[orange_puff]

Hypothetical; Suppose that this scanning program only ever did what Apple said it was going to do, look for known CSAM. Would this still be upsetting? I am trying to parse if the blow back to this announcement is rooted in the tech communities' ideal of near perfect privacy, or if instead it's a reaction to what this tech could potentially be used for.

I don't find the following argument compelling; Because this tech will be used to scan known CSAM, it will necessarily one day be used to scan for non CSAM. If Apple can implant this tech on your IPhone now, it always could have, and therefore the threat of the government coercing Apple to scan all images for whatever pernicious reasons they can think of has always existed.

CSAM is a massive problem. The solution to how we deal with it will be nuanced and plagued with tradeoffs, but I refuse to be an extremist for either side. I do want something done about CSAM, which is why I am happy that Facebook reports over 10 million instances of it per year from messenger. I also want devices to be mostly private (to assume that a device manufactured by a large corporation would ever be perfectly private in the internet age is delusional). But anyone who acknowledges that CSAM is a problem must also acknowledge that some sacrifice of privacy would be necessary to mitigate it. Or, perhaps one day we can rely on homomorphic encryption to deal with this.

[xur17]

> Hypothetical; Suppose that this scanning program only ever did what Apple said it was going to do, look for known CSAM. Would this still be upsetting? I am trying to parse if the blow back to this announcement is rooted in the tech communities' ideal of near perfect privacy, or if instead it's a reaction to what this tech could potentially be used for.

No, because there will always be false positives, which means someone is going to be manually reviewing your photos.

[orange_puff]

To be clear, that would essentially be working as intended. Apple admitted there would be false positives.

So does this mean that no measure to prevent spread of CSAM should be accepted so long as it has false positives? If we are to trust Apple's numbers, that would be every 1/1trillion images.