A lot has already been said and written about the new Apple’s new child safety features that the iPhone manufacturer was diverted in recent days: the characteristics that represent an attempt to decipher child exploitation. And in the use of Apple devices to disseminate child sex abuse material (or CSAM). Apple established its plans and technical descriptions of how new protections will work with the arrival of IOS 15. And the company followed with a frequently asked questions that responds (or, rather, is announced as a response a) some of the many of the many , Many concerns of privacy communities, security and cryptography.
Here, however, it is what I keep going back to. Yes, these new security features for Apple children attack a problem that urgently requires a solution. How bad is the problem? This should inform you all you need to know: Google reported 546,000 instances of CSAM to the National Center for missing and exploited children every day last year. For Facebook, the number exceeded 20 million. I know that, although, however, something else can be true at the same time. That Apple communication above all this leaves a lot to be desired.
Apple, and privacy.
Before immersing us in a deeper discussion about the safety features of Apple children, however, we first renounce the clock. More than five years return to the past, to February 2016.
A federal judge has just delivered an Apple’s request, demanding that the iPhone manufacturer help the FBI to unlock the iPhone of a dead terrorist, following the attack of San Bernardino. Doing so, would have required that Apple Enginers will produce a piece of code that essentially ascended to a golden key. Something that represented a sufficiently serious threat for the privacy of users that Apple CEO Tim Cook was involved. He denounced the judge’s order, warning legitimately that creating a back door on an iPhone will instantly make each iPhone in a less secure existence.
The FBI was eventually able to unlock the terrorist’s iPhone without the help of Apple. But let’s stop and remember what that series of events implied. Apple was ordered, not asked, by a judge to help the FBI do something good. Well, that is, at least in an isolated sense (entering the terrorist phone to help with an investigation). But Apple resisted. Why? Due to a terrible hypothetical scenario that is at the bottom of a sliding slope. That scenario is the erosion of the user’s privacy of each Apple, as the cost of investigating that a dead terrorist.
Without arriving too deep in the technical weeds, the company is essentially tying the Apple user’s icloud photos account essentially to a database of child operating material maintained by the NCMEC. It is the arrival of IOS 15 that will establish all this in motion. And once the new Apple’s new child safety features are live, if each time the photos in your account “match the known CSAM images”, according to Apple, the compliance mechanisms of this new Apple security paradigm can Start.
Now, in the Frequently Asked Questions Launched that is supposed to reassure people about all this? Apple seemed to recognize that some people can see a slippery slope here. In the document, Apple proposed a question that such people could ask. “Could governments force Apple to add images not CSAM to the hash list?”
The slippery slope
In other words, could a country like China to Apple and say, you know what, since everyone already has a system to take measures in child porn, reported by a database of specific material, we want to give you another basis for Material data. However, instead of CSAM, we want you to look for and take action every time you find something different. What do we want you to look for? Users with content not approved by the Government on their devices.
