There has been some rumbling about some features Apple plans to install on all their devices.
There are two main features that the company is planning to install in every Apple device. One is a scanning feature that will scan all photos as they get uploaded into iCloud Photos to see if they match a photo in the database of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) maintained by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). The other feature scans all iMessage images sent or received by child accounts—that is, accounts designated as owned by a minor—for sexually explicit material, and if the child is young enough, notifies the parent when these images are sent or received. This feature can be turned on or off by parents. – Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life, by India McKinney and Erica Portnoy, for the EFF
Yeah. And once you have that capability, you can fine tune it based on external pressure. And there will be external pressure!
So not using iCloud Photos and iMessage seems like the thing to do, going forward? In a way, this is what is Happening: lose your rights or live without the digital extensions people around you are using, thus giving up without a fight. Like some of the people in our society that cannot use their smartphones like we can and they bumble through life, always struggling against the torrent of thoughtless digitalization: government services start requiring apps and smartphones, and the alternatives are getting more and more cumbersome. This is not how we fight for our rights. This is how we lose out and disappear from modern society.
Recently I saw @aral posting on Mastodon about Apple’s move to install the spyware mentioned above and noting that this will make the devices work against our best interests.
When I wrote The Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights, I wanted to get people thinking about the kind of constitutional protections we would need to protect personhood in the digital network age. – Apple is trying to redefine what it means to violate your privacy. We must not let it.
Apple is trying to redefine what it means to violate your privacy. We must not let it.
Yeah, Aral Balkan’s Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights is very cool.
Human beings in the digital age use digital technologies to extend their minds and thereby their selves … The boundaries of human beings in the digital age extend beyond their biological boundaries to encompass the greater boundary of their cyborg selves and include the digital organs by which they extend themselves. – Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights
Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights
Anyway, back to Apple. There is an open letter you can sign. It also has longer arguments to make, should you need them.
Apple’s current path threatens to undermine decades of work by technologists, academics and policy advocates towards strong privacy-preserving measures being the norm across a majority of consumer electronic devices and use cases. We ask that Apple reconsider its technology rollout, lest it undo that important work. – An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology
An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology
You can sign this letter via GitHub. A link is on the letter’s web page.
#Apple #Privacy
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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I’ve been without a smartphone for about two years now and I would *never* go back. The grass truly is greener.
What seems so strange about it is people around me actually seem *envious*; to deal with COVID checkin rules I keep in my wallet a bunch of business-card sized printouts with my info, which prompts questions about my lack of smartphone, to which almost everyone says “I want to do that!” Well, nothing’s stopping anyone...
– rnkn 2021-08-09 04:21 UTC
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Wow! Something to think about. I still stand by my point that this is not how we should fight for our rights, but the life style choice is interesting.
– Alex 2021-08-09 08:18 UTC
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I guess for now I’m firmly in the camp that believes our lives are enriched by the phones.
@aral puts it this way:
It’s shocking how easily some folks jump to “just go live in a cave.” No, that’s not an acceptable alternative. We deserve to partake in modern life without sacrificing our human rights… ¹
I think I find living without a smartphone attractive because I imagine myself focused on the here and now. At the same time, I realize that I keep in touch with my family with pictures I take on these phones, with messages I send on the messengers of these phones, I organize the my games using these messengers; I use the maps on these phones… It really does start to feel like forcing myself to live in the nineties while everybody around me gets a new cyborg body or a portable memex.
I suspect that the people saying “I want to do that!“ without doing it are doing the same trade-offs.
Who knows, perhaps one day I’ll do the same: when most of the family is gone…
– Alex 2021-08-10 16:45 UTC
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The EFF keeps posting about it:
Apple is a global company, with phones and computers in use all over the world, and many governments pressure that comes along with that. Apple has promised it will refuse government “demands to build and deploy government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users.” It is good that Apple says it will not, but this is not nearly as strong a protection as saying it cannot, which could not honestly be said about any system of this type. Moreover, if it implements this change, Apple will need to not just fight for privacy, but win in legislatures and courts around the world. To keep its promise, Apple will have to resist the pressure to expand the iMessage scanning program to new countries, to scan for new types of content and to report outside parent-child relationships. – If You Build It, They Will Come: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship Around the World, by Kurt Opsahl, for EFF
– Alex 2021-08-13 08:25 UTC
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Isn’t it funny how now to protect our privacy we have to protect Apple from the governments of the world?
– deshipu 2021-08-13 09:55 UTC
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Our current situation is that we use the government to reign in the corporations, and we use the corporations to put pressure on the governments. Always struggling, always struggling.
– Alex 2021-08-13 10:54 UTC
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@aral has been posting more links, this time articles written by Riana Pfefferkorn, written for The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) at Stanford Law School, explaining how the crypto-war has turned to child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as the golden argument.
This is a significant escalation in the current Crypto Wars. The U.S. government has not gone so directly head-to-head over encryption with a specific company since its showdown with Apple in early 2016, when the government blinked first. … The suddenness of this new push is alarming. Also noteworthy is that suddenly the main reason to demonize encryption is CSAM, with terrorism and other ills playing second fiddle. – William Barr and Winnie the Pooh, by Riana Pfefferkorn, for CIS
William Barr and Winnie the Pooh, by Riana Pfefferkorn, for CIS
The point is that the government no longer wants to prevent end-to-end (E2E) encryption, it just wants the messaging providers to scan material before it is sent. That works, of course, if the devices are not under the control of their users. I’m just waiting to see how we no longer “buy“ our phones but “license“ them.
In the same article:
It is beyond question that CSAM is a real and serious problem for Facebook (and every tech company that has ever given users the ability to upload, store, send, share, post, or otherwise communicate files). It is radioactive, it is illegal everywhere, and no legitimate company wants it on their servers. Nevertheless, this new single-minded focus on CSAM in the revived anti-encryption push feels like an exceedingly cynical move on the part of the U.S. government. Out of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (terrorism, drug trafficking, CSAM, and organized crime), terrorism didn’t work to turn public opinion against encryption, so the government has switched horse(men) midstream. – William Barr and Winnie the Pooh, by Riana Pfefferkorn, for CIS
William Barr and Winnie the Pooh, by Riana Pfefferkorn, for CIS
Yes, the phrase exists.
There does not appear to be a universally agreed definition of who the Horsemen are, but they are usually listed as terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles/child molesters, and organized crime. – Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse, on Wikipedia
Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse, on Wikipedia
It’s upload filters, again and again.
So already, we are seeing CSAM, plus defamation, copyright infringement, and violent extremism (all concepts that are much harder to accurately spot on sight than child sex abuse), as the driving forces behind existing and government-demanded filters on people’s ability to engage in “one-to-many” speech online, through such mediums as YouTube or Facebook. … it is even more troubling when the same idea is applied to flag blacklisted content (be it words or images) in a one-on-one or small-group conversation – something we reasonably consider private. – William Barr and Winnie the Pooh, by Riana Pfefferkorn, for CIS
William Barr and Winnie the Pooh, by Riana Pfefferkorn, for CIS
There is a whole section in that article on how the US and Europe are enviously looking at how China is doing it, and there is a section explaining how the slippery slope argument turns into bitter truth, again with an example from China. Then again, we don’t have to look too far. The same dynamic is apparent everywhere. Here in Switzerland, paedophiles are used to introduce a law that is then used to go after drug dealers.
We are already on that slipper slope.
Her follow-up makes it very clear:
In that October post, I acknowledged that maybe everyone would think I was just making a slippery-slope argument that could easily be dismissed as hyperbole. But the publication of Citizen Lab’s WeChat report provides me with some vindication, thank you very much. Client-side scanning proposals must not be treated as though they are serious ideas worthy of serious consideration. The ratchet of surveillance still goes only one way. You don’t have to help crank it. – Client-Side Scanning and Winnie-the-Pooh Redux (Plus Some Thoughts on Zoom), by Riana Pfefferkorn, for CIS
– Alex 2021-08-13 11:27 UTC