corrected: their intent is to scan all photos in your photo library, on your device, including images automatically pulled in from from various sources such as messages, if you have iCloud Photo enabled.
As far as I am aware, this is false and there is no mechanism on iOS by which images are "automatically pulled into" the photo library from anywhere, Messages or otherwise. Do you have a source or an example of how that could happen?
(edit: people are mentioning Whatsapp, which I guess has an option to auto-save received photos. Fair enough, but that's a third-party app and requires you to enable photos access anyway, so it's pretty clearly not what the parent meant).
> their intent is to scan all photos in your photo library, on your device ... if you have iCloud photos enabled
Yes, that's what I said. Enabling iCloud photos uploads your photo library to the cloud, so it's scanning your cloud photos.
Per Apple [0]
>Shared with You works across the system to find the (...) photos, and more that are shared in Messages conversations, and conveniently surfaces them in apps like Photos (...) making it easy to quickly access the information in context.
---
>Yes, that's what I said. Enabling iCloud photos uploads your photo library to the cloud, so it's scanning your cloud photos.
Being disingenuous about it is still a thing though. You stated
> More accurately put, their intent is to scan cloud photos (...) (like every other cloud provider, including Google)
which makes it appear that the photos are only scanned server side "like every other cloud provider". Client side scanning is something that no other provider does, in contrast to what you stated.
[0]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/06/ios-15-brings-powerfu....
I was not being disingenuous, frankly. I said that Apple is scanning your cloud photos, i.e. they are scanning photos that are uploaded to the cloud. Photos not being uploaded to the cloud are not scanned. I made no claims about where the scanning is happening, and I'm not particularly sure why it matters in any material sense.
Still: they scan photos locally - those are not cloud photos, those are local photos. And they have deployed the technical capability. You can bet that once capability exists, they will bend to government demands - there's ample precedent for that.
SO, yes, Apple, unlike all others, scans your photos locally. If they are going to be uploaded to cloud, or if they are forced to.
But yes, I agree with the comment, there's no reason to hide between details: Apple plans to introduce the capability of scanning photos on your local device and comparing hashes against an opaque (non-reviewable) list of hashes that they (along with governments) control (details about how they plan to initially employ this capability are irrelevant).
What no one has done before and what I totally don't accept is someone scanning photos on my device, which is what Apple is doing.
The in the cloud vs. on your device aspect of this debate is the most important part and cannot be glossed over.
If you want to "correct" the claim to say their intent is to scan every photo, citation needed.
Google, on the other hand, has been scanning the entire contents of your account for the past decade.
>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...
However, Google is scanning everything in your account.
We recently had a thread from a historian whose entire account was suspended after Google scanned all the files in his Google Drive, and didn't like what they saw (files on the history of tanks).
https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/81988101/google-l...
If you want your photos to upload in the background, iCloud Photos is your only choice on iOS. Not so on Android. This makes backing up photos to a server privately on iOS essentially unusable.
This kind of crippling anti-privacy pro-Apple-profits design permeates iOS. You cannot even install an app on your device without giving Apple your billing details and letting them know you installed it, which is used for ads. You cannot get your location without also telling it to Apple. You cannot tell Apple not to track your WiFi SSID's location. You cannot uninstall Apple News, which is filled with user tracking for ads. On and on.
> We recently had a thread from a historian whose entire account was suspended after Google scanned all the files in his Google Drive,
You're comparing iOS to the wrong entity when you compare it to Google instead of Android, but even your comparison to Google is faulty. Your link is about Google suspending an account for files shared publicly, not about Google scanning all the files in that account. Section V.B. of https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/ says that sharing those types of images publicly is also a violation of the iCloud TOS, and Apple has the right to do the same thing. The difference is that Apple will probably handle the customer complaint better, but that is an issue of customer service, not privacy.
Apple claims to not scan your pictures, but that's unrelated to whether they scan your pictures
You either believe their corporate communications on the subject or you do not.
In reality they probably have a "photoscanner.so / .dylib" that currently is only linked in by the iCloud uploader thing, but at any time could be called in by any other part of the system (or offer exploits new avenues for data exfiltration), which was actually spelled out in their initial announcement (there will be a system API for accessing it).
So they absolutely have the ability to scan photos on your phone; the fact that they don't intend to currently use it outside of the iCloud uploader is totally immaterial to this debate (the thing I don't want on my phone is photoscanner.so or any such capability).
That is completely false. They announced, a week after the initial announcement, that the on-device nudity-detection they planned on implementing in iMessage would also be open to Snapchat and other messaging apps. That doesn't report anything to the police, isn't hash-based, and is done on-device; it just pops up a bypassable warning to allow child users who are part of "iCloud Family Sharing" to avoid seeing things they don't want to see. It has nothing to do with CSAM detection.
I continue to be frustrated by the amount of misinformation on the anti-CSAM scanning side of the debate, including on HN (and it's orders of magnitude worse everywhere else).
Come on, now you're really going off the rails. What we're discussing here is the system Apple has said they have implemented and described. Anything beyond that is hearsay and accusation, for which some evidence would be appreciated. If you're just going to believe whatever you want to, and damn the evidence or what anyone says, go ahead. There's nothing much more to say.
