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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.
The question of whether or not it's possible is leaps and bounds above my pay grade, but I suppose if the cryptobros are able to come up with things like a fully anonymous immutable ledger of transactions, using zero knowledge proofs and other voodoo, it shouldn't be surprising if someone manages to come up with a way to flag child porn without knowing what's exactly on the picture.
That said, even though you wanted to focus on the technical side, my mind always floats towards the question of "what even is privacy?". Europe has a strong core of "muh privacy" protectors, but as far as I can tell, they only care about individual privacy - as long as I'm not able to connect any particular data to any particular person, that's all fine by them. For my part I find "anonymous surveillance" even scarier, because all the creepy stuff happens on an aggregate level. I might as well face it, I'm not that unique, and if you've seen one traditionalist conspiracist schizo, you've seen them all. So governments and megacorps being able to collect all they data on trad-schizos they want, """"anonymously"""", doesn't really bring me much comfort. As time goes by they'll probably know me better then I'll know myself, and if there's any way to nope out of that, I will.
Now, does that justify lying about whether or not it's technically possible to flag child porn? I'll go with a "no". It has the same energy as those folks coming up with a new species to stop the construction of a dam.
Anonymous this. Anonymous that. With sufficiently effort you can be deanonymized. What cell phone regularly visits your work, home and relatives? It's yours. Somewhere in aggregated """anonymized""" data is a perfectly obvious unique user number that is you.
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