Apple unveiled a plan two weeks ago founded in good intentions:
Root out images of child sexual abuse from
iPhones.
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But as is often the case when changes are made to digital
privacy and security, technology experts quickly identified the downside:
Apple’s approach to scanning people’s private photos could give law enforcement
authorities and governments a new way to surveil citizens and persecute
dissidents. Once one chip in privacy armor is identified, anyone can attack it,
they argued.
The technology that protects the ordinary person’s privacy can
also hamstring criminal investigations. But the alternative, according to privacy
groups and many security experts, would be worse.
“Once you create that back door, it will be used by people whom
you don’t want to use it,” said Eva Galperin, cybersecurity director at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group. “That is not a
theoretical harm. That is a harm we’ve seen happen time and time again.”
Apple was not expecting such backlash. When the company
announced the changes, it sent reporters complex technical explainers and
laudatory statements from child safety groups, computer scientists and Eric
Holder Jr., the former US attorney general. After the news went public, an
Apple spokesperson emailed a reporter a tweet from Ashton Kutcher, the actor
who helped found a group that fights child sexual abuse, cheering the moves.
But his voice was largely drowned out.
Cybersecurity experts,
the head of the messaging app WhatsApp and Edward Snowden, the former
intelligence contractor who leaked classified documents about government
surveillance, all denounced the move as setting a dangerous precedent that
could enable governments to look into people’s private phones. Apple scheduled
four more press briefings to combat what it said were misunderstandings,
admitted it had bungled its messaging and announced new safeguards meant to
address some concerns. More than 8,000 people responded with an open letter
calling on Apple to halt its moves.
As of now, Apple has said it is going forward with the plans.
But the company is in a precarious position. It has for years worked to make iPhones
more secure, and in turn, it has made privacy central to its marketing pitch.
But what has been good for business also turned out to be bad for abused
children.
A few years ago, the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children began disclosing how often tech companies reported cases of child
sexual abuse material, commonly known as child pornography, on their products.
Apple was near the bottom of the pack. The company reported 265
cases to authorities last year, compared with Facebook’s 20.3 million. That
enormous gap was largely due, in most cases, to Apple’s electing not to look
for such images to protect the privacy of its users.
In late 2019, after reports in The New York Times about the
proliferation of child sexual abuse images online, members of Congress told
Apple that it had better do more to help law enforcement officials or they
would force the company to do so. Eighteen months later, Apple announced that
it had figured out a way to tackle the problem on iPhones while, in its view, protecting
the privacy of its users.
The plan included modifying its virtual assistant, Siri, to
direct people who ask about child sexual abuse to appropriate resources. Apple
said it would also soon enable parents to turn on technology that scans images
in their children’s text messages for nudity. Children 13 and older would be
warned before sending or viewing a nude photo, while parents could ask to be
notified if children younger than 13 did so.
Those changes were met with little controversy compared with
Apple’s third new tool: software that scans users’ iPhone photos and compares
them against a database of known child sexual abuse images.
To prevent false positives and hide the images of abuse, Apple
took a complex approach. Its software reduces each photo to a unique set of
numbers — a sort of image fingerprint called a hash — and then runs them
against hashes of known images of child abuse provided by groups like the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
If 30 or more of a user’s photos appear to match the abuse
images, an Apple employee reviews the matches. If any of the photos show child
sexual abuse, Apple sends them to authorities and locks the user’s account.
Apple said it would turn on the feature in the United States over the next several
months.
Law enforcement officials, child safety groups, abuse survivors
and some computer scientists praised the moves. In statements provided by
Apple, the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
called it a “game changer,” while David Forsyth, chair of computer science at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that the technology would
catch child abusers and that “harmless users should experience minimal to no
loss of privacy.”
To many technologists, Apple has opened a Pandora’s box. The
tool would be the first technology built into a phone’s operating system that
can look at a person’s private data and report it to law enforcement
authorities. Privacy groups and security experts are worried that governments
looking for criminals, opponents or other targets could find plenty of ways to
use such a system.
“As we now understand it, I’m not so worried about Apple’s
specific implementation being abused,” said Alex Stamos, a Stanford University
researcher who previously led Facebook’s cybersecurity efforts. “The problem
is, they’ve now opened the door to a class of surveillance that was never open
before.”
If governments had previously asked Apple to analyze people’s
photos, the company could have responded that it could not. Now that it has
built a system that can, Apple must argue that it will not.
“I think Apple has clearly tried to do this as responsibly as
possible, but the fact they’re doing it at all is the problem,” Galperin said.
“Once you build a system that can be aimed at any database, you will be asked
to aim the system at a database.”
In response,
Apple has assured the public that it will not
accede to such requests. “We have faced demands to build and deploy
government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users before, and have
steadfastly refused those demands. We will continue to refuse them in the
future,” the company said in a statement.
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