Hiya! I'm a fullstack developer, with experience with PHP, JavaScript and Go. I'm also an Android enthusiast and I like pretty much everything related to tech.
I was completely unaware of this, but I still think Apple's take on this is way more invasive than Google's. According to the link you provided, it seems that Google scans images sent/recieved through Gmail, which technically means that they're not actively scanning people's devices. Apple wants to proactively scan your gallery.
While I agree that their intentions seem to be good, how are they gonna rule out 'false-positives', like a picture taken on a hot day at the beach? And even "worse" - how can I be sure that they won't scan more stuff from my phone without my consent? Whilist I don't have anything to hide, I rather keep my stuff private.
It's not quite like that - they're not actively "scanning" and then using AI or whatever, instead they simply calculate a file hash (checksum) and comparing that to a database with hashes of known (confirmed) CP imagery ... that's probably about the most robust and least questionable way of implementing this kind of thing.
Hiya! I'm a fullstack developer, with experience with PHP, JavaScript and Go. I'm also an Android enthusiast and I like pretty much everything related to tech.
Hey, thanks for the answer! So this means they won't get the images, just the hashes, right? Any place I can read more about how it'll work? I'm really interested on understanding more.
What they do is download a little database (list) of those hashes to your iPhone (this list gets updated regularly), then when uploading a file to iCloud they simply compute the hash/checksum and compare it to the list.
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I was completely unaware of this, but I still think Apple's take on this is way more invasive than Google's. According to the link you provided, it seems that Google scans images sent/recieved through Gmail, which technically means that they're not actively scanning people's devices. Apple wants to proactively scan your gallery.
While I agree that their intentions seem to be good, how are they gonna rule out 'false-positives', like a picture taken on a hot day at the beach? And even "worse" - how can I be sure that they won't scan more stuff from my phone without my consent? Whilist I don't have anything to hide, I rather keep my stuff private.
It's not quite like that - they're not actively "scanning" and then using AI or whatever, instead they simply calculate a file hash (checksum) and comparing that to a database with hashes of known (confirmed) CP imagery ... that's probably about the most robust and least questionable way of implementing this kind of thing.
Hey, thanks for the answer! So this means they won't get the images, just the hashes, right? Any place I can read more about how it'll work? I'm really interested on understanding more.
Yup it's here in their FAQ, it's very clearly explained here how it works:
apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Expande...
What they do is download a little database (list) of those hashes to your iPhone (this list gets updated regularly), then when uploading a file to iCloud they simply compute the hash/checksum and compare it to the list.