On the contrary, it would be weird if everyone inside unanimously agreed.

Use a photo client on an android phone, encrypt the photos and use NextCloud (self-hosted). Make sure your certificates are up-to-date. Reverse this process on another client to see the photos.

What I wouldn&#x27;t recommend is using a cloud service like Flickr if you value the integrity of your data. Recently they charged me with a &quot;Community Guideline Warning&quot; because I accidentally included a folder filled with non-photo images, and threatened to delete my account within three days. There is no way to appeal or know which content is specifically in violation. All they left was a curt, automated email. You can request all your data from Flickr to save everything, but they state that the process can take up to several weeks before you&#x27;re given a download link, longer than the three days it takes for them to arbitrarily terminate your account.Even with services like MEGA that tout keywords like &quot;encryption&quot; and &quot;privacy&quot; without end, look at their Terms of Service and there will be a clause stating that they will still give all your data to any law enforcement agency that puts in a request, including encrypted files. And they have no choice but to do so, because of the very same issue that&#x27;s forcing the personal privacy debate with Apple into the spotlight - hosting any kind of illegal data, which is for all intents and purposes synonymous with CSAM, makes your service criminally liable in dozens of different jurisdictions. A public cloud provider that allows arbitrary file uploads and has absolute privacy cannot exist because of the necessity to allow law enforcement to investigate reports of the illegal hosting of CSAM in dozens of different countries.Any expectation of privacy is a facade when dealing with the cloud. Even beyond the issue of privacy, you&#x27;re still at the whims of the cloud provider in the end. Fail to play by their rules, and you&#x27;re done for.

Since we&#x27;re on HN. Use something like restic and a cron job backing up to something like blackblaze.Yes, it&#x27;s the cloud, but they don&#x27;t control the backup software (it&#x27;s open source, not developed by them, using public APIs) or the encryption keys (protected by a passphrase client side, use a good one).There may be less programmery equivalents of that, which have scheduling built into the backup tool and so on. Just recommending what I&#x27;ve used.(This advice applies to general purpose computers, not sure if there&#x27;s an equivalent for android or iOS)

Synology has a phone app that automatically backs up your photos.  Then a pointy clicky setup to backup your backups to Glacier

Er, do you have a recommendation for non-cloud services that provide me with automatic backups of everything I do if something happens to my apartment, or open-source services that are free of all security flaws allowing hackers to compromise your privacy?Like I wholeheartedly get where you&#x27;re coming from, but I&#x27;m not sure what realistic alternatives look like.

Don&#x27;t use cloud services or closed-source services if you want your stuff to be safe and you want your privacy to be maintained.

The poem begins with &quot;First they came for the socialists..&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;First_they_came_" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;First_they_came_</a>...

&quot;First they came for the pedophiles...&quot;

That is how you should look at it.They have no business scanning the phones for anything, period.I&#x27;ll refer you to the poem beginning with &quot;First they came for the Jews...&quot;.

Also if you remotely think the scanning is going to stop at CSAM I have a bridge in brooklyn to sell you. Copyrighted material, national security, thought crime, are already inside this trojan horse waiting to jump out.

I feel like this is a false sense of security. Even before this change, they can easily access and scan photos on your device. If they do any post-processing of the image on device, they already do.

There is also an argument that the cloud scanning is a few bit flips away from allowing random Apple employees from looking through all my photos while on device scanning means they have to be specifically looking for certain content.  On device scanning is probably preferred if one&#x27;s fear is someone stealing their nudes, which is one of the more common fears about photo privacy and one that Apple has already shown is a problem for them.

I agree. Our phones tend to hold all of our most intimate data. Violating them is akin to violating our homes. It would be nice if the laws saw it this way.

&gt;the system is just a few bit flips away from scanning every photo on your deviceI prefer to think of it as being just one national security letter away from that happening.Which is of course a schroedinger&#x27;s cat kinda thing. It&#x27;s already been sent. Or it hasn&#x27;t. But why would the national security apparatus not take advantage of this obvious opportunity?Anyone giving benefit of the doubt to this kind of stuff nowadays is IMO very naive or just poorly informed of recent digital history.

With server-side scanning, the separation is clearIn all these threads everyone is coming close to the crux of the issue, but I want to restate it in clearer terms:There is a sacrosanct line between &quot;public&quot; and &quot;private,&quot; &quot;mine&quot; and &quot;yours.&quot; That line cannot be crossed by Western governments without a warrant. Cloud computing has deliberately blurred this line over time. This on-device scanning implementation blows right past that line.Our tools before the computing revolution, and our devices after, become a part of us. Our proprioception extends to include them as part of &quot;self.&quot; A personal device -- a tool that should be wholly owned and wholly dependable, like pen and paper -- that betrays its user, is a self that betrays itself.

How is it any more ‘bit flips’ away from scanning every photo on your device than it was before?

Yes. This is it. When I wrote the above I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I felt like this but this is the reason. It’s the slippery slope of mine &#x2F; yours.

You could enable scanning of all files using a few bit-flips, but that doesn&#x27;t have any effect - the results need to be evaluated by someone. Afaik, the system is designed such that the client side does not know whether a match occurred. So to actually report anyone based on the results of the proposed CSAM scanner, Apple also needs to upload all of the scanned files, including the client-side scan result, to figure out whether there&#x27;s a match.

The practical difference is that with on-device scanning, the system is just a few bit flips away from scanning every photo on your device, instead of just the ones that are about to be uploaded. With server-side scanning, the separation is clear—what&#x27;s on Apple&#x27;s server can be scanned, and what&#x27;s only on your phone cannot.This all plays so perfectly into my long-time fears about the locked down nature of the iPhone. Sure, it&#x27;s more secure if Apple is a good steward, but no one outside of Apple can inspect or audit what it&#x27;s doing!

&gt; I know that isn&#x27;t how you should look at it, but that&#x27;s still how it feels.Why do you think you know that? You didn&#x27;t say. It seems like that is how you should see it since they are using your processing power on your device potentially against you.

No it&#x27;s not. Not scanning any content on device at all is better privacy wise.

Can you explain how it is better?If they only scanned icloud I can choose to not use that.If they scan on my iphone my choice would be to stop using that and get a gphone instead.

Turning your own device against you is better? There is no way that is better for you as a user. It&#x27;s great for governments and police forces but it doesn&#x27;t do anything for you as a user but spy on you without getting a warrant.

In reality, the fact that they do the scanning on-device is actually better privacy-wise. But I can see how instinctually it “feels” wrong.

Why is this not how you should look at it. This is exactly how I look at it. It&#x27;s your device, no company should be able to scan shit on a device that they have sold to someone. That&#x27;s like keeping the key of a house after you have sold it and then checking sneakily every week whether the new owners are doing illegal stuff.

I downvoted this comment because it&#x27;s hyperbole.There are plenty of over very real concerns with this. For example, say some activist intern at Apple decides they don&#x27;t like your politics and hits the report button, next thing you know, the police show up to your door and are confiscating all your devices. Just one of many potential abuses.

&gt; I know that isn&#x27;t how you should look at it, but that&#x27;s still how it feels.This is exactly how you should look at it. They turned your device against you.

It has already be announced, this is not only iOS, but all Apple devices.

I think you’re going to have to go to a flip phone, then.Not to be, uh, flippant. Because this feels like a rather obvious slippery slope that Google will be compelled to slide down as well.Feels like the only way to avoid such a thing would be dumb phone + Linux laptop&#x2F;desktop.

&gt;Does anybody know if this policy will extend to macOS too?I don&#x27;t see how it could be in the same way, or at least it only could be on brand new ARM Macs right? The thing is that at least on Intel Macs Apple simply doesn&#x27;t control the whole stack. I mean, obviously, while more effort it&#x27;s perfectly possible to get x86 macOS running virtualized or directly on non-Apple hardware entirely. So any shenanigans they try to pull there can get subverted or outright patched out. Without the whole hardware trust chain and heavy lock down like they have on iOS this sort of effort, even if attempted, becomes less threatening. I guess we&#x27;ll see what they go for though :(. They could certainly make it pretty nasty anyway so as much as anything it&#x27;s more of a forlorn hope they&#x27;ll mainly focus on low hanging fruit.

Yes it will come with the next &quot;+1&quot; version due out in late fall (winter?). It will be an integral to the icloud photos platform. Supposedly if you turn off iCloud photos backup it gets turned off as well

Yes, thats exactly how i feel. I&#x27;d still hate it if my iCloud uploads are scanned but I&#x27;m already assuming that anyway.But the fact that my iOS device can potentially report me to any authorities, for whatever reason, is crossing a line that makes it impossible to ever own an iPhone again. 
I bought my first one in 2007 so I&#x27;m not saying this lightly..Does anybody know if this policy will extend to macOS too?

Only thing I disagree with, it is how you should look at it and that&#x27;s why it feels wrong, because it is wrong.

That&#x27;s true for now but once it gets normalized it will be extended laterally across the whole phone.

They didn’t do themselves any favors by blurring the line between apps and the OS. If it’s just Apple’s Photos app doing this, you can install a different app and not use that one.

I think what you describe and what is shown by Apple is &quot;the&quot; concrete piece of evidence, and what I have suspected for long that there is no longer any product person running the company. It used to be Steve Jobs.You have people arguing over the technical definition of privacy, or on devices, off devices terminology. It doesn&#x27;t matter. The user doesn&#x27;t understand any of it. And they just feel exactly what you wrote. An intrusion of their private space by a company that has been telling you how much they value your privacy for a better part of decade.These sort of technical explanation used to be a Tech Companies &#x2F; Google &#x2F; Microsoft things. Absolutely make sense to nerds, but nothing much to a layman. Now Apple are doing the same. If you watch their Keynotes, you should notice the increase usage of technical jargons or numbers for performance over the past 5 years. Something that Steve Jobs&#x27;s keynote used to keep it to minimal.

Apple just announce I would posit it will be a few weeks, not a few years. This news is everywhere.

&gt; if someone makes new CSAM, it won&#x27;t match any hashes so even &quot;new&quot; pedophiles won&#x27;t get caught by this.That assumes the hashes aren&#x27;t recorded permanently.

&gt; all the pedophiles will stop using iPhoneSounds like “mission accomplished” for Apple then

In a few years, all the pedophiles will stop using iPhone, and then only innocent people will be scanned in perpetuity. Remember, if someone makes new CSAM, it won&#x27;t match any hashes so even &quot;new&quot; pedophiles won&#x27;t get caught by this.So really, the steady state is just us regular folks getting scanned. As the years go on, what is defined as CSAM will morph into &quot;objectionable material&quot;, and will then include &quot;misinformation&quot; like today. They say they won&#x27;t right now, but where will things be in a few years?

I wonder how much of this is shifting the overton window. I&#x27;d really not have people scanning my data at all really.&quot;If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.&quot; said Cardinal Richelieu in the 16th century.I&#x27;m pretty sure my phone and online accounts hold a lot more data than just six lines. How do I know there won&#x27;t be accidents, or &#x27;accidents&#x27;?

My understanding is that there isnt a whole lot of established anything re: the 3rd amendment. So...maybe, we can dream?I think warantless search is a much stronger argument, though.

Wild thought: could on-device scanning be considered a violation of the 3rd Amendment (quartering soldiers [enforcing agents of the government] in peoples homes [property]) ?

I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if there was some weird telemetry tied to this too

I agree. While the difference is slight, one feels almost expected, the other is creepy and invasive.

&gt; I know that isn&#x27;t how you should look at itWhy not? The argument seems perfectly reasonable to me.

&gt; I know that isn&#x27;t how you should look at it, but that&#x27;s still how it feelsIt&#x27;s definitely how you should look at it because it&#x27;s right. Once a device is compromised in this way, there&#x27;s no going back and the erosion of privacy and expansion of scope will become neverending. If a capability exists, it will just be too hard for spooks to keep their fingers out of the cookie jar.

Oh hey.. Roomba scanning for illicit drugs on your coffee table. It sounds ridiculous, but that thing is a literal camera roaming around your entire house, with machine learning.. so..

&gt; your own, trusty iPhoneiPhone runs software which is in full control of Apple. They take active measures to stop general public from auditing its behavior (i.e. no source code, no API specifications, etc).In my opinion, such a device can never be considered as belonging to their users or &quot;trusted&quot; in any reasonable way. The reason is that its root functionality always remains in control of a different entity.I believe that such a relationship can more accurately be described as a lease.Instead of providing specifications and source code, which would help establish the fundamental trust in their products and their behavior, Apple seems to increase their reliance on the &quot;trust me bro&quot; promises, which their current user base has accepted.So far.

I think its just more visible, its easy to upload to the internet and think im uploading to the internet, you don&#x27;t think I am sharing this with law enforcement and Apples third parties.

Don’t second-guess yourself. The viewpoint you express is completely valid. Other child comments have pointed this out, but corporate messaging does not get to tell you how _you_ choose to look at things.

In their attempt to make this extra private by scanning &#x27;on device&#x27;, I think they&#x27;ve managed to make it feel worse.If they scan my iCloud photos in iCloud, well lots of companies scan stuff when you upload it. It&#x27;s on their servers, they&#x27;re responsible for it. They don&#x27;t want to be hosting CSAM.It feels much worse them turning your own, trusty iPhone against you.I know that isn&#x27;t how you should look at it, but that&#x27;s still how it feels.

No, the Fourth Amendment applies to private actors acting on behalf of the government.

Acting as a agent, used to anyway, mean the 4th amendment attached to the companyif they WERE NOT acting as an agent then the 4th would not apply. I think they way they get around that is not do not report to the FBI but instead to NCMEC a &quot;non-profit&quot;

It’s that third party doctrine that is so convenient when acquiring information otherwise requiring a warrant to obtain.

Why stop there?  Instead of getting pesky warrants to search apartments, the government could just contract the landlord to do the search for them.   After all, the landlord owns the property and ownership trumps every other consideration in libertarian fantasy-land.

As I understand, they&#x27;re acting as an agent of the government, it&#x27;s a private company. So, the 4th amendment protecting against unreasonable searches _by the government_ does not apply.

Because for the last at least 80 years the constitution as not been seen as a document limiting government power, but instead as a document limiting the peoples rightsit has literally been inverted from it original purpose

A EULA cannot force you to give up your constitutional rights.

IANAL but I presume I consented to this in their EULA.

You can bet they were by the TLA intel agencies, but you will not find that documented anywhere other than &quot;Met with FBI&#x2F;NSA&#x2F;XXX for liason purposes&quot;. I&#x27;m sure they were given an ultimatum and they folded.

Or when the NSA feeds your texts through their ML and into their DB it&#x27;s not a &quot;search&quot; because humans haven&#x27;t gone looking for it.

Probably the same way people say that when Twitter moderates speech on their platform it’s not censorship.

what&#x27;s this take based on - have a link or anything?

It’s silly to think the US government hasn’t been twisting their arm to do this for years.

Why then release this feature in the US? Why not just release it in China and avoid all this negative press? Bad take is bad

It&#x27;s most likely a demand by China so that they can create an infrastructure to locate political dissidents. Oh look, a Winnie the Pooh Xi meme ended up in your gallery&#x2F;inbox. Why is there a knock at the door? I&#x27;m pretty sure thats the real reason.

If you do not understand what the software on your phone is doing; you cannot control it; you do not own it. Apple owns it.

Technically it&#x27;s not apple searching, it&#x27;s your phone searching itself. Sadly, they&#x27;ll probably put it somewhere on page 89 of their ToS.

National Security Letters for example. They wouldn&#x27;t even be allowed to talk about it.

USPS regularly X-rays mail, and the only protection against abuse is policy (it’s not admissible evidence in the United States).

This cuts both ways. Our laws not evolving with technology is also the reason why tapping and intercepting secured digital communication is orders of magnitude more difficult than tapping someone&#x27;s analog phone line, or why decrypting a hard drive is far more difficult for the police than sawing apart a safe.

Simple - our laws haven&#x27;t evolved with technology. That&#x27;s why your mail has about a million times more protection than your email.

There is no law that requires providers to scan users private documents, even uploaded.However, if they do review the material and see child porn they&#x27;re obligated to report it.

Apple hasn&#x27;t gone above and beyond anything here. The only way they can save face is laugh at the government and not give into their demands to set up a backdoor tool to scan every iphone user.

I am not a Lawyer, but my understanding is:The wording of the CSAM law is that content should be scanned when uploaded. That condition &quot;upon upload&quot; triggers the 3rd party doctrine.Apple has gone above and beyond here, not the actual US gov. So, the bill of rights doesn&#x27;t apply to Apple&#x27;s decision to scan content on device, just before it is uploaded.

&gt; Apple is engaging in this activity of their own free will for sake of their own commercial gainWhat&#x27;s the commercial gain?

&gt; Apple is engaging in this activity of their own free will for sake of their own commercial gain and are not being incentivized or coerced by the government in any way.Honest question: how do you know this, for sure? Or is your comment supposed to be read as an allegation phrased as fact?

They aren&#x27;t being coaxed or coerced. If they were forced-- or even incentivized-- by the government to perform these searches than they&#x27;d be subject to the fourth amendment protecting against warrantless searches.Apple is engaging in this activity of their own free will for sake of their own commercial gain and are not being incentivized or coerced by the government in any way.As such, the warrantless search of the customer data is lawful by virtue of the customer&#x27;s agreements with Apple.

Something tells me people with access to nuclear arsenal are not going to take pictures of it with an iphone and share them via imessages

&gt; the porn problem.Is the pornography the problem, or is the the abuse of children?

My money is this is secretly about nuclear, bio, chemical or other WMD or “dangerous” material. I can’t imagine that Apple would be so stupid to open such a Pandora’s box to an Orwellian state and crimes against all children in the name of making no statistical difference in the porn problem. There has got to be a hidden story here and severe pressure on top executives, otherwise I can’t see how the math makes sense. Please keep digging, journalists!

Because it&#x27;s a contract between you and apple. You don&#x27;t have to use their phones and they&#x27;re a corp not the government. Personally I see it as an underhanded attempt for the government to use apple as a police force in everything but actually deputizing them. They&#x27;re using a loop hole in the 4th amendment to spy on you without a warrant.

Because it&#x27;s only a hash that matches and then a court order is needed to get the actual contents.

&quot;The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have &quot;no reasonable expectation of privacy.&quot;&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Third-party_doctrine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Third-party_doctrine</a>

Can someone explain how Apple being coaxed or coerced into searching all of our personal devices for illegal files by federal law enforcement is not an unconstitutional warrantless search?

Part of the reason this might succeed is the Apple fans. They&#x27;re defending Apple yet again despite the treasons against our privacy being committed.

I have advice for Apple employees. Think Different.You&#x27;ve become Microsoft. I might as well buy a facebook phone.

As it should be sparked! Apple is asking its engineers to create spyware and deploy it on millions of devices. &quot;Concern&quot; is majorly understating my feelings right now.

They are acting on behalf of the government.

Why did Apple invest so much engineering effort, into something so complex, without being told to do so? This move doesn&#x27;t benefit their brand, or the year of advertising they have done to differentiate themselves with Google and facebook as a privacy focused company.

How is Apple&#x27;s CSAM implementation not a violation of the fourth amendment?

People switch back and forth between iphone and android all the time.

This is the ultimate lock-in strategy. If you switch from iPhone now, everyone will suspect you of being a pedo and you&#x27;ll have to endure the social consequences.

I don&#x27;t understand what they are thinking.This project is probably going to cost millions, they won&#x27;t catch any pedophiles, they will only scare them so they don&#x27;t use Apple devices.Nobody asked them to do it.This is none of their business.It can only creates new vulnerabilities, privacy issues and general annoyance.

Me neither. I used to trust them to do the right thing for their customers but not anymore.

I want to own the devices I buy, hardware and software.
Apple has no business doing what is the role of a state.I, quite simply, don&#x27;t trust them.

Ham Radio does not depend on internet backbone. In the extreme, you can communicate across the world with a few basic electronic components which can be built at home. Sure, government can listen to it but it&#x27;s trivial to encrypt (illegal on Ham bands) if you&#x27;re oppressed by the government.&gt; nice list for their shit to be confiscated.I am not sure if this would go well in the USA.

Why ham radio? That doesn’t make sense. There’s no privacy there by law. It is by nature a completely non anonymous medium. Not only that if a country shuts down its comms the hams are all on a nice list for their shit to be confiscated.Im not a ham because of some romanticised dystopia avoidance. It’s just fun to make things that you can talk to people on :)

Governments have wilfully not kept up with the technology, so they can spy on it all.Imagine if the government suddenly decided that they would open and scan everyone&#x27;s physical mail into a permanent database. Why should email be any different?

Regarding smartphones, I wonder if we’ve just lost a grip on what it means to have privacy. Even our expectations for privacy have degraded and eroded over time. We just carry this device with our life encoded in a flash chip with keys to cloud access. Life. Everything from emails to our walking gait, photos, text, history, health records, etc is stored on this one device. Dictators of the past would have a field day with this infrastructure.“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the people of future would willingly carry a surveillance device that they depend on everyday to communicate to others and carry with them everywhere?”We need to move towards OSS and OSH phones with extreme urgency. We also need to get more people involved in Ham Radio.

If iCloud content was encrypted (as it should be given what Apple says about themselves and privacy) they wouldn’t and couldn’t care any less what the data on their servers contains since, ideally, they’d have no way of decrypting that data. No need for any privacy invasion!&gt; Apple needs to make sure you don’t have certain content on your phone. 
Excuse me, what? What does Apple care what I have on my device?

My understanding is they already do server-side. But relying on server-side alone means trying to end-to-end encrypt your data on the server would put them in political&#x2F;legal crosshairs.

It seems easy as hell for them to just change the system to do server-side scanning instead of client-side scanning and it would probably be enough to calm the horde.I think people can understand, Apple can&#x27;t have certain content on their servers. People have a much harder time understanding that Apple needs to make sure you don&#x27;t have certain content on your phone.

&gt; this kind of backdoor is the kind of thing that makes big corps prohibit the use&#x2F;purchases of devices.I wouldn&#x27;t be too hopeful about this. They can just disable this feature if the device is enrolled in MDM. For enterprise devices, the company itself is responsible for what&#x27;s on them. And depending on the company, they may already scan all content for a bunch of stuff (like exfiltrating trade secrets or whatever).

&gt;Messaging someone will also reveal yourself as the senderSending a link to 4chan &#x2F;b would probably be enough.
Or a hidden iFrame in a forum post.Its very very easy to get images onto someones device without their consent, getting them to upload them to a 3rd party is completely different.

I think a lot of people overestimate how hard it is to stay hidden for small jobs.Furthermore there is a lack of imagination here:- work from a hacked account (I&#x27;ve seen gmail accounts that have been &quot;shared&quot; with an attacker for long enough to let the attacker having conversations with their bank, i.e. attacker used the account but stayed hidden until the bank called to verify details.)- VPNs exist.- Russia exist.- nasty images can be embedded into details of innocent high resolution photos.- very soon they&#x27;ll have to scan pdfs, pdf attachments and zip files otherwise this is just a joke.- at this time it becomes even easier to frame someone- etcRemember, the goal is probably not to get someone convicted, just to mess up their lives by getting business contacts, family and neighbors to wonder if they were really innocent or if they just got off the hook.That said, the bigger problem with having a secret database of objects to scan for is that it is secret: anything can go into it, allowing all kinds of fishing expeditions.I mean: if you have such a wonderful system it would be a shame not to use it to stop copyright infringement in the west, blasphemy (Christian or Atheist literature) in Muslim countries or lack of respect for the dear leader (Winnie Pooh memes) in China.

&gt; Secondly, it seems rife for abuse: dont like someone who uses an ios device, msg them some cp and destroy their entire life.I see this a lot. First of all, if you even have CP in the first place that seems quite bad and that you&#x27;ve made yourself vulnerable. Messaging someone will also reveal yourself as the sender. But my bigger question of this hypothetical issue is that Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, etc etc have been scanning for CP all of this time on their servers. So it&#x27;s not like this is somehow a new proposition. Thus wouldn&#x27;t this already be a big issue through the many, many more people that use all of these other company&#x27;s cloud products?

WhatsApp on iOS for example will by default, save images that people send to you to your photo gallery.

&gt;dont like someone who uses an ios device, msg them some cp and destroy their entire life.For this to work one would have to send multiple photos and convince the other person to save the photos to their library.

Apple&#x27;s choices are do this or give people admin rights on their devices. Keep in mind there are iOS features for doing admin on the device that are kept internally, so that wouldn&#x27;t require much (if any) new software.One makes them look bad and the other makes them lose money. Which do you think they will choose?

There are two things that make me think this will be walked back.Firstly, and most importantly, this kind of backdoor is the kind of thing that makes big corps prohibit the use&#x2F;purchases of devices.Secondly, it seems rife for abuse: dont like someone who uses an ios device, msg them some cp and destroy their entire life.

Not really you were essentially immune to a lot of the ad spying and individual databases that google built up on you to sell to 3rd parties that advertised to you. Also apps were given much less freedom to spy on you or access your on device file. Apple just threw all the good sentiment they built up over google down the shitter and try to convince us otherwise with &quot;think of the children&quot;.

It was easier to dismiss in the past because the evidence to the contrary has been largely circumstantial, of sufficiently dubious origin, or not direct enough for people to accept as proof.They publicly announced a backdoor this time. They can’t un-invent the capability. You can now prove that Apple is lying about its concern for privacy by citing their own website.

And that&#x27;s all it ever was, perceived differentiation.  They were never truly concerned with privacy ever.

What makes it even weirder is that just couple months ago, everyone was praising Apple for their whole &quot;Privacy&quot; ads when they announced iOS 15 with the do not track defaults.I even think that Apple would have faced less backpack over this CSAM stuff if they hadn&#x27;t used the &quot;privacy&quot; shtick just couple months ago.

The whole reason why they come up with that complicated on-device scan instead of simply scanning their server is because they are trying to push e2ee, on the contrary.

This was such a weird way for them to announce that they’re no longer pursuing privacy as a differentiation strategy.

On both platforms those are enabled by default.96% users keep defaults[1].[1] - My estimate

It&#x27;s not about CSAM scanning its about where the scanning is done!&gt; I’d say most people have iCloud Photos enabled, so I’m trying to gauge whether that’s true of Google Photos too.I&#x27;d say most people don&#x27;t have CSAM eitherway.

Question for Android users: do you have Google Photos backup enabled?I’d say most people have iCloud Photos enabled, so I’m trying to gauge whether that’s true of Google Photos too.Google Photos also does CSAM scanning, I believe

Until even owning a non-standard phone becomes illegal.A similar scenario was found in Stallman&#x27;s disturbingly-prescient story 24 years ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;right-to-read.en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;right-to-read.en.html</a>

So it boils down to companies make most of the OSs for devices.Governments can compel companies to do stuff.The only option for the truly privacy conscious is to not use a company provided OS. The future is in buying a phone and flashing the ROM you want.Until even owning a non-standard phone becomes illegal.

Please don&#x27;t post flamebait and&#x2F;or unsubstantive comments. We&#x27;re trying for something a bit different from internet default here.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Hey it&#x27;s still private... unless you have content that matches an opaque, government controlled list of forbidden content... what could go wrong?

That is, it seems like Apple really wanted to preserve &quot;end-to-end&quot; encryption,“ … except they still have not mentioned anything about E2E encryption… and they currently don’t encrypt icloud backups.You would think apple would get ahead of this story and mention … or maybe they don’t have any E2E plans at all.

Something probably did happen. Apple no doubt became increasingly aware of just how legally culpable they are for photos uploaded to iCloud.For content that is pirated Apple would receive a slap on the wrist, but for content that shows the exploitation of children? And that Apple is hosting on their owned servers? There is no doubt every government will throw their full legal weight behind that case.Now they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do they or do they not look at iCloud Photos? Well, not in the cloud i guess, but right before you upload them. Is that any better? I don&#x27;t know? Probably not. They really have no choice though. They either scan in the cloud of scan on the device. Scanning in the cloud would at least let people know where their content truly stands, but then they can&#x27;t advertise end-to-end encryption and on paper it may have felt like a bigger reversal.I think the long and short answer is. Apple cannot really legally protect your privacy when it comes to data stored on their servers. The end.

That would be the best case scenario, but then why wouldn’t they come out and say that?They could have announced this all in one shot and saved themselves a lot of blowback.I believe they have to understand that, which makes me think the theory of them planning to add E2E may not be true.

I sold all the Netflix stock I had purchased when they announced Qwikster. Woe is me!

&gt; didn&#x27;t quite realize that their plan to protect end-to-end encryption doesn&#x27;t mean that much if one &quot;end&quot; is now forced to run tech that can be abused by governmentsNot just one end, but specifically the end that their users thought they had control over.

Thus, my guess is, at least at the beginning, they saw this as a strong win for privacy. As the project progressed, however, it&#x27;s like they missed &quot;the forest for the trees&quot; and didn&#x27;t quite realize that their plan to protect end-to-end encryption doesn&#x27;t mean that much if one &quot;end&quot; is now forced to run tech that can be abused by governments.Sincere or not, the &quot;the only way we could do true X is by making X utterly useless and meaningless&quot; thing certainly seems like bureaucracy speaking. It&#x27;s a testament to &quot;the reality distortion field&quot; or &quot;drinking the Koolaid&quot; but it shows that the &quot;fall-off&quot; of such fields can be steep.

There are methods for dealing with CP that would maintain privacy, not subject humans to child pornography, and would jive with their end to end encryption goals. But we’ll never know what they’re doing under the hood and I think that’s the concerning part.

&gt; That is, it seems like Apple really wanted to preserve &quot;end-to-end&quot; encryption, but they needed to do something to address the CSAM issue lest governments come down on them hard.This seems like an incredible reach to me.

I agree with your analysis -- I also think it was probably meant to mollify law enforcement without sacrificing encryption. The same thought occured to me independently right when it was announced.

What follows is conjecture:&gt;... to address the CSAM issue lest governments come down on them hard.And I think that is the springboard of why this is happening.It&#x27;s no secret that Apple has lobbyists which by turns have a &quot;pulse&quot; on the trajectory of Bills in the House and Senate.What immediately came to mind to me was H.R.485 of 2021&#x27;s House Session:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;117th-congress&#x2F;house-bill&#x2F;485&#x2F;text" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.congress.gov&#x2F;bill&#x2F;117th-congress&#x2F;house-bill&#x2F;485&#x2F;...</a>My (layperson) estimation is that Apple knows the rewording of it is liable pass both House&#x2F;Senate in some way either in the 2022 or 2023 sessions and are attempting to get ahead of the issue. (most likely as a &quot;rider&quot; bill at this point)That&#x27;s my thought process on what may have precipitated Apple&#x27;s move toward &quot;CSAM&quot;; and I welcome it in some ways (unequivocally, children should not be subjected to sexual abuse) and am wary of it in others (ML is in its infancy in too many respects, and if a false-positive arises who&#x27;s to say what&#x27;s liable to happen on the Law Enforcement level).There are infinitely many concerns to be discussed on both sides of this argument, and I want both to succeed in their way. CSAM, however, feels like an attempt to throw a blanket over Apple&#x27;s domains-of-future-interests while playing an Altruism Card.One thing is certain, though: they&#x27;ve opened the floodgates to these discussions on an international level...

&gt; …to be honest I think many at Apple behind this decision are likely pretty surprised by the blowback.If Apple is surprised by the blowback, it’s entirely Apple’s fault because it didn’t engage with many outside experts on the privacy front.I recall reading either in Alex Stamos’s tweets or Matthew Green’s tweets that Apple was invited before for discussions related to handling CSAM, but it didn’t participate.Secretiveness is helpful to keep an advantage, but I can’t believe that Apple is incapable of engaging with knowledgeable people outside with legal agreements to keep things under wraps.This blowback is well deserved for the way Apple operates. And I’m writing this as a disappointed Apple ecosystem user.

&gt; but they needed to do something to address the CSAM issue lest governments come down on them hard.If Apple does not have decryption keys for iCloud content, they can&#x27;t decrypt it, only the user can. For Apple, it&#x27;s not technically feasible, and the law supports that.Apple has now demonstrated that it is technically feasible to overcome this challenge by doing things &quot;pre-encryption&quot; on the user&#x27;s device.From a user&#x27;s point-of-view, Apple&#x27;s privacy is worth nothing. It makes no sense for them to encrypt anything, if they leak all data before encryption. Children today, terrorism tomorrow. All your messages, photos, and audio, can be leaked.There are thousands of people at Apple involved in the release of any single feature, from devs and testers, to managers all the way up to VPs.The fact that this feature made it to production proofs that Apple is an organization that I can&#x27;t trust with my privacy.Their privacy team must be pulling their hairs out. They better start looking for a new job.

I&#x27;m not a techie, but I think iOS already has similar technology: Camera detects faces, Photos can recognize people and objects (or cats) — all with help of AI (or ML). I think they are just expanding this and combining with &quot;share&quot;.

,,Netflix could very clearly see the writing on the wall, that the DVD-by-mail business needed to morph into a streaming business.&#x27;&#x27;I don&#x27;t argue with your point, but actually Reed Hastings originally created Netflix the DVD rental company so that he could turn it into a movie streaming company. He had to wait for internet to be fast enough. His interview with Reid Hoffman is pretty cool:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jYhP08uuffs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;jYhP08uuffs</a>

It all seems so weird.It&#x27;s actually easier to the the scanning on the backend compared to scanning of the user&#x27;s phones.My opinion, maybe entirely wrong, is that it&#x27;s related to how Apple operates in China. In China, Apple does not actually operate their backends, but their BE is operated by government owned business, which is &quot;leased&quot; by Apple.Maybe they don&#x27;t want to enable scanning on BE for that reason, and over-engineered local device scanning, that really doesn&#x27;t make much sense if you think about it twice?

Adding to the confusion, they announced both the AI powered parental control feature for iMessage and hash-based scanning of iCloud pictures.The iMessage thing is actual spyware, by design, it is a way for parents to spy on their children, which is fine as long as it is a choice and the parents are in control. And that&#x27;s the case here.The iCloud thing is much more restrictive, comparing hashes of pictures before you send them to Apple servers. For some reason, they do it client side and not server side. AFAIK, iCloud photos are not E2E encrypted so I don&#x27;t really know why they are doing it that way when everyone else does it server-side.But combine the news and it sounds like Apple is using AI to scan all your pictures. Which is not true. Unless you are a child and still under your parents authority, it will only compare hashes of picture you send in the cloud, no fancy AI here, and it is kind of understandable for Apple not to want to host child porn.

&gt; there&#x27;s no easy way to explain it and still defend Apple&#x27;s Privacy narrative, wihout doing extreme mental gymnastics.&gt; &gt; Apple really wanted to preserve &quot;end-to-end&quot; encryption, but they needed to do something to address the CSAM issueThere we are.

&gt; I think many at Apple behind this decision are likely pretty surprised by the blowback.Maybe they would have been surprised where it ended up, but someone in charge there is definitely on board with a reversal on the previous privacy stance, given the doubling-down with an email signal-boosting the NCMEC calling privacy concerns the &quot;screeching of the minority&quot;.

They announced CSAM scanning but would you trust there is no scanning if they said they reversed their decision and eventually gave you E2E? Considering how big the firmware size is and that all images are processed by their APIs and they control both SW and HW they could hide such scanning in the firmware or even hardware if they wanted or were forced to. They could add a new separate microcontroller similar to Secure Enclave which would (in addition to &quot;AI-enhancing&quot; the picture) compute and compare CSAM hash. On a positive match, the main CPU would decrypt and run a hidden reporting code which would report the image over TLS-secured channel with Secure Enclave-backed certificate pinning to prevent any MITM. No one would notice because it would be decrypted only after a positive match and no one could see the image being sent out on a positive match because of TLS. It is not just Apple, though. We currently don&#x27;t have enough control over our devices, especially smart phones. There are some vendor binary blobs on Android too. Now or in the future, these proprietary, very capable devices are ideal for many types of spying. Stallman warned about this many years ago.

Apple know what they are doing. Don&#x27;t fool yourself by giving plausible excuses. The further away you are from your phone the more privacy you will have.Almost everyone was traced back to the Jan 6th insurrection, because unlike antifa they took their phones with them, so easy trace for government. Now they are in solitary confinement in prison while the world loughs at their expectations of privacy from their phones.If they get a covid passport implemented, you won&#x27;t be able to go out in public without your phone to prove you&#x27;ve been vaccinated. So leaving a phone behind will not be much of an option if this is to pass. Metadata and contact tracing will keep track of everyone you&#x27;re near. This dystopian future is possibly just a few weeks away.

So Apple has rightfully lost the trust of its users then. We submit to their walled garden because we believe they are benevolent. But when they make this kind of a mistake how can we trust them?I don&#x27;t really see how they can recover from this. Will they go out of business? no. Will they even lose market share? No. But there will always be that example of the time Apple got it wrong.If I was an Apple employee I would certainly be concerned about how something like this could happen.

I also think that some kind of negotiation between Apple and the government happened in the background. Probably something like “don’t break up the company and we give you a backdoor”. Maybe we throw stones at the wrong window? I wish we could know more about this, but it is probably that the inner workings of state surveillance are not meant to be public. What do we do?

I actually think something else happened, and to be honest I think many at Apple behind this decision are likely pretty surprised by the blowback.That is, it seems like Apple really wanted to preserve &quot;end-to-end&quot; encryption, but they needed to do something to address the CSAM issue lest governments come down on them hard. Thus, my guess is, at least at the beginning, they saw this as a strong win for privacy. As the project progressed, however, it&#x27;s like they missed &quot;the forest for the trees&quot; and didn&#x27;t quite realize that their plan to protect end-to-end encryption doesn&#x27;t mean that much if one &quot;end&quot; is now forced to run tech that can be abused by governments.This kind of thing isn&#x27;t that uncommon with large companies. To me it seems very similar to the Netflix Qwikster debacle of a decade ago. Netflix could very clearly see the writing on the wall, that the DVD-by-mail business needed to morph into a streaming business. But they fumbled the implementation, and what largely came across to the public was &quot;you&#x27;re raising prices by 40%.&quot;I give Netflix huge props for actually reversing the decision pretty quickly - I find that exceptionally rare among large corporations. Remains to be seen if Apple will do the same.

If I were to speculate, I’ve seen lots of references as to how Apple reports way less of this to the appropriate authority than the rest of their competition. It does kinda sound to me like this is the consequence of external pressure. I cannot prove this but speculate, of course.I just don’t think the messaging they had around this is reassuring at all. While they had all sorts of technical explanations as to how trustworthy this will all be because they are in charge, the whole thing quickly went from “this is only for iCloud photos” and only in the US to “3rd party integration can happen” and “we’re expanding it to other countries”. Which I guess is a logical next step but it is a hint at expansion.The walled garden becomes much less tempting after all of this, especially right after a scandal like the Pegasus one.

So who is responsible for this decision? Is it Tim Cook?

&gt; This CSAM Prevention initiative by Apple is a 180 degress change of their general message around privacy.yes, but at least they are telling the truth now...

Aren&#x27;t a number of things E2EE with Apple?

Apple only had pro privacy PR. They were always working this way. What you&#x27;re witnessing is a PR change and not a technical one.

And, it’s absurdly defeat-able. Which means there’ll be an escalation. Whether in v2 or beyond, this will get worse &#x2F; more intrusive.

&gt; A bunch of people are making speculative claims that Apple is doing this to enable encryption of data in iCloud, but there&#x27;s no reason to believe that&#x27;s true. Apple certainly hasn&#x27;t mentioned it.There is nothing surprising here. Apple never mentions things unless it’s ready for release or is just about to be released. It’s just how Apple works.

Here&#x27;s my hope: E2E encryption. Maybe the government is throwing a fit about Apple harboring potential CP on its server if it&#x27;s E2E encrypted, so apple says, &quot;fine well review it prior to upload, and then E2E encrypt the upload itself&quot;I can hope, I guess...

&gt; &quot;we need to scan your phone because we need to look for this material, and by the way, we&#x27;re only scanning things _we&#x27;ve been scanning for years already_&quot;As far as we know, Apple is not already using their decryption keys to decrypt images upload to iCloud and compare them with known images. That&#x27;s according to this blog post that claims Apple make very few reports to the NCMEC:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackerfactor.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;index.php?&#x2F;archives&#x2F;929-One-Bad-Apple.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hackerfactor.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;index.php?&#x2F;archives&#x2F;929-On...</a>

To me the issue is that it makes no sense: if it&#x27;s just scanning iCloud photos, ___why does this feature need to exist at all__?Apple is saying this: &quot;we need to scan your phone because we need to look for this material, and by the way, we&#x27;re only scanning things _we&#x27;ve been scanning for years already_&quot;Basiclaly, everything else aside, in the current state of things, this feature makes no sense. They are not scanning anything they weren&#x27;t scanning already (literally, everything on iCloud) so why did they bother?A bunch of people are making speculative claims that Apple is doing this to enable encryption of data in iCloud, but there&#x27;s no reason to believe that&#x27;s true. Apple certainly hasn&#x27;t mentioned it.So .. why?

Apple was always pro “think of the children”, not just privacy.

&gt; why wouldn&#x27;t we trust that these image hashes can&#x27;t be reversed back into images?You should avoid making political or moral arguments when your technical knowledge is 10 feet below your ego. An image is orders of magnitude larger than a password, meaning that many more collisions. Also, because it&#x27;s a perceptual hash, even more collisions. One does not simply reverse a perceptual hash. Keep your hat on ;-)

I don&#x27;t think this is a good metaphor. You still get the privacy same privacy aspect as you did before. Only your iCloud images are now being scanned for visual matches. If you are already trusting Apple with rest of your private life this hardly is complete 180 degree turn.I don&#x27;t quite understand why people are so against this. What if some algorithm scans your images? If you are using any cloud service to share your images then your images are already being scanned and far more invasively. Is the the storing of hashes that concerns you? Your password(s) is already being stored as a hash and we trust that it can not be reversed back to plain text, why wouldn&#x27;t we trust that these image hashes can&#x27;t be reversed back into images?I&#x27;ve seen some notion that this is a backdoor and governments and other Lovecraftian entities could use it to suppress freedom of speech by censoring certain images, but that would require them to first have the image in question, then creating hash of the image, and then inserting it into the Apple&#x27;s database and after that it would only be flagged for human verification and again assuming you trust Apple to handle rest of your digital life (such as iMessages) why wouldn&#x27;t you trust Apple to share your images? If some entity has it&#x27;s hooks so deep in apple that they start to censor images why wouldn&#x27;t they just stop all of your messages being sent?Please correct me if I&#x27;m missing something obvious.

&gt; Apple privacy focus was always opportunistic: they couldn&#x27;t get a foothold into online advertising so they decided to make that weakness a selling point instead.You could spin that the other way: Apple’s foray into advertising was opportunistic, but didn’t sit with their focus on privacy. You’d need internal memos to prove it went either way.

Apple privacy focus was always opportunistic: they couldn&#x27;t get a foothold into online advertising so they decided to make that weakness a selling point instead.They&#x27;ll ditch privacy in a second if they can sell you enough ads, just as they ditched privacy for Chinese customers when the Chinese government asked them to.

&gt; It&#x27;s like working for a food company that claims to use organic, non-processed, fair-trade ingredients and in just a day deciding that you&#x27;re going to switch to industrial farming sourcing and ultra-processed ingredients.No it&#x27;s not, it&#x27;s more like in just a day they started including a chemical preservative amongst all the organic ingredients. All the good stuff is still there, it&#x27;s just pointless now for people who want to eat pure organic food.I agree with the sentiment though.

For me the only thing stopping me was the lack of type-c and a headphone jack, which at the time was an annoyance but now is turning out to be a blessing in disguise

I was going to buy my first iphone ever this year. Because of the privacy promises. Now I am not sure anymore.Once they open the door they will not be able to close it ever.

They’re certainly trying. But the video of Craig trying to use a novel definition of “law enforcement backdoor” and accusing people of being confused is contemptibly dishonest.

Apple is heavy on their advertising. If there&#x27;s a way to spin it, they will

That is not an accurate analogy at all. Apple DID design this with privacy in mind. What would work to fit your inaccurate analogy is if Apple suddenly started reading everything of yours in the plain, directly violating your privacy.As it stands, the system is designed so that the phone snitches you out if you have CSAM on it matching some perceptual hashes (and plenty of it), but if you do not have CSAM above threshold amounts then your phone never even phones home about it. It is in fact a privacy-preserving mechanism in the sense that Apple never sees your photos.

Sure, but even if it was an illusion, they spent a lot of time and energy building it up, just to burst it like this.

Apple was never pro-privacy. Apple has always been pro-Apple. They will do whatever benefits them the most at any time. It just so happens that with the failure of their own attempts to start an advertising network, they saw an opportunity to spin themselves as the privacy company and take digs at their competitors. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe it&#x27;s time for a new spin.

You seem to be missing the fact that they&#x27;re only scanning for existing images in a database, not detecting brand new images.  Grandma&#x27;s photo won&#x27;t be in the database unless she uploads it somewhere that reports it.

If a grandmother takes a photo of their grandchild in a bathtub this is technically against federal law 18 U.S.C. § 2252. There is no &quot;I am grandma&quot; exception. This is a serious felony with serious consequences. If you use an algorithm without any context I think you are looking at a ton of new 18 U.S.C. § 2252 (child pornography) charges through these scans. These charges are notoriously difficult to defend against and even the charge itself will ruin lives and careers [1]. Getting custody back of your child will also be impossible [found guilty or not]. I am getting my popcorn ready. Apple has no idea what they have unleashed.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;wbna8161067" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;id&#x2F;wbna8161067</a>* edit: hahaha downvotes thanks apple employees!

If you will believe anything a company says I have a bridge to sell.

It would feel a lot less creepy if they just scanned files on their servers like everyone else.Is it supposed to make us feel better the scanning is happening on our own devices instead of someone else’s?It certainly increases the “creep factor.”

To be honest you lost the privacy battle when you bought apple hardware. Can&#x27;t run Linux, can&#x27;t run windows, you&#x27;re stuck with zero competition in the OS space.

This CSAM Prevention initiative by Apple is a 180 degress change of their general message around privacy. Imagine investing hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-privacy programs, privacy features, privacy marketing, etc... just to pull this reverse card.Of course this is going to spark concern within their own ranks. It&#x27;s like working for a food company that claims to use organic, non-processed, fair-trade ingredients and in just a day deciding that you&#x27;re going to switch to industrial farming sourcing and ultra-processed ingredients.It&#x27;s a complete change of narrative and there&#x27;s no easy way to explain it and still defend Apple&#x27;s Privacy narrative, wihout doing extreme mental gymnastics.

a bit of stretched speculation - may be Apple is just ahead of the curve getting ready (and thus naturally bringing it closer - dialectics though) for a future where &quot;common carrier&quot; protections would get eroded even more. We already have FOSTA laws against websites and it isn&#x27;t a big stretch to imagine that the Apple style scanning would become a &quot;reasonable care&#x2F;etc.&quot; under FOSTA style laws.

Certainly this can be used just as easily to analyze documents on the phone for antigovernment sentiment and I think Apple will use it for that eventually because &quot;the Chinese government demanded it&quot;

I’m more mad that they made a tool that will clearly be abused by totalitarian governments that need to squash protests in HK for example.

I don&#x27;t necessarily think you were wrong to believe in Apple, perhaps just a bit naive about how little &quot;as much as possible&quot; is good for in this context.Apple is a public corporation at the mercy of several superpowers. Economic incentives and the people with the guns make the rules. Full stop. Apple&#x27;s privacy stance was always one desperate&#x2F;amibitious business unit or bureaucrat away from complete collapse.

&gt; I still continued to believe that they would keep sticking up for privacy as much as possible.Considering how often Apple gives up customer data without a fight when requested to by the government, I don&#x27;t really believe that.According to Apple, they respond to government data requests with customers&#x27; data ~85% of the time, and 92% in cases of &quot;emergencies&quot;[1].Apple gave customer data from over 31,000 users&#x2F;accounts based on FISA requests and National Security Letter requests in the first half of 2020 alone[1].During that same 6 month period, Apple provided customers&#x27; data to the government&#x27;s data requests (not FISC related) about 9,000 times[1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;transparency&#x2F;us.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;transparency&#x2F;us.html</a>

I appreciate you saying this, I felt the same way. I was delighted when Apple started selling privacy hard, and hoped it would persist. Their &quot;Mind your own business&quot; [1] ad was a delight - only 2 months ago. Now my question is, which of the annoying characters in the ad is Apple?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8w4qPUSG17Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8w4qPUSG17Y</a>

Have you ever considered that the profit motive might be responsible for leading all companies to act unethically? In the future, it&#x27;s a good reason never to trust them.

While I knew that the &quot;privacy&quot; stance from Apple in prior years was always a marketing facade to sell more devices, I still continued to believe that they would keep sticking up for privacy as much as possible.It&#x27;s kind of funny how I am very suspicious of governments and politicians but when it comes to a trillion dollar corporation, I was giving them more of benefit of doubt. I was wrong.

I think what he is saying is that Apple has consistently not acted in the interest of consumers. Therefore, why should we take their privacy claims seriously? Remember when they attacked journalists, for example? How about the corporate culture of secrecy? That is far from consumer friendly.

Important adjustment -- privacy and surveillance are what&#x27;s on a spectrum. Security is not the inverse of privacy.

My daily drivers are an Android and an iPhone while my PinePhone gathers dust, so I don&#x27;t understand what this has to do with my privacy choices. Nor did I say it to act superior or imply that no one had a right to complain.This is merely a reminder that Apple was founded in and most HN readers live in the United States, a nation founded on the idea that, without checks and balances, any power that can be abused will be abused. Without something legally binding and someone holding Apple to their word, their privacy stance was never going to be anything more than a temporary ploy in their ultimate goal: to make more money.

Please stop insulting people because they chose  less privacy than you. Don&#x27;t act superior. I would posit that just about everyone who reads hackernews knows that privacy and security are on a spectrum. People complaining about this as the last straw have every right to do so and this is a huge leap from Apple&#x27;s previous position. No one thinks you&#x27;re any smarter by saying &quot;I told you so&quot;.

I agree. I wanted to believe that despite being a greedy coropration - like they are all - and despite the hidden compromises in security they do (like not encrypting backups because the FBI asked them to) they would at least try their best to avoid being scumbags.Too bad. Scumbags they are.

I think you&#x27;ll find that a few of us, above poster included, have been saying all along it&#x27;s a farce - that their stances have been missing the point for a long time. In that case, it&#x27;s called foresight. Sometimes just luck, but repeated lucky guesses are indistinguishable from predictive power.

No, this is obvious to anyone that understands that companies one master: profit. The soon as it becomes convenient to discard a &quot;principled&quot; stand, a company will do it. Apple was using privacy as a wedge to attack the Android consumer base or because they wanted their customers to believe they were special to reinforce their velben brand, not because they have some deeply held belief. In this case, perhaps Apple saw a way to do a favor for the government in exchange for some policy that will advantage it.

Not true, unless by &quot;having the benefit of hindsight&quot; you mean &quot;having watched Apple&#x27;s actions for the last few years&quot;.Yes, they do a lot for privacy. But when it comes to their bottom line, they also have a record of compromising on privacy (and consumer rights in general) to preserve business with less than freedom-loving countries such as China, the UAE, Russia.It is sometimes difficult to criticize them for this because the financial loss to them would be huge if, say, China kicked them out of their market (and utterly devastating if they kicked them out of manufacturing in China), and because people like to make the argument that iOS is (probably) &quot;still the the bets option for privacy in China&quot; - but it doesn&#x27;t change the fact that in Apple&#x27;s hierarchy of priorities privacy ranks lower than making money.To give a concrete example: if Apple allowed sideloading of apps as Android does, Apple would no longer be in the position to remove VPN apps on behest of China - but at the cost of opening up app distribution outside their own store, which means no free rent-seeking income from that anymore. They&#x27;d now actually need to compete on providing the best store for developers, which is obviously going to be more work and cost for them. So, instead they choose the &quot;lesser evil&quot; of putting themselves in a position where they are the only thing that stands (or rather: drops dead lie a wet sack) between an authoritarian state and people trying to circumvent that state&#x27;s surveillance.It&#x27;s a good thing Apple shows more Courage(TM) when it truly counts, for instance when it comes to ridding us all of that terrible scourge of human existence, the 3.5mm jack.

Many of us saw this coming years ago and got into pretty repetitive arguments with those who need the hindsight to see this.

It’s only a “farce on borrowed time” because you have the benefit of hindsight.

What criteria do you use to evaluate whether a post takes a thread further into a flamewar or not? In what way did my reply make the rest of the discussion &quot;shallower, more tedious, and nastier&quot;? I felt that this sparked a lively (albeit short) debate about a blindspot that a great many readers seem to have.It took a six hour rollercoaster ride before flags killed it - not even a fair shake for anyone to vouch despite no flagged children.

Please don&#x27;t take HN threads further into flamewar. It makes discussion shallower, more tedious, and nastier.We detached this subthread from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28163326" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28163326</a>.

&gt; It&#x27;s a complete change of narrative and there&#x27;s no easy way to explain it and still defend Apple&#x27;s Privacy narrative, wihout doing extreme mental gymnastics.Everyone who took Apple at their word was already doing extreme mental gymnastics because Apple&#x27;s privacy stance was a farce on borrowed time to begin with. Now it&#x27;s just blatantly obvious to everyone.

Facebook does significantly more business outside the US then inside of it.

The American public broadly does not care about privacy. Facebook is more than enough proof of that.

&gt; Apple was surprised its stance then was not more popular, and the global tide since then has been toward more monitoring of private communicationHuh. That’s a big problem. If the American public doesn’t support privacy, we won’t have it.

Apple's child protection features spark concern within its own ranks: sources