Like any platform that size, they face a big abuse problem. Like iMessage, WhatsApp is an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform with billions of users. The accuracy of the matching system, combined with the threshold, makes it very unlikely that pictures that are not known CSAM pictures will be revealed.” What about WhatsApp?Įvery big tech company faces the horrifying reality of child abuse material on its platform. Harmless users should experience minimal to no loss of privacy, because visual derivatives are revealed only if there are enough matches to CSAM pictures, and only for the images that match known CSAM pictures. “In my judgement this system will likely significantly increase the likelihood that people who own or traffic in are found this should help protect children. “Apple’s approach preserves privacy better than any other I am aware of,” says David Forsyth, the chair of the computer science department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who reviewed Apple’s system.
But child abuse is a real and sizable problem where big tech companies have mostly failed to date.
It wouldn’t relieve all the pressure: most of the same governments that want Apple to do more on child abuse also want more action on content related to terrorism and other crimes. Cops have to work hard to get directly into iPhones, but if most of the data is already in an unencrypted iCloud account, a warrant will do the trick. Apple’s public embrace of encryption has made some cops’ jobs more difficult-but it’s made some kinds of surveillance and abuse of power harder too. Child abuse is always at the top of that list, followed closely by terrorism. Governments have for years exerted enormous pressure on all tech companies, Apple included, to allow law enforcement special access to otherwise encrypted data in order to prevent what they see as the most heinous of crimes. So even in 2019, that famous iPhone privacy ad could have used a tiny asterisk. But many Apple customers automatically back everything up to their iCloud accounts-and iCloud has never been encrypted. iMessage is one of the most popular messaging apps with end-to-end encryption. The iPhone was one of the first personal devices to be automatically encrypted. One popular theory is that this week’s announcement will be the first of several moves in the coming months.Īpple’s marketing has boasted about privacy for years. There is an enormous amount we don’t know about what Apple is doing now and what comes next. Why, then, doesn’t Apple just do what other big tech companies do and scan images when they’re uploaded to the cloud instead of when they’re still on someone’s phone? Why build a new and complex set of technologies when it could just take existing tech from off the shelf? Apple’s next move
iCloud accounts are not currently encrypted, so law enforcement can already peer into them.
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In a briefing with journalists on Friday, Apple said that while other cloud services scan nearly everything their users upload, Apple’s on-device scanning is meant to only send an unreadable hash to the company, a code that identifies images that depict child abuse based on a database maintained by NCMEC rather than Apple.Īpple has also pointed out that the feature applies only to people who upload photos to iCloud (automatic uploads are the default setting on iPhones but can be disabled).
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