Tech & Gaming
While scanning for leaked government documents is the first thing I’ve heard that could be a problem for whistleblowers, I’ll point out this scanning tech is already in use in major cloud platforms and no government has forced anyone to do it. Having a database of all government documents like that wouldn’t be trivial to put together either. It’s just not practical to be used that way.
I don’t care that it was Apple who did this, it presents a legitimate answer to E2E encryption of data while cutting many government arguments off at the legs. Without an answer we are closer to E2E being made illegal then we are nothing happening.
It’s also a real world problem, and positioning yourself as a safe haven for it isn’t going to work. Apple was trying to let you have E2E while simultaneously destroying many Governments main objection to it. Now we are back to square one, and if providers refuse to work with governments, governments will attack E2E encryption.
Proton hasn’t really gotten pushback yet as they are small. If Pedophiles start utilizing Proton for CSAM I guarantee you things will change or they will shut down. Another full e2e provider, can’t recall the name at the moment, just ended up shutting their service down when governments started coming after them. They aren’t the guys from the PirateBay.
They published a white paper on it. It would have taken many detected examples before they did anything about it. It’s not strictly a hash as it’s not looking for exact copies but similar ones. Collisions have been proven, but afaik they are all reverse engineered. Just Grey blobs of nonsense that match CSAM examples. I don’t recall hearing about someone’s random taken photo matching with anything, but correct me if I’m wrong.
Not according to their terms of service
You agree not to use your Account or the Services for any illegal or prohibited activities. Unauthorized activities include, but are not limited to: Disrupting the Company’s networks and Servers in your use of the Services; Accessing/sharing/downloading/uploading illegal content, including but not limited to Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) or content related to CSAM;
The CSAM database isn’t controlled by Apple. It’s already in use practically everywhere. Apple tried to compromise between allowing private encrypted image storage at scale and making sure they aren’t a hot bed for CSAM. Their competitors just keep it unencrypted and scan it for content, which last time I checked is worse 🤷♂️
You’re thinking of Google, where they data mine you as their primary business model. Google Photos scan your photos for object recognition, what do you think that is? There’s no E2E there at all. Apple’s object detection is done on device. It amazes me that Apple got attacked about this when literally everyone else is just doing it without telling you and not offering encryption.