<story><title>Princeton Researchers Who Built a CSAM Scanning System Urge Apple to Not Use It</title><url>https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/20/university-researchers-csam-dangerous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>atlgator</author><text>&amp;gt; A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That&amp;#x27;s no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials.&lt;p&gt;This sums up the concern. CSAM is just the excuse because who would come out against protecting children, right? But this will absolutely be used for political purposes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sam0x17</author><text>&amp;gt; pre-screening&lt;p&gt;Pre-screening would be the kind way of implementing this feature. They could make it so if CSAM is detected, just don&amp;#x27;t upload those files to the cloud and delete them locally. Then they are still doing due-diligence to prevent that material from entering their cloud and to remove that material from circulation, but they don&amp;#x27;t get random people arrested for false positives. When they detect hash matches on a device, they are under zero legal obligation to do anything about it because it could easily be a false positive (as the public has demonstrated on HN and elsewhere), so they&amp;#x27;d be in the clear with this approach. This will have the effect they desire without pissing tons of people off.&lt;p&gt;Instead they have taken the aggressive stance of manual review + tipping off law enforcement, which goes against their entire mantra of protecting privacy. Your phone will now be an informant against you. If you are an activist or a whistleblower, a false positive could be enough to get your device searched and seized.</text></comment>
<story><title>Princeton Researchers Who Built a CSAM Scanning System Urge Apple to Not Use It</title><url>https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/20/university-researchers-csam-dangerous/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>atlgator</author><text>&amp;gt; A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That&amp;#x27;s no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials.&lt;p&gt;This sums up the concern. CSAM is just the excuse because who would come out against protecting children, right? But this will absolutely be used for political purposes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>api</author><text>The more I think about it, something that concerns me greatly is the &lt;i&gt;silent&lt;/i&gt; use of this for political purposes.&lt;p&gt;By silent I mean they don&amp;#x27;t arrest you or put you on any public lists. Instead they just gather information, lots of information, and they use it in future Cambridge Analytica style propaganda campaigns.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t mean to imply that only Republicans would do this. After Trump&amp;#x27;s successful use of this kind of political propaganda every single political party and PR agency on the planet is working on duplicating it.&lt;p&gt;Arresting people is old fashioned. Modern totalitarianism is built on disinformation, microtargeted propaganda, surveillance, and nudge theory.</text></comment>