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Apple’s privacy reputation is at risk with the changes it announced this week

07 August 2021 18:27 (UTC +04:00)

Apple announced a system this week that will enable it to flag images of child exploitation uploaded to iCloud storage in the U.S. and report it to authorities, APA reports citing CNBC.

The move was hailed by child protection advocates. John Clark, the CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — a nonprofit created through a congressional mandate — called it a “game changer” in a statement.

But the new system, which is in testing in the U.S. now, was also vociferously opposed by privacy advocates who warned it represents a slippery slope and could be tweaked and further exploited to censor other kinds of content on people’s devices.

Apple isn’t unique in its efforts to rid its cloud storage of illegal images of child pornography. Other cloud services already do this. Google has used hashing technology since 2008 to identify illegal images on its services. Facebook said in 2019 it removed 11.6 million pieces of content related to child nudity and child sexual exploitation in just three months.

Apple says its system is an improvement over industry-standard approaches because it uses its control of hardware and sophisticated mathematics to learn as little as possible about the images on a person’s phone or cloud account while still flagging illegal child pornography on cloud servers. It doesn’t scan actual images, only comparing hashes, the unique numbers that correspond to image files.

But privacy advocates see the move as the beginning of a policy change in which Apple could be pressured by foreign governments to, for example, repurpose the system to quash political speech by asking Apple to flag photos of protests or political memes. Skeptics aren’t worried about how the system works today and aren’t defending people who collect known images of child exploitation. They’re worried about how it might develop in the coming years.

“Make no mistake: if they can scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which has supported Apple’s policies on encryption and privacy in the past, slammed the move in a blog post, calling it a “backdoor,” or a system built to give governments a way to access encrypted data.

“Apple can explain at length how its technical implementation will preserve privacy and security in its proposed backdoor, but at the end of the day, even a thoroughly documented, carefully thought-out, and narrowly-scoped backdoor is still a backdoor,” the influential nonprofit.

Apple’s new system has also been criticized by the company’s competitors, including Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp, which also uses end-to-end encryption for some of its messages and has faced pressure to provide more access to people’s content to prevent child exploitation.

“Instead of focusing on making it easy for people to report content that’s shared with them, Apple has built software that can scan all the private photos on your phone -- even photos you haven’t shared with anyone,” WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart tweeted on Friday. He said WhatsApp won’t adopt a similar system. “That’s not privacy.”

Privacy has become a core part of iPhone marketing. Apple has been public about the security architecture of its systems and is one of the most vociferous defenders of end-to-end encryption, which means it doesn’t even know the content of messages or other data stored on its servers.

Most notably, in 2016, it faced off against the FBI in court to protect the integrity of its encryption systems in the investigation of a mass shooter.

Apple has taken heat for this stance. Law enforcement officials around the world have pressured the company to weaken its encryption for iMessage and other software services like iCloud to investigate child exploitation or terrorism.