>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account
https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...
Their system can easily be abused by governments or malicious actors to frame innocent people.
Gmail files that get scanned are contained on Google's property, in their cloud, on their machines.
Entirely different context.
It's the difference between the USPS coming into my home without permission and going through my documents, records, mail - versus if I send mail through their system and they track it, scan the envelope, etc.
The iPhone used to be pretty obviously personal property, now Apple is saying that's clearly no longer going to be the case going forward.
Meh, nevermind. That's not much cleaner.
Apple's new system only scans photos you attempt to upload to their cloud.
Nothing else is scanned.
Scanning the files on server, the way Google and Microsoft do it, means that false positive data is lying around where it can be subpoenaed and used to incriminate innocent people.
>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...
And what if in the future they decide they need to scan more than images going to the cloud? What if there is some huge epidemic of child abuse or some other terrible thing and Apple decides they need to do more?
Once you open Pandora's Box you can't close it.
It matters that the capability is there.
Yes, other companies are doing bad things, and they should be stopped.
Doesn't by any stretch of the imagination mean that Apple should be allowed to do something even worse.
Only photos you attempt to upload to Apple's iCloud are scanned. If you turn off iCloud photos, NOTHING is scanned.
>Q: So if iCloud Photos is disabled, the system does not work, which is the public language in the FAQ. I just wanted to ask specifically, when you disable iCloud Photos, does this system continue to create hashes of your photos on device, or is it completely inactive at that point?
A: If users are not using iCloud Photos, NeuralHash will not run
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/interview-apples-head-of-p...
That isn't what I said.
Also, that's not why most people are so upset. Most people are so upset mainly because Apple has now proven that the capability exists, so they can now be more easily compelled by governments to scan for "extra things".
Prior to this, if a government asked Apple to scan someone's phone, Apple could respond with "we don't have that capability", and it would presumably be a tough legal battle to force a company to add a capability that doesn't exist.
This hurdle is now much lower. The effort has gone from "force Apple to design a new system for scanning phones" to "add these couple of hashes to the pre-existing database".
Also, expanding this from just iCloud upload candidates to the entire device is a very small leap now. I mean, the bad guys could just turn off iCloud, and we must think of the children...
Then you have Apple's "reassurance" that they won't comply with government requests to scan for additional things, which is completely moot considering Apple relies on a third party database and has absolutely no control or idea of what the hashes really are.
