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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.
Privacy and Security is not the same thing. Just because there is opt-in feature that supposedly keeps your privacy with cryptography it is not that the same thing as securing information with cryptography from untrusted parties. I usually detest analogies around these things. But the lock for your bathroom door is for privacy and the lock on your front door is for security, the requirements for the lock designs are different. Kerchoffs's Principle still applies for any kind of key escrow in that your information security will be as secure as the security guarantee of the escrow provider.
Also directly from Apple Machine Learning Research page about the homomorphic encryption. Identifying the database shard relevant to the query could reveal sensitive information about the query itself, so we use differential privacy (DP) with OHTTP relay — operated by a third party — as an anonymization network which hides the device's source IP address before the request ever reaches the Apple server infrastructure. With DP, the client issues fake queries alongside its real ones, so the server cannot tell which are genuine. The queries are also routed through the anonymization network to ensure the server can’t link multiple requests to the same client. For running PNNS for Enhanced Visual Search, our system ensures strong privacy parameters for each user's photo library i.e. (ε, δ)-DP, with ε = 0.8 , δ = 10-6. . i.e. it requires a trusted third party not to leak information to apple about your IP as a sidechannel.
Further I would like to have independent cryptographic review of the homomorphic-encryption both of algorithm and implementation before even trusting it with my privacy. There are so many ways of creatively undermining cryptography algorithms and implementations for information leakage.
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