The Wall Street Journal
6 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2022
11:46 · 366K views · Aug 13, 2021
A WSJ interview in which Apple's Craig Federighi explains Apple's CSAM scanning and child-safety features, including neural hashes and safety vouchers, and defends them against backlash.
Mostly cited critically, as Apple's own defense of its scanning plans, which commenters found out of touch or unconvincing; one commenter says it adds nuance.
6 comments from Hacker News
Creating a novel on-device scanning mechanism and claiming that is somehow more privacy is a lie, and therefore shady. Using that novel on-device scanning capability to secretly report people to authorities, that's beyond shady. Claiming that the novel hashing algorithm is verifiable by third parties, but simultaneously suing any third parties that try to analyze the actual code running (without being subject to Apple NDA), is mega shady. Secretly reporting people to authorities based on unverifiable novel image hashing algorithms and only image "derivatives", whatever that means, that's ultra shady. Pretending that people are somehow "misunderstanding" if they are alarmed by this unprecedented, unverifiable scanning and secret snitching mechanism being run over their private photos, that's extra ultra mega shady, but typical of Apple. Look at this shitshow explanation. When have you ever seen Apple being so terrible at explaining a feature? None of this smells right: this video
If you watch the Joanna Stern interview with Craig Federighi[1] you’ll find plenty of nuance to contradict your comment. That doesn’t mean you should believe them or that there isn’t a real possibility of the system being abused (that’s partially addressed in the interview), but it also doesn’t mean there was no nuance or thought put into the feature or that it isn’t being misunderstood. All of those can be true at the same time. You can have a bad system that people disagree with for incorrect reasons. That matters: the effort Apple needs to spend fending off inaccurate criticism is effort not spent understanding and addressing the real issue. [1]: this video
> That was just for scanning photos in general. Are you trolling? What Federighi proposed before was scanning "for CSAM" on device [1]. Same angle. > Doing it on device is probably preferable to on cloud and at worst no different. Please elaborate. How is it better to force users to run software they don't want than to let them decide whether or not to have their photos scanned when they choose to upload them to the cloud? Anyway it's a false dichotomy. Apple isn't doing on-device scanning, and now they've announced they won't do it in the cloud either. [1] this video
The part Federighi's "interview" where he can't understand how people perceive this as a back door [1] seems incredibly out of touch. The back door is what everyone is talking about. Someone at Apple should at least be able to put themselves in their critics' shoes for a moment. I guess we need to wait to hear Tim Cook explain how this is not what he described 5 years ago [2]. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
> Steve Jobs must be rolling over in his grave. June, 2010 - Jobs: "Privacy means people know what they're signing up for." [LINK] December, 2015 - Cook: "If you put a back door in, that back door is for everybody, for good guys and bad guys." [LINK] August, 2021 Interviewer: "Isn't this in a way a back door?" Federighi: "I really don't understand that characterization." this video