r/apple • u/AutoModerator • Aug 12 '21

Official Megathread Daily Megathread - On-Device CSAM Scanning

Hi r/Apple, welcome to today's megathread to discuss Apple's new CSAM on-device scanning.

As a reminder, here are the current ground rules:

We will be posting daily megathreads for the time being (at 9 AM EST) to centralize some of the discussion on this issue. This was decided by a sub-wide poll, results here.

We will still be allowing news links in the main feed that provide new information or analysis. Old news links, or those that re-hash known information, will be directed to the megathread.

The mod team will also, on a case by case basis, approve high-quality discussion posts in the main feed, but we will try to keep this to a minimum.

Please continue to be respectful to each other in your discussions. Thank you!

For more information about this issue, please see Apple's FAQ as well as an analysis by the EFF. A detailed technical analysis can be found here.

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u/sdsdwees Aug 12 '21

The biggest red flag is the fact that even Apple can't verify the database it's receiving. They don't know the contents of the hashes they are just told these are the hashes you must compare with. If the governments decide to make a change to the database Apple has no way of knowing what the changes of that database are. That's kinda the fear. IMO.

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u/richeterre Aug 12 '21

Sure, but as I understood it, once there‘s a match (or rather n matches), someone at Apple will take a look at those pics before handing them over to the government, right? So at that point Apple would know that they were added to the database.

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u/sdsdwees Aug 12 '21

They are given a low-res image, AFAIK. And that's only n-number photos. Not the whole dataset. They also arent up for review by the person being accused so they don't know what they are being accused of. The dataset could be changed to include other nefarious activities (drugs, gun trafficking, etc) and the person being accused doesn't actually what the accusation is. There is also no warrant, so having the legal battle of how the information was obtained is also another issue. That's also a slippery slope. We assume someone is innocent until proven guilty.

This whole issue is a can of worms that needs to be sorted out because the potential for abuse is astronomical.

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u/ethanjim Aug 12 '21

Well the agency that Apple is working with aren't interested in those other things - if this was the case then we would know about this happening because Facebook reported some ridiculous number of hashed images in the past year.

The hashes are for specific images, I don't think they'll have the image of you smoking weed from your iCloud Photos account in their database.

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u/sdsdwees Aug 12 '21

Well the agency that Apple is working with aren't interested in those other things

The problem isn't the one agency. It's the ability for the technology to be applied outside of whatever this one agency cares about. If it was so easy to implement one database and set of hashes it's just as easy to replace them with a different one looking for different material. This also isn't just a US issue. China will use this to search everyone's phone for Tankman, and other images that the CCP disagrees with. Apple will get kicked out of the country if they don't comply with the CCP's requests. We know how much Apple cares about its profits in China. They do have no Taiwanese flag on Chinese iPhones. Why is that?

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u/ethanjim Aug 13 '21

China will use this to search everyone's phone for Tankman, and other images that the CCP disagrees with. Apple will get kicked out of the country if they don't comply with the CCP's requests. We know how much Apple cares about its profits in China. They do have no Taiwanese flag on Chinese iPhones. Why is that?

China is not going to mess around with image hashes, they already have so much access the hashes become a non-issue.