[hilyen]

If they're still hashing files, its not end to end.

An anecdote, an activist had a document in their Google Drive. It was not something people high up wanted being distributed. It was deleted not just from their account, but platform wide. Guess how they did that? Its hash.

[Klonoar]

People need to demand sources for some of the stuff said on this site. Unless you can provide an example of that incident of an activist having a file deleted, you're just spewing stuff.

It's not inconceivable, but you need to source it.

[BudaDude]

You are correct, but how could Apple solve this issue without hashing? Syncing files alone without E2E is tricky. I can't imagine a way to sync files between devices without having some sort of hash or id.

[n3t]

You encrypt a file first, then you calculate hash of the encrypted file.

[juniperplant]

That would prevent file de-duplication.

[Obscurity4340]

Big...deal...? That wouldn't be a "you" problem. That would be an Apple problem. If you pay for cloud service (say 100GB), Apple has no business "optimizing" or de-duplicating anyways. If you want it as an option, sure.

But let's not pretend this isn't a subtle backdoor that can invalidate the entire "E2E" implementation. I believe that in the US, having the filename and/or hash/checksum is most of what is necessary to trigger the Foregone conclusion doctrine and force the person to lose their 5th amendment protection and be compelled to decrypt their data to be used against themselves.

I'd like if someone with legal knowledge could comment if my understanding is correct.

[brundolf]

Activists could always salt their own files by adding some junk content to the end (or cropping images by one pixel, cropping video clips by a fraction of a second, etc)

[sneak]

It also allows them to track the contact/social graph of all users based on clusters of who has the same unique file hashes.

Then again, they already have everyone's address books and iMessage traffic, so I guess they already have that data for most of the industrialized world. I wonder who else will preserve copies?

[smoldesu]

100% - this was my largest concern when they announced perceptual hashing, and it seems to be the big takeaway here. Of course, this is a concern with most online hosting services, but at Apple's scale it's pretty scary to consider the possibilities.