Friday, March 29, 2024

Apple will launch a child abuse photo inspection system worldwide

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The company said on Friday that Apple will launch a system to check photos for child abuse images in various countries in accordance with local laws.

A day ago, Apple said it would implement a system to filter photos of these images before they are uploaded from the iPhone in the US to its iCloud storage.

Child safety organizations praised Apple for joining Facebook and Microsoft. Alphabet’s Google is taking such measures.

But Apple’s photo inspection of the iPhone itself has raised concerns that the company is investigating users’ devices in ways that may be used by the government. Many other technology companies check the photos after they are uploaded to the server.

At a media conference on Friday, Apple said it will develop plans to expand its services in accordance with the laws of each country/region in which it operates.

The company said that nuances in its system, such as the “security credentials” passed from the iPhone to Apple servers that do not contain useful data, will protect Apple from government pressure to identify materials other than images of child abuse.

Apple will now scan for child abuse images uploaded by your iCloud

It added that Apple has a manual review process that can serve as a support to prevent government abuse. If the review does not find images of child abuse, the company will not pass the report of its photo inspection system to law enforcement.

Regulators are increasingly asking technology companies to take more measures to remove illegal content. In the past few years, law enforcement and politicians have used the scourge of child abuse materials to condemn strong encryption, just as they mentioned the need to curb terrorism.

Some of the resulting laws, including in the UK, can be used to force technology companies to act secretly against users.

Although Apple’s strategy may divert government intervention by demonstrating its initiative or complying with expected European directives, many security experts said that this privacy advocate made a big mistake by expressing willingness to contact customers’ phones.

Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said: “This may divert attention from U.S. regulators on this subject, but it will attract international regulators to do the same with terrorist and extremist content.”

She said that copyright owners with political influence in Hollywood and elsewhere might even argue that their digital rights should be enforced in this way.

Facebook’s WhatsApp, the world’s largest fully encrypted messaging service, is also under pressure from governments that want to understand what people are saying, and it fears that this situation will increase now. WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart blasted Apple’s new architecture on Twitter on Friday.

He wrote: “We have had personal computers for decades, but no one has ever asked to scan the private content of all desktops, laptops, or mobile phones worldwide for illegal content.” “This is not established in a free country. How the technology works.”

Apple’s experts argued that they did not really enter people’s phones because the data sent on their devices had to clear multiple barriers. For example, banned materials are marked by regulatory organizations, and identifiers are tied to Apple’s global operating system, making them more difficult to manipulate.

Some experts said that they have reason to hope that Apple has not really fundamentally changed its course.

As Reuters reported last year, the company has been working to make iCloud backups end-to-end encrypted, which means that the company cannot give its readable version to law enforcement agencies. After the FBI objected, it abandoned the project.

The founder of the Stanford Observatory, Alex Stamos, said that Apple may turn on encryption later this year, using this week’s measures to block expected criticism of this change.

Apple declined to comment on future product plans.




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