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by sodality2 1772 days ago
Apple began scanning for CSAM with Neuralhash. This allows you to turn an image into a specific neuralhash thus possibly triggering its (automatic) CSAM detection. Imagine if a picture of a cat could cause Apple to think you have CP on your device.
3 comments

Well, you'd have to do it 30 times to trigger the system, and then someone at apple moderation would look at those 30 pictures of cats and hit "next" vs "supervisor"
Good that there’s some human supervision. But, I know I have more than 30 photos of my dog. Also don’t like the idea of false positives auto-sharing some of my camera roll.
It's only if you back it up to iCloud, the signatures of the CP used as references are rotated, and they're also not public. The chances of you randomly triggering the system is effectively 0 unless you're uploading CP to your iCloud.
Wait, wasn't all the hullabaloo over this scanning not requiring an upload to iCloud anymore?

They're scanning anything you upload to iCloud (and have been for some time) but now also scan everything on your device too.

No. They calculate a hash on the device, but they only do it as part of the iCloud upload. So whether the hashing happens on the device or on the server, the same images get hashed either way.
Photos of your dog are not going to trigger it. Someone would need to engineer the 30 photos of your dog tweaked to hash to a particular value, and then convince you to save them to your device and then upload to iCloud. And then some portion/abstraction of the dog photo would need to convince a reviewer they were looking at CSAM.

The more likely path to trouble is legal NSFW material that's been engineered.

You can be pretty sure they'll report your account if at least 1 low-res thumbnail ("visual derivative") looks like an image of naked people/a sexual act.
You're not trying hard enough on how to bypass the human component methinks.

Use porn as the base images. The more petite, flat and young looking, the better. The moderators are already going to be tuned in to csam, so all you need to do is to give them a slight push.

Oh damn, that’s crazy. Very cool project. Thanks for sharing and the explanation.