Algorithms don't put people in jail, people do. The person who irresponsibly followed the output of the algorithm is, and the person who vouched for the algorithm being correct and put it into production is.
Don't think of an algorithm as an independent actor, think of it as an awesome tool that makes you 100x more productive.
... and guns and cars don't kill people, murderers do.
But now a company is creating s new kind of "gun" that huge chunks of the community of security professionals are warning about because it is insanely powerful and dangerous.
We have a number of reasons to warn about it:
- China will undoubtedly demand to have Apple scan for their hashes too. The databases these hashes are collected from are not public for obvious reasons so this means they can slip whatever they want into it. Maybe Apple will check the images before they send them over but that is not necessarily the case as far as I read it, also it takes one rogue employee to correctly classify as not abuse material but make a note of the account and send it back after work.
- This is not your average sha256 hash. This is perpetual hashes. They are made to catch not only the exact document but all kinds of variations of it. I have not specialized in perpetual hashes but as far as I can understand it goes without saying that the more resistant this is to modifications, the easier it becomes to create innocent images that triggers it.
- even if we had a magic algorithm that resonated with everything good and only matched the images we wanted there still is potential for abuse. When I was younger I browsed through the cache folder of my machine and I remember there being a lot of images there that I can't remember having seen on any site I visited. Now it is said that this algorithm will only flag images about to be uploaded so obviously cache folders won't be scanned. But once this tool is in place why won't governments start applying pressure to Apple to scan everything? And what prevents someones soon-to-be ex from downloading and slipping some into iCloud when one leaves the phone unlocked?
- Due process should sort many of the problematic cases here, but child abuse is for good reasons one of the worst things you can get accused. A mere accusation is often enough to ruins someone's life even if it later becomes clear to law enforcement that the person is innovent. Also most places have a way to go wrt due process.
Okay but what about the intense war going on for youtube content creators getti g banned or content struck right now. Or all the wrongful bans on platforms like facebook or Twitter.
a) Executives at Alphabet, who are ultimately in charge of the companies decisions
b) The individual product managers, lawyers, engineers, and whoever else is involved in creating, maintaining, and running the system that bans people inappropriately.
The algorithm they are using is a tool that they are using to do this, using a tool does not absolve them of the responsibility in any way.
