<story><title>The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”</title><url>https://piotr.is/2021/08/12/apple-csam/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>querez</author><text>I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fortenforge</author><text>Lots of people responding to this seem to not understand how perceptual hashing &amp;#x2F; PhotoDNA works. It&amp;#x27;s true that they&amp;#x27;re not cryptographic hashes, but the false positive rate is vanishingly small. Apple claims it&amp;#x27;s 1 in a trillion [1], but suppose that you don&amp;#x27;t believe them. Google and Facebook and Microsoft are all using PhotoDNA (or equivalent perceptual hashing schemes) right now. Have you heard of some massive issue with false positives?&lt;p&gt;The fact of the matter is that unless you possess a photo that exists in the NCMEC database, your photos simply will not be flagged to Apple. Photos of your own kids won&amp;#x27;t trigger it, nude photos of adults won&amp;#x27;t trigger it; only photos of already known CSAM content will trigger (and that too, Apple requires a specific threshold of matches before a report is triggered).&lt;p&gt;[1] &amp;quot;The threshold is selected to provide an extremely low (1 in 1 trillion) probability of incorrectly flagging a given account.&amp;quot; Page 4 of &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.apple.com&amp;#x2F;child-safety&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.apple.com&amp;#x2F;child-safety&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;CSAM_Detection_Techni...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The deceptive PR behind Apple’s “expanded protections for children”</title><url>https://piotr.is/2021/08/12/apple-csam/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>querez</author><text>I have a newborn at home, and like every other parent, we take thousands of pictures and videos of our newest family member. We took pictures of the very first baby-bath. So now I have pictures of a naked baby on my phone. Does that mean that pictures of my newborn baby will be uploaded to Apple for further analysis, potentially stored for indefinite time, shared with law enforcement?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fossuser</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s worth reading this, which is basically the only good reporting I&amp;#x27;ve seen on this topic: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;daringfireball.net&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;apple_child_safety_initiatives_slippery_slope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;daringfireball.net&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;08&amp;#x2F;apple_child_safety_initia...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are legitimate things to be concerned about, but 99% of internet discussion on this topic is junk.</text></comment>