TL;DR: Apple will deploy client-side image-scanning/matching technology and snitch on you if it’s allegedly sexually abusive material of minors. Naturally everyone is against child porn. But like pretty much everything rationalized as being for the children, it’s surely a canard to build acceptance and deployment before that scope invariably creeps. The next time the FBI wants access to an iPhone Apple will have the infrastructure ready and waiting. Perhaps you’ve got some media on your phone that wasn’t properly obtained through iTunes. Or maybe you said something off-color that was vaguely menacing towards your betters.
It would be fun if privacy advocates can figure out a way to automatically generate so many false positives that the system becomes useless. Of course, they may just be helping train the AI for free at that point…sigh.
Will be interesting to see how this affects APPL price…probably not too much in long term, I am guessing.
Honestly, the for the children canard will probably work the same way it always does - activate would-be moral crusaders to accuse critics of being pedophiles rather than argue the idea on its (generally, lack of) of merits and limitless potential for abusive scope creep. This will make for uncomfortable rhetoric, but one is not obliged to accept the premise of assholes.
But should it get rammed through the scope will creep invisibly, buried under hundreds of pages of nigh-indecipherable TOS and slowly become the norm across platforms.
The FBI is not the most concerning. There is at least some check-and-balance on them.
From Apple’s perspective there is no way to tell the difference between their actual scanner and something developed by NSO Group Technologies. The dramatic inevitable step on Apple’s path is a false positive brought about by an adversary who has sent the requisite financial donation to NSO’s “analytics” division.
If Apple is doing it, you can bet Scroogle is not far behind…probably already ahead of Apple on the tech but didn’t want to be the inevitable-lawsuit beta tester, as they already have the Gubmints of various countries nosing into their crotch.
FX Technology, in conjunction with the folks at XDA, produced a mobile phone that comes with LineageOS installed out of the box. I don’t expect the big players to hop on board, but for the life of me I don’t understand why more manufacturers or startups don’t see the obvious market for this kind of offering.
IIRC, this required the use of an undisclosed exploit for which the FBI forked over a nontrivial sum after some ugly sparring with AAPL in the courtroom. I believe that exploit was swiftly patched.
Sort of. There’s a big difference between one off attempts and systematic architectural compromises that expose the data of all users equally and indefinitely. The phone of the shooter was eventually “cracked” but it wasn’t related to Apple or the FBI and it came at a huge expense and was only doable one time because the flaw exploited was patched. Ironically the phone reportedly contained no useful information. There’s several stories on the matter but here’s one.
In other words caring about privacy is still a thing that matters. At least that’s my two cents.
