Apple already scans your photos for faces and syncs found faces through iCloud. I’d imagine updating that machine learning model is at least as straightforward as this one.
They're searching for different things though. To my knowledge, before now iOS has never scanned for fingerprints of specific photographs. It would be so darn easy to replace the CSAM database with fingerprints of known tiananmen square photos...
That is a distinction without a difference. I’m sure you could put together quite a good tank man classifier (proof: Google Reverse Image Search works quite well), and it’d catch variations which a perceptual hash wouldn’t.
The only difference is intent. The technical risk has not changed at all.
The technical risk to user privacy - if your threat model is a coerced Apple building surveillance features for nation state actors - is exactly the same between CSAM detection and Photos intelligence which sync results through iCloud. In fact, the latter is more generalizable, has no threshold protections, and so is likely worse.
It's the legal risk that is the biggest problem here. Now that every politician out there knows that this can be done for child porn, there'll be plenty demanding the same for other stuff. And this puts Apple in a rather difficult position, since, with every such demand, they have to either accede, or explain why it's not "important enough" - which then is easily weaponized to bash them.
And not just Apple. Once technical feasibility is proven, I can easily see governments mandating this scheme for all devices sold. At that point, it can get even more ugly, since e.g. custom ROMs and such could be seen as a loophole, and cracked down upon.
This hypothetical lacks an explanation for why every politician has not demanded Apple (or say Google) do this scope creep already for photos stored in the cloud where the technical feasibility and legal precedent has already been established by existing CSAM scanning solutions deployed at scale.
Nonsense. Building an entire system as opposed to adding a single image to a database is a substantially different level of effort. In the US at least this was used successfully as a defense. The US cannot coerce companies build new things on their behalf because it would effectively create "forced speech" which is forbidden by the US Constitution. However they can be coerced if there is minimal effort like adding a single hash to a database.
Photos intelligence already exists, and if people are really going to cite the legal arguments in Apple vs. FBI, then it’s important to remember the “forced speech” Apple argued it could not be compelled to make was changing a rate limit constant on passcode retries.
Exactly this. The whole thing is a red herring. If Apple wanted to go evil, they can easily do so, and this very complex CSAM mechanism is the last thing that will help them.
I’ve read your comments, and they are a glass of cold water in the hell of this discourse. This announcement should force people to think about how they are governed - to the extent they can influence it - and double down on Free Software alternatives to the vendor locked reality we live in.
Instead, a forum of presumably technically savvy people are reduced to hysterics over implausible futures and a letter to ask Apple to roll back a change that is barely different from, and arguably better than, the status quo.
A false positive in matching faces results in a click to fix it or a wrongly categorized photo. A false positive in this new thing may land you in jail or have your life destroyed. Even an allegation of something so heinous is enough to ruin a life.
The "one in trillion" chance of false positives is Apple's invention. They haven't scanned trillions of photos and it's a guess. And you need multiple false positives, yet no one says how many, so it could be a low number. Either way, even with how small the chance of it being wrong is, the consequences for the individual are catastrophic. No one sane should accept that kind of risk/reward ratio.
"Oh, and one more thing, and we think you'll love it. You can back up your entire camera roll for just $10 a month and a really infinitesimally minuscule chance that you and your family will be completely disgraced in the public eye, and you'll get raped and murdered in prison for nothing."
I literally do not take that risk in 2021. I do, currently, make the reasoned assurance that the computational overhead of pushing changes down to my phone, and the general international security community, are keeping me approximately abreast of whether my private device is actively spying on me (short answer: it definitely is, longer answer: but to what specific intent?)
Apple's new policy is: "of course your phone is scanning and flagging your private files to our server - that's normal behavior! Don't worry about it".