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- Hacker News
- A court should not quietly create a general duty to inspect everyone's private files because a provider could theoretically detect illegal contentby KolibriFly
- I simply don't trust services such as iCloud. The legal landscape is too volatile, and Apple's own "terms and conditions" are also subject to constant change. As far as I can tell, most people don't need cloud backups, and iCloud mostly shows up as an annoyance designed to extract more money from customers. In fact, most people probably don't know that Apple and Google vacuum up their files the moment they are created, for their own good, of course.by drnick1
- I gotta say handling my ever growing photo collection is a pain in the ass but I'm just not okay with uploading it to some server I don't control.by poolnoodle
- Everybody needs cloud backups for their photos at least.
Most people don’t have computers, those who do, do not regularly backup their photos on them.
In both family and extended family many a cry would be avoided if people paid the 5 bucks it costs to backup their photos before your phone gets stolen or lost.
by yoz-y - > most people don't need cloud backups
What world do you live in?
by slashdave - If these judges are so righteous, they should go further and mandate the OS to do mandatory scanning of personal hd.by m3kw9
- Don't worry, we'll get there soon enough.by dilap
- It's still a shade of gray to me. If I offered some homegrown cloud storage to my friends, and one of them uploaded CSAM to it, you can bet your ass that I would be arrested for it.
- As the creator of mediaden.ca[1] I’ve thought about this. Client side scanning is maybe marginally better than server side scanning, but both paths lead to privacy rot.
Governments need to catch criminals, but they shouldn’t do it at everyone else’s expense.
by ryanisnan - “Apple created its own proprietary alternative, NeuralHash, which apparently wasn’t as good. So Apple U-turned on its efforts to scan for CSAM in its cloud storage. Instead, Apple implemented end-to-end encryption for iCloud files.”
Wasn’t Apple’s design to explicitly NOT scan in its cloud storage, but look at the file on-device at the moment you wish to upload it to iCloud? This method would make it compatible with Advanced Data Protection; so ADP could have always been in the pipeline rather than Apple u-turning. In fact, NeuralHash may have been proposed because Apple wanted to introduce ADP and saw a potential problem here/get concerns from government agencies about it and saw this as a means to an end(-to-end).
The system was designed pretty elegantly and offers far better privacy protections - including guardrails - than what Microsoft and Google do, but the communication from Apple about it was absolutely horrible and generated enormous backlash. (Not saying I agreed with implementing it, just saying the design was infinitely better than competitors.)
by St0n3d - A mandatory client side scanning system with an opaque database filled with unverifiable entries would render many of the protections provided by ADP meaningless. Its was insane that Apple was even considering such an idea in the first place.
- Also, Apple's E2E iCloud encryption vastly predated the NeuralHash efforts.by kyralis
- sigh
Once again, someone (in this case, the judge of this case) asks if we can meet in the middle on whether or not private communications are actually private.
To be clear: this is not a limitation of nerds' imagination. This is a limitation of physics. A person is either party to a communication (and thus can decrypt it) or is not (and thus cannot). If you demand Apple scan encrypted photos for CSAM, what you are demanding is that Apple be party to every communication done with an iPhone. There is no middle ground on encryption, there will never be a middle ground on encryption, and I will hold this truth on my deathbed.
There is no "encrypted but crackable" - if the CIA can crack it at all, we're only a few years away from some kid's gaming rig doing the same thing. There is no "secure golden key" - if there was, you could buy it in the same section of Amazon that sells copies of the TSA master key that opens all luggage locks.
Personally, the next time a government demands decryption keys, I think Apple should just set all iCloud photo libraries in that country to public and say "Sorry, your politicians made private photos illegal, take it up with them". Obviously, telegraph this far in advance and give users time to actually delete their cloud-hosted photos first. But definitely do not pretend like you can keep a secret with a government bureaucracy of hundreds of thousands of people.
But then again, Apple also capitulated (good meaning) to the EU on third-party app distribution, so Apple has a lot less of a spine than they let on. At least Google actually stayed out of China.
by kmeisthax - A win for privacy and freedom
- Indeed. And a rare one at that.by hosteur
- The judge called the outcome disturbing, as it leaves victimized children as "collateral damage" of privacy protections.
As sad as this is, end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning.
As an alternative Apple previously tried to do scanning on the phones locally but caught hell for that too.
This is one of those unfortunate tradeoffs but I see no alternative to privacy taking priority.
by JSR_FDED - > As sad as this is, end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning.
I think it depends on your definition of e2ee and where the "end"s are.
If the locally running application can decrypt the data, it could always do whatever it wanted. Is that really how you define e2ee?
by majorchord - -by an0malous
- > end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning
Not true. There is the option of scanning on the device.
by slashdave - Truly being honest, I think CSAM scanning of private comms is ineffective in the long term anyways. Pedophiles aren't stupid, you'll drag a bunch at first but the networks will be reestablished and sharing will be done via sneakernet.
The primary focus should always in preventing the creation of CSAM.
- Comprehensive Sex Ed starting young so kids can identify grooming and seek help from a trusted adult, even if abuse comes from a family member.
- Fixing schools in general so homeschooling isn't as attractive for parents. Keep a tab on home schooled children and identify social isolation.
- Bigger resources for actual honest to god on the ground investigations.
To be clear I'm not saying that homeschooling = child abuse, simply there's a lack of the mechanisms to detect it in homeschooling settings.
by SepiaSapient - The judge's comments are extremely disturbing, as she seems to want legislation passed that requires companies to violate user privacy.
And client side scanning is just as bad as encryption backdoors. There's a good reason Apple was attacked for even considering it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450
- I wonder if the judge would be in favor of companies proactively going into people's houses at random to check on their belongings, if they don't have inappropriate photos somewhere, or whatever.
It's harder to do, but conceptually the same. So sad it's not being done. Very disturbing.
They could do it when people are not at home. There'd no problem, nobody would even notice.
by megous - Children are often used as a weapon to erode freedoms, like privacy and speech. Those pushing it rarely actually care about the children.by al_borland
- People can also distribute heinous things through snail mail, but we are not yet at the point where the government reads all letters looking for wrongthink.
Just because we technically can make a privacy destroying drag net does not mean we should. Had phones existed 250 years ago, I have no doubt the founders would have thought it obvious that a cellphone’s contents were your personal papers which could not be freely searched.
by 0cf8612b2e1e - IMO "end-to-end encryption" simply isn't possible when the application is run by the same company as the servers the data sits on, is closed source, and can at any time, see the decrypted contents of data it downloads from their servers and do whatever they want with it.
Same issue with Proton, MEGA, and any other e2ee app... it's only useful when the company decides not to mess with the data it could always decrypt locally. Also why people are hesitant to use javascript-based e2ee solutions where the site owner can modify the code at will to do what they want.
by majorchord - > IMO "end-to-end encryption" simply isn't possible
In a technical sense it's absolutely possible. Owning the servers != transferring keys to the servers. Most E2E apps run both client and servers, it's about if they ever had key access.
by scosman - There's no issue with mega. There are third party apps and as long as you don't login to mega.nz with their website you're fine. And they also have SDK you can use that they'll not be able to control/manipulate without your knowledge.by megous
- Only if the company misleads and adds a backdoor to the front-end app (thus this entire discussion).
If the company is misleading, any encryption technology is irrelevant anyway.
by slashdave - This is based on a faulty understanding of the underlying systems. The risk with this sort of E2E encryption is not that the service provider pinky promises not to decrypt what they have, it's that they promise they will not insert a new key into your circle of trust to subsequently start decrypting things.by kyralis
- Beyond the privacy marketing angle, e2e allows companies with global exposure to sidestep any unpleasantness when they get a subpoena from Bumfuck, Nowhere.
Sure, the NSA, GCHQ and Mossad have a way to exfiltrate the unencrypted data but proprietary e2e is a good thing for most people IMO. Shifts the risk from "my messages are theoretically available to most law enforcement in the globe" to "YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD’ED UPON"[0]. This is specially good for me because I know the equivalent to the FBI where is live is too cheap to buy a Cellebrite [1] license.
[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/leaker-reveals-which...
EDIT: I suppose someone could ask about Meta. The reason behind their support for scanning (and removing e2e in facebook msg) is simply regulatory capture. The zucc wishes to have a letter of marque to "protect" your children and remove the "unsafe" competitors.
EDIT2: Used the wrong term, I mixed up exfiltration channel with sidechannel attack.
by SepiaSapient