I really don’t understand why Apple is doing this. The vast majority of their customers aren’t involved in any of these illegal activities, so it only provides potential downside through false positives.
I’m also struggling to imagine scenarios where a child predator is clever enough to acquire illegal photos without triggering any number of internet monitoring mechanisms (e.g. honeypots, server logs with their IP address) who would then turn around and upload those photos to their iCloud account. Doesn’t make sense.
I just spent the last hour of my life digging through the material. It seems like they've calibrated the system to have an expected false classification rate of one account in one trillion, per year. Based on the threshold secret sharing math, they won't know anything until a user has a significant collection of CSAM and the secret key is recovered.
> I’m also struggling to imagine scenarios where a child predator is clever enough to acquire illegal photos
I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but CSAM has been shared openly on the clearnet on places like 4chan for years. The internet is a pretty wide open search space. Many of the people who download CSAM don't do so from some sketchy underground website. This is why Tumblr, for instance, burned their platform to the ground: lots of people sharing CSAM with no way to detect and stop it (without costing Verizon a ton of money to work on the problem).
i'm scratching my head wondering why they bothered announcing it ahead of time?
why not just run the scans in the background... (honestly surprised they aren't already) it's not like it would be hard to omit this avenue as your lead during prosecution
I’m also struggling to imagine scenarios where a child predator is clever enough to acquire illegal photos without triggering any number of internet monitoring mechanisms (e.g. honeypots, server logs with their IP address) who would then turn around and upload those photos to their iCloud account. Doesn’t make sense.
This is a really strange move.