It is. It's a simple matter for two foreign governments to decide they don't want their people to criticize the head of state with memes, and then insert such images into the database Apple uses for scanning.
Apple's previous position on privacy was to make such snooping impossible because they don't have access to the data. Now they are handing over access.
What I and thousands of others online are describing ought to be understandable by anyone at Apple. The fact that an Apple exec can sit there in a prepared interview and look perplexed about how people could see this as a back door is something I don't understand at all. This "closing his ears" attitude may indicate he is full of it.
That really doesn’t sound like anything I’d describe as a “back door”. A back door implies general purpose access. A system which required the collision of multiple governments and Apple and their child abuse agencies simply is not that.
One of the casualties of this debate is that people are using terms that make things sound worse than they are. If you can’t get at my filesystem, you don’t have a back door. I understand the motive for stating the case as harshly as possible, but I think it’s misguided.
Having said this, I would find it interesting to hear what Federighi would say about this potential abuse case.
> A system which required the collision of multiple governments and Apple and their child abuse agencies simply is not that.
Agree to disagree.
> I would find it interesting to hear what Federighi would say about this potential abuse case.
Personally I would not. That's a political consideration and not something I want to hear a technologist weigh in on while defending their technology. Apple's previous stance, with which I agree, was to not give humans any chance to abuse people's personal data,
> Personally I would not. That's a political consideration and not something I want to hear a technologist weigh in on while defending their technology.
It’s not. The abuse case flows from their architecture. Perhaps it isn’t as ‘easy’ as getting multiple countries to collude with Apple. If the architecture can be abused the way you think it can, that is a technical problem as well as a political one.
You may not be able to solve the bias problem altogether, but you can definitely change the threat model and who you have to trust.
Apple’s model has always involved trusting them. This model involves trusting other people in narrow ways. The architecture determines what those ways are.
Trusting Apple to not scan my device in the past was easy because as an engineer I know I would speak up if I saw that kind of thing secretly happening, and I know security researchers would speak up if they detected it.
Now Apple will scan the device and we must trust that 3rd parties will not abuse the technology by checking for other kinds of imagery such as memes critical of heads of state.
The proposed change is so much worse than the previous state of things.
How does this attack even work? So some government poisons the database with political dissident memes and suddenly Apple starts getting a bunch of new reports which when reviewed are obviously not CSAM.
If the government can force Apple to also turn over these reports then they could have just made Apple add their political meme database directly and it's already game over.
More like, the government says Apple can't operate there unless they include what they say is illegal.
Apple is run by humans who are subject to influence and bias. Who knows what policy changes will come in Apple's future. Apple's previous stance was to not hand over data because they don't have access to it. This change completely reverses that.
It is. It's a simple matter for two foreign governments to decide they don't want their people to criticize the head of state with memes, and then insert such images into the database Apple uses for scanning.
Apple's previous position on privacy was to make such snooping impossible because they don't have access to the data. Now they are handing over access.
What I and thousands of others online are describing ought to be understandable by anyone at Apple. The fact that an Apple exec can sit there in a prepared interview and look perplexed about how people could see this as a back door is something I don't understand at all. This "closing his ears" attitude may indicate he is full of it.