s jurisdiction and where they go with those pictures. My 16 year-old self got quite a lecture when my girlfriend and I took some pics of each other and my parents found them. (Age of consent was 13 where we lived, but it was 18 just up the road in another state).

[starwatch]

I'm not well versed enough in the topic (or the law) to have answers. I do think the podcast episode I pointed to does give a lot of food for thought. For me it was an eye opener, as a software engineer trying to build a beautiful future with strong beliefs around e2e encryption, etc.