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Apple has yet again betrayed the fact that "it's not technically feasible" is bullshit when it comes to government access
They said it concerning device access, and that was a lie. They said it concerning private cloud compute, and that was a lie. Hell, they said it concerning even the conceivability of secure backdoors, and that was probably a lie, too (not even getting into the fact that they definitely already have magic numbers that can overtly tell your phone to execute arbitrary code).
Apple has now introduced Enhanced Visual Search, technomagic which whizzes your photos (even the ones not in iCloud) off to Apple servers, using all sorts of mathematical goodies like homomorphic encryption to keep them private while allowing them to tag said photos with labels like, "What is this landmark in this photo?" It would be strictly easier to design a system that looks for stuff like child porn and alerts them.
Yes yes, you will rapidly object. False positives, false negatives. I grok filtering theory. Who will have the authority to do what with the information? Sure sure. Who will have to maintain the databases or filters that look for it? Yup, I hear ya. Those are not technical objections. Those are process objections.
I have never supported having the government involved in any of these things. I understand the significant nature of the tradeoffs at the societal level. But I have routinely said that the cry of, "This is just technologically/mathematically impossible," is total bullshit. It's just not true. Several other influential voices in the tech privacy world are coming around sort of slowly to this. They're seeing the deployment of these systems and saying how they're taken aback. How, well damn, if you can do that, then you probably can do this other stuff. But of course, doing the other stuff seems socially problematic, so they don't know how to feel.
It's actually easy to know how to feel. Just drop the lie that these sorts of things are technologically impossible. They are possible. But there are process tradeoffs and there are potentially huge liberty concerns that you can focus on. The more you continue to try to push the Noble Lie, the more likely you're just going to harm your own credibility in the long-term. Better to fight on the grounds of true facts with, "We don't want it," win or lose, than to prepare the grounds for a complete credibility crisis, such that when the time comes, no one is able to responsibly push back.
I’ve never understood people who believe that the purpose of backing up your images in any form wasn’t about anything other than Apple trying to become another entry for the Eye of Sauron. It’s a huge cost to create software whisking your photos into a server, labeling them etc. and at least according to theory, the idea is totally not to get the feds involved or to maintain privacy while doing so. Especially given that the bad solution they used to have was “what’s on your phone stays private on your phone because we don’t download it, look at it, or label it. It’s just crazy because doing nothing would have continued to give users the privacy that Apple claims to be all about, while protecting Apple from liability for not finding crime-think images. Now, because of the downloads, I could theoretically sue Apple for not catching images of my rape or of my ex holding a gun he then tried to kill me with — they have those images, they’re tagging them, and if they’re potentially hinting a crime, them not reporting it would risk them being an accessory to what was happening in those images.
Long story short, anything that doesn’t remain completely off the internet servers is public at this point and the only way to guarantee that is to use analog cameras and write on paper.
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