For CSAM, there's all sorts of monitoring, scanning, identify capturing, etc. But it's all after abuse has taken place, and it seems that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA. This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures. As an aside, if that gets extended to political speech or other non-CSAM materials that are determined to be undesirable, that's a big concern. I can imagine that a conservative state could pass a law banning all porn because they claim it could encourage illegal activities such as prostitution, rape, or CSA.
On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM). There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. Ironically, the groups doing the most to educate and implement protective strategies are the ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc). Even then, a lot of it is just getting clearances, which doesnt prevent people who where not caught or were first timers. Offenders get put on a list/map. This is sort of a half approach. If they are still a threat, they shouldn't be released. Yet if you comb the list and see some of the results, they don't all seem to fit with CSA. I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.
It seems like these laws are more about peddling to the publicist and lawmakers fantasy of incrementally extreme punishment rather than taking a appropriate, data driven, and level-headed approach that actually protects kids. Otherwise they will just keep pushing ham-fisted low-hanging "fixes" like required scanning and IDs to access the internet.
The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.
If you provide the government a platform to do So, they'll do Y if you wait long enough
And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools which do a lot less training and enforcement of youth protection policies.
Children are still safer in Scouts and churches than in schools.
Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of.
I work with kids, and I've had to take the Scouts and Catholic Church's youth protection training. They are both free to take online if anyone wants to check it out.
Is that in absolute terms, or per child who frequents the establishment?
Why are you making apologies for (Catholic) church sex abuse? Because you are a member and you took a training? Yikes.
What evidence do you have of this? The only sources I can find that would even vaguely support your claim switch to talking about physical abuse in schools, or sexual assault committed by fellow students.
To be clear, we're discussing the sexual assault of children by adults here. We're not talking about physical abuse, nor are we talking about assault by fellow students.
These are utterly anathema to huge chunks of society, especially American society. It's more and more clear, from the scope of the Epstein Files, just how much of American society and government has been influenced specifically to enable easy access to children by rich white men. Even beyond that, the entire right wing would instantly catch fire if we actually required effective sex education. Especially age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten (yes, kindergarten: the better children that age understand what's normal and safe, the better they can communicate when someone is doing things to them that are not that...and I only stop at kindergarten because AFAIK that's the earliest mandated schooling still). Similarly, the right wing desperately wants to have absolute control over their children—treat them as property—so giving children rights that even parents have to respect will get them to oppose absolutely everything.
Plus, as other sibling comments have already noted, the real desire here is for ubiquitous surveillance. CSAM is just the excuse they use.
Apple could easily not do this stuff and it may even be easier to not.
> It also ensured pressure from governments and plaintiffs, including CSAM victims, who preferred Apple’s more interventionist approaches, which Apple had voluntarily demonstrated it was willing to do.
I feel that Apple open pandora's box with the client-side scanning. It proved that it was technically feasible, and was "privacy preserving". I use scare quotes there because I don't think that political or religious dissidents would find that the same or similar technology used to discover and persecute them is "privacy preserving". And that's really the problem with Apple here. They provided a model for scanning for any kind of message or material while purportedly maintaining privacy.
Didn't their paper disproved by reversing the perceptual hashes to reveal blurred version of the images being hashed, and Apple basically said "that's fair, it's not as robust as we wanted, let's visit this later"?
If not, I'll happily stand corrected, but please share sources.
Addenda:
- Apple's original paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20210807165030/https://www.apple...
- Paper breaking the hash: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06628
Edit: The second one is the wrong paper. I’ll find and link the correct one tomorrow. Keeping the link for transparency.
Skimmed your linked paper. It seems they were able to classify hashes up to ~8% top-1 accuracy and ~30% top-10. Not exactly a blurred version, or any images at all.
So for example, they can say that you probably have images of trees, or images of buildings, but without much other data & very low accuracy.
I'd still be a lot more concerned about them simply flagging political images rather than trying to get a broad understanding of what type of photos I have
That box has been open for years now.
Big brother is already watching what you do on your Android device.
> A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
Google reported him to the police based on a single false positive.
To add insult to injury, even after the police contacted Google to tell them that they had cleared him of wrongdoing, Google refused to restore access to his account.
> The father uploaded photos of his son’s genitals, which were also backed up on his Google cloud, to the health care provider’s messaging system as requested.
(It is, granted, a bit pushy about it and will ask multiple times when you run it with an intrusive dialog.)
Very different than trying to narc out users to the authorities.
The other is detection of images that may contain nudity, whether sent or received, when the owner/admin/parent enables the feature. It is relatively uncontroversial and is described here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105069
Accidental false positives could lead to horrific outcomes up to and including oh look bob got shot by the cops for resisting.
It was possible to produce apparently matching innocuous images and then poison people's machines with them.Oops did you click on that picture of a tree have fun with the cops. Like an advanced form of swatting.
Although inspired by a desire to find CSAM Apple could be forced to scan for ANYTHING by repressive regimes including America and China.
Although initially targeting images client side scanning of messages is a pretty obvious next step. Again obvious good motivation exists and is completely justifiable who doesn't want to stop the next mass shooting or terrorist attack... and then we can basically use it to find people critical of the regime. Do remember we are presently prosecuting a political figure for a picture of sea shells and a guy in texas is rotting in prison for distributing political literature.
No, in the sense that your therapist is still required to report you to the police in various situations where you pose an immediate threat to yourself or others, etc.
And therapists are legally mandated to report you if you told them you viewed or possessed CSAM.
I get it, actually. It's totally possible the picture in question was not known to authorities prior. That's called due diligence to look into it.
Adults not looking into things or following up on things are how the system fails children if you read some accounts of people who were abused by their guardians. Horrifying stuff.
Honestly shocked that anyone would even say this, but even giving you the benefit of the doubt here -- the one case where I could imagine this might not happen would be if you're a police officer investigating such cases. But they also have their own therapists dedicated/trained in police-specific issues.
But also there are definitely ways to get accidentally exposed. That's an absolutely awful thing to call the cops over.
A whistleblower goes to a therapist, stressed out over their pending decision to reveal official misconduct. They've been investigating ways to post something on the internet that can't be immediately taken down by the corrupt government officials they want to expose. They express their discomfort, in confidence, to their therapist, about using something they've discovered is also used for CSAM.
You think it's a good thing for the therapist to be required to report this? Should they report that the patient admitted to viewing CSAM with no context so the whistleblower gets investigated and arrested, or should they provide the context -- that the patient is about to expose the corruption of the government receiving the report?
For that matter, consider what it does when someone is actually a pedophile. They find out that if they try to seek therapy to address their perverse attraction to kids, the therapist isn't allowed to keep their confidence and they'll be arrested, so instead of seeking professional help, they keep abusing kids. Is that the result we wanted? There is a reason doctor-patient confidentiality was a thing.
If its your license to practice on the line you know what choice you're going to make.
> Across most states, viewing CSEM alone is generally not a mandated-reporting trigger; reporting becomes obligatory when disclosures involve an identifiable child being abused or used to produce material.
> California’s CANRA imposes a distinct duty to report electronic access (download/stream) with identifying patient information, upheld against privacy challenges based on compelling state interest.
[0] https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/mandatory-reporting-ch...
Trying to avoid false positives by not firing until a threshold was hit (was it 20 images?) seemed insane from a PR position... rightly or wrongly, all it would take would be the wrong court case and you can see the headlines:
"Apple says users can have up to 20 CSAM images on their phone before they'll tell police"
You might not like pictures that way but honestly I think more important in procescuting CSAM is to go after the large sources of CSAM generation. Its trafficing in East Asia, and in Europe. I think weirdly America actually produces less CSAM in general because Americans are lot more off put by Sex than most other cultures. Abuse definitely happens in the US but making policy decisions like this produces bad policy.
Does iCloud rehost the photos to other people I don't really know because I use andriod tbh. If they are being rehosted (I assume to members of your contacts) that can be problematic but I think honestly the issue a lot more complex than just protect the children which the source of critic is a lot attacks against apples are coming from
The US has the largest pornography industry in the world by a massive margin, and the largest consumption of online pornography per capita
Meanwhile should we be surprised that CSAM production is higher in countries like the Philippines that have very weak digital policing, abject poverty, high numbers of street children etc?
Some TV shows rightfully take aim at this contradiction (recently: The Hunting Wives).
In some countries it is as far as I’m aware
If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. I'll take it. But don't attribute to this ~5 trillion dollar company some kind of altruism.
At least on Desktop we have usable Linux, but on the phones there is literally nothing usable because thanks to Google efforts switching to GrapheneOS mean tons of apps either not working or break every few months.
Yes its possible to make Andoid spy on you a little less, but even for tech savvy person its damn inconvinient and Google making platform worse with every single release.
Thanks to Google "security" I can use my banking apps on 9 years old device with 6 years outdated firmware, but not on GrapheneOS.
I've been using GrapheneOS for years and that hasn't been my experience. There are two financial apps that don't work for me, and that's it. Pretty much everything else I use is fine. But, to be fair, I'm very scrupulous about my apps and tend to avoid installing an app for every little thing that wants me to.
Sometimes, all you need is a Web browser. I personally don't want any "apps" on my phone that aren't basic utilities.
I am aware some banks in Europe require 2FA on a mobile device. Short of switching banks, my answer to that is a cheap or e-waste Googled Android phone that stays at home and serves that sole purpose.
Some banks limit functionality on web apps, which is annoying.
More importantly, many refuse to provide a decent 2FA other than push notifications inside the app or SMS, which is insecure and EU has mandated its phaseout.
The thing that works for me is to pretend to be clueless and get an old hardware OTP generator, but those are susceptible to impersonation attacks on the bank side.
I also need to maintain my own nextcloud, photo sync infrastructure and backups.
Its inconvinient. This is exactly what I talking about.
They probably use E2EE just so they don't have to respond to court orders and such.
So once there’s a profit motive for violating your privacy, the justification for eroding your privacy will proceed. It’s really the inertia of Apple starting out as privacy-compatible that makes them hesitant to throw that away.
But they are until they are actually defeated. I would rather plan for failure. We are in a global climate where court rulings can be ignored.
Like OP said, Apple isn't perfect nor will they ever be, but they do prioritize privacy better than most.
Look up the "iCloud Keychain" API:
For years Apple has let and helped Facebook, TikTok, Tinder etc. track users even after you delete an app, even ACROSS DEVICES and DEVICE RESETS.
There's no way to even SEE what data the apps have stored on your device & iCloud account on iOS, only through the macOS Keychain Access app. Even then you can't be sure that that's all that being stored.
They temporarily changed course and wiped iCloud Keychain data when deleting apps, but only during a single beta of iOS some years ago, and then reverted to the way it is now.
This scores so many points in favor of privacy intruding corporations that it puts Apple far from being the paragon of privacy they pretend to parade as.
Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself (theregister.com)
161 points by Logans_Run on Feb 14, 2025 | 69 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047952
Apple silently uploads your passwords and keeps them (lapcatsoftware.com)
170 points by ingve on Nov 1, 2024 | 127 comments
And whenever your privacy contradicts their control over "your" device, you are also out of luck, e.g., you can't have Ublock Origin on an iPhone. Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921
Except ublock, which can't do what it does the way it normally does, for the same reason you can't have any plugin inspecting realtime activity and doing scriptlet injection.
You can have ad blocking. You can't have plugins with that kind of low level access to your browser activity.
You can prefer something that allows dangerous behavior as a trade-off for greater capabilities, but you can't deny it's a safety trade-off where Apple picked what's safer.
People understood this settlement to mean Apple was spying on their conversations and selling them to advertisers, when it seems to have more to do with people accidentally triggering Siri. But people don’t care about this kind of nuance or actually tallying up all the ways Apple is pro privacy against rare issues like this one. It’s all just tribalism at the end of the day.
> Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to contractors working for the company around the world. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
Regardless of how you feel towards Apple, this sort of data should be siloed in a way that makes it impossible to share with undisclosed third-parties. It also should not be shared anywhere until Apple can confirm that PII and other sensitive information was redacted from the data, which they did not. It generally points to a laissez-faire attitude towards personal data that is hard to abdicate without seeing the Siri server-side code or retention architecture, which is why Apple settled to avoid revealing the extent to which they retain and share data in a class-action discovery process. The settlement is a mea-culpa without admitting to wrongdoing or proving fundamental security.
The lawsuit was entirely avoidable if Apple didn't play fast-and-loose with production databases. It'll be a black eye for anyone that points to Apple's whitepapers as an example of their commitment to security - some retention simply doesn't get documented by Apple.
These companies are liars. I do not trust liars. It has served me well.
Apple is on the side of making money, and the privacy claims are mostly marketing. The entire stack is closed source, which means it is difficult and expensive to independently verify any of the claims made. What's more, the "auto update" universal backdoor means that Apple can forcibly push a user-hostile "feature" like client-side scanning when it wants or is compelled to by a state actor.
Same issue with Proton, MEGA, and any other e2ee app... it's only useful when the company decides not to mess with the data it could always decrypt locally. Also why people are hesitant to use javascript-based e2ee solutions where the site owner can modify the code at will to do what they want.
Sure, the NSA, GCHQ and Mossad have a way to exfiltrate the unencrypted data but proprietary e2e is a good thing for most people IMO. Shifts the risk from "my messages are theoretically available to most law enforcement in the globe" to "YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD’ED UPON"[0]. This is specially good for me because I know the equivalent to the FBI where is live is too cheap to buy a Cellebrite [1] license.
[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/leaker-reveals-which...
EDIT: I suppose someone could ask about Meta. The reason behind their support for scanning (and removing e2e in facebook msg) is simply regulatory capture. The zucc wishes to have a letter of marque to "protect" your children and remove the "unsafe" competitors.
EDIT2: Used the wrong term, I mixed up exfiltration channel with sidechannel attack.
Watching memory changing on a complex code base without having said code base is near impossible.
1. Run code 2. Watch memory changes 3. Correlate those to real data
If your code is doing anything complicated that's an intense thing to determine. If you're deep enough for a side channel there's likely a lot easier way of getting in.
My mental model is that most competent intelligence agencies have a PRISM 3.0 deal with FAANG, including on E2E products or at least have devs on the payroll. I imagine that any backdoor is only used on important targets, so no intel sharing with Cletus the deputy.
From a liability standpoint that implies a security breach could result in massive loss of customer data and if it did occur would destroy their privacy image to their customers.
I agree with the point that what you actually trust is the company to not insert maliscous code or keys into your protected path but modern systems actually contain ways to truly lock out the company itself from seeing your data.
Security wise it's amazing. If a company's admin cannot take your data it's excedingly hard for a hacker to do so.
I'm not sure what you mean by "custom methods", but I'm not saying they have bypassed the e2e encryption - I'm just saying that they technically could.
And as for why they would do that, they might get compelled by a government to do it secretly. As far as I know that hasn't happened yet but I see no reason it couldn't and it would take a whistleblower to find out.
> Security wise it's amazing. If a company's admin cannot take your data it's excedingly hard for a hacker to do so.
I agree, it is the best option available. But Apple/Meta are technically lying when they say it's impossible for them to read your messages.
If the company is misleading, any encryption technology is irrelevant anyway.
Which apple does.
It's largely academic though, as almost nobody opts-in to escalated e2e posture in apple services unless they're a high risk person (journalist, dissident, etc).
The headaches that come from e2e everything are too great for most people.
That's obviously only the case if they aren't also the sole providers of the "ends".
1. 3rd party audit of a current repo hash 2. Public hosting of hash 3. Modern attested compute can check the current startup and running code hash and return to the user for their own checks. 4. User encrypts the last known hash they used or trust a 3rd party to perform the check like azure's methods.
Another way is to open source it and repeat 2/3/4
The way around that requires either a backdoor in attested hardware which would be wild if discovered because it's the same tech protecting companies and governments most sensitive info so they're all incentivised to audit that.
In a technical sense it's absolutely possible. Owning the servers != transferring keys to the servers. Most E2E apps run both client and servers, it's about if they ever had key access.
As sad as this is, end to end encryption means no CSAM scanning.
As an alternative Apple previously tried to do scanning on the phones locally but caught hell for that too.
This is one of those unfortunate tradeoffs but I see no alternative to privacy taking priority.
Just because we technically can make a privacy destroying drag net does not mean we should. Had phones existed 250 years ago, I have no doubt the founders would have thought it obvious that a cellphone’s contents were your personal papers which could not be freely searched.
Personally, I am on the side of privacy, just to be clear.
So - political solution, not a tech solution.
An icloud is like a storage locker or a safety deposit box... the owner should go through all your stuff there, just in case you have some CSAM!
Metadata is just tracking info about who, where and with whom... every bartender should take your IDs and log when you came to the bar, who you sat with and how long you talked there.
EU Chat control is like general eavesdropping... every time you sit down and talk with someone, an EU bureaucrat should sit next to you and listen and write down your conversations, just in case.
etc.
Somehow people think that "it's ok if it's on the internet", even when it's stuff they'd never accept in real life.
When arguing against surveillance, the arguments should be on its merits, not on whether the current proponents happen to have ulterior motives.
Even if the current proponents have no ulterior motive, and in fact live and die having done nothing negative with such power, it does not stop the next group in power from extending and abusing power, don't base laws on temporary trust of politicians.
If you take a 1000 random people of the street now,how many of them are sharing CSAM via icloud?
If you take a 1000 random politicians, how many of them have corruption scandals? Why not start with them instead, a bodycam and an AI powered microphone that would detect corruption automatically... let them lead as an example, before they apply the laws onto "the rest of us".
And client side scanning is just as bad as encryption backdoors. There's a good reason Apple was attacked for even considering it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450
The primary focus should always in preventing the creation of CSAM.
- Comprehensive Sex Ed starting young so kids can identify grooming and seek help from a trusted adult, even if abuse comes from a family member.
- Fixing schools in general so homeschooling isn't as attractive for parents. Keep a tab on home schooled children and identify social isolation.
- Bigger resources for actual honest to god on the ground investigations.
To be clear I'm not saying that homeschooling = child abuse, simply there's a lack of the mechanisms to detect it in homeschooling settings.
I'm not entirely convinced that's true. Facebook is a leading reporter of CSAM, much of it sent through Messenger, which only recently got E2EE, and Instagram DM, which briefly had E2EE but no longer does. If I was going to transmit something that could get me in trouble, it certainly wouldn't be via Instagram DM.
Facebook's EU CSAM report is here: https://transparency.meta.com/reports/regulatory-transparenc...
It's harder to do, but conceptually the same. So sad it's not being done. Very disturbing.
They could do it when people are not at home. There'd no problem, nobody would even notice.
A better one: what about rental property, like a business? Can the landlord randomly check for criminal behavior?
Not true. There is the option of scanning on the device.
https://www.ncontracts.com/nsight-blog/risk-management-strat...
I think your conspiracy theory needs work, to be perfectly honest with you.
I think it depends on your definition of e2ee and where the "end"s are.
If the locally running application can decrypt the data, it could always do whatever it wanted. Is that really how you define e2ee?
There is something ironic about US laws that attempt to prevent crime A by outlawing action B. For example:
* A: physical sexual abuse of children. B: possession or distribution of CSAM
* A: drug trafficking or tax evasion. B: structured cash withdrawals
It's my understanding that conviction of CSAM-related crimes do not require any physical act to have ever occurred to any real person: one can be convicted of CSAM-related crimes related to paintings/drawings/created_art of fictional people.
It's my understanding that one can be convicted of structured withdrawals that are not driven by, linked to, or in any way related to anything nefarious.
This isn't necessarily the case in the US, though I believe only for drawings. AI-generated CSAM probably wouldn't fly in a court of law.
Regardless, it's a naive conception of a system of law to think of it as a utilitarian system of restitution in contexts of "this individual harmed this individual". In fact, that would fall under the category of a "tort" rather than a "crime". The law is just as much about enforcing social mores and norms as it is about dealing with individuals harming each other. Hence why locales like Canada outlaw all forms CSAM, even fictional ones. The victim taken is to be society itself. The possession of this material, implicitly entailing enjoyment of it, is so gross a violation of society's norms and mores that it becomes elevated to a legal matter.
This shouldn't be the case in a society that supposedly values liberty.
The reason why the Supreme Court upheld bans on possessing CSAM is not because it's obscene, but because it incentivizes abuse of children to produce it.
On top of that, while there are different types of child abusers, the worst ones almost invariantly collect CSAM to the point of hoarding. So it really isn’t that bad of a proxy.
The root comment is implying that legalizing or decriminalizing csam would somehow help with prosecution of child abuse? I’m kind of speechless. Csam IS child abuse. The fact that there are consumers encourages producers to, well, produce!
I mean, if there were any truth to it, surely our nation would have seen an uptick, in the past 30–40 years, of new generations picking up guns and just mercilessly mowing down soft targets as if playing GTA.
Thankfully, that is all confined to fantasy in cyberspace!
perhaps there is more to it?
Oh, and everywhere in your nation? At the same time?
Sorry, I think I have a button.
Mother Shares How Video Games Radicalized Her Son to Run Around and Pick up Coins
If this were true then widespread availability of pornography on the internet would have resulted in a massive increase in rape of adult females. When in fact, assault numbers have been on a steady decline for decades.
60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life: https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i2.29
I'm not taking a position here, but the total amount of pornography is irrelevant to the argument. If the amount of rape pornography available has increased 500x as the total amount of pornography has increased 5000x, the proportion of pornography that was rape pornography has been reduced by 90%.
> 60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life
Someone looking for child pornography is somebody looking for child pornography, so their opinion about what the search might lead to seems a bit worthless. There's no reason to assume that they have any insight into what will happen next, but we know for a fact what has already happened.
That out of the way, though, and assuming that child pornography leads to child abuse, the good pro-pornography case that has been made is that when pornography is suppressed rather than regulated, the 95% of people who are exclusively interested in adult pornography will have to go through the same underground channels that child pornography flows through, thus having the perverse effect of exposing more people to child pornography (or at least obtaining access to it.) If exposure to child pornography causes child abuse, then the suppression of adult pornography would then lead to more child abuse.
Hence your theory should be easily visible in rape statistics, yet it’s the opposite.
As well as possession. I don't actually know if those are different for CSAM, but I would assume so because they are for drugs.
Mere possession of a substance is surely not what society cares about.
> Non-consented distribution of sexual images (eg: revenge porn) is also a crime.
There is very compelling empirical evidence that this causes actual harm (suicide ideation in a very big fraction of the victims), even if it is fictional, so here there is no question about the harm.
There have been a handful of convictions based on fictional content, but usually the defendants also possessed real CSAM so there wasn't much point in contesting the charges over fictional images.
> The PROTECT Act includes prohibitions against obscene illustrations depicting child pornography, including computer-generated illustrations, also known as virtual child pornography. Previous provisions outlawing virtual child pornography... had been ruled unconstitutional... The PROTECT ACT attached an obscenity requirement under the Miller test or the variant test noted above to overcome this limitation.
Which, if I'm reading it right, means that GP was correct in saying "conviction of CSAM-related crimes do not require any physical act to have ever occurred to any real person"
> However, the court did not reverse its holding in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition as to virtual child pornography which is not obscene under the Miller standard
Does it surprise anyone else that this is a legal possibility?
Also, in regard to the fictional CSAM depictions that stuff is still wending its way through the courts.
(a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)is obscene; or ...
(b)...
(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
People have infantilization fetishes - where they wear diapers and shit. You can certainly imagine someone making a cartoon of that in a sexual way.
Adults often don't look their ages. John Mulaney famously had a set about resembling a child when he was 29.
What if someone generated an image that looked like a teenager, but there was a driver's license in the frame that said the person was an adult?
Real people have ages. Imaginary people are imaginary.
What about art from the antiquity when what we would call a teenager would have been treated as an adult? Surely someone painted people having sex before "the age of consent" was a well-defined term. Is it illegal to own that painting?
I can't wrap my head around how AI-generated imagery is evidence of child sexual abuse (CAS). How are you abusing a real child by generating an image of a fake one?
[1] https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...
- Structured transactions are illegal because we put a minimum on the amount of cash that has to move before government financial surveillance applies. The alternative (at least, one acceptable to the state) would be that the government knows every transaction you make[0] no matter the size. Since we don't want that, it has to be illegal to lie about the size of a transaction. Furthermore, the harder it is to get away with structuring your transactions, the more legible the financial system becomes and the easier it is to catch drug dealers.
- Pedophiles have not stopped possessing or distributing CSAM to reduce their legal liability. Actually, this argument ignores the main reason why pedophiles store and trade CSAM around in the first place: it's specifically to scare victims into silence and revictimize those who tell the cops. In fact, this is why we stopped calling it "child porn" and started calling it "child sexual abuse material" - because it is specifically material designed to sexually abuse children by way of it's mere existence.
If you're a "no touch" pedophile (they do exist!) that's still trading real CSAM around, well... Congratulations, Nobuhiro Watsuki, award-winning author of the hit samurai manga Rurouni Kenshin, you're still doing the dirty work for the full-contact pedo who recorded the damned thing.
As for drawn child porn, involving fictional characters (i.e. not CSAM), it is legal in certain jurisdictions. Notably, America, where the 1st Amendment errs on the side of creative expression[1]; and Japan, the thinking man's Epstein Island, where... I actually don't know why the fuck Japan is so weirdly tolerant of all this sick lolicon trash. Hell, Watsuki didn't even get cancelled when it came out he had 100 DVDs worth of actual CSAM.
There's an additional layer to this, though, in that for all the crimes you brought up, there's been a history of active state complicity in the crime:
- The CIA is a drug trafficking gang that happens to moonlight as a government intelligence agency
- A good chunk of elected officials and heads of state in multiple countries were compromised by notorious child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein
- The government doesn't pay taxes. I mean, obviously, they're the ones levying them.
We like to think of law enforcement as a cat-and-mouse game: criminals do a thing and law enforcement tries to hunt them down within the bounds of 4A/5A. The reality is more complicated. There are cases in which governments actively collaborate with organized crime, either because the government is corrupt as sin, or because the criminals are offering the state a way out.
[0] Fun fact: if you use Bitcoin, you're automatically opting into this.
[1] To be clear, while I agree with the American argument, you still shouldn't actually expose yourself to this kind of porn, because you're training yourself to get horny around kids. I shouldn't have to say this, but just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's safe to use.
As I noted in another comment:
Currently this is explicitly against the law[0]:
(a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)is obscene; or ...
(b)...
(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
Governments need to catch criminals, but they shouldn’t do it at everyone else’s expense.
What world do you live in?
A growing number of people people today can figure out how to run Fable in a co work session, or codex, and that can indeed set up the self-owned backup system for you along with an alternative trustable cloud backup thats not Apple or Google.
For most people "the cloud" is where you backup stuff. If you have a personal backup strategy that doesn't involve the cloud, you are not "most people".
Doing backups the right way take some skill and investment if you want to do it by yourself. It may involve setting up a NAS, and some discipline with physical media. You have to do your own security too. Most people don't want to do that, so, cloud backup it is.
It is not a perfect solution, even beyond the privacy considerations, like you can still lose your data by losing your account, but from my personal experience, people lose their data less often now that they have cloud backups.
I back up files to my own cloud with a Nextcloud integration for Android. That being said, a monthly or so backup of devices via USB/Ethernet, like we used to in the pre-cloud area, would be enough for all intents and purposes. It's not like what people have on their phones is generally very valuable.
Most people don’t have computers, those who do, do not regularly backup their photos on them.
In both family and extended family many a cry would be avoided if people paid the 5 bucks it costs to backup their photos before your phone gets stolen or lost.
Wasn’t Apple’s design to explicitly NOT scan in its cloud storage, but look at the file on-device at the moment you wish to upload it to iCloud? This method would make it compatible with Advanced Data Protection; so ADP could have always been in the pipeline rather than Apple u-turning. In fact, NeuralHash may have been proposed because Apple wanted to introduce ADP and saw a potential problem here/get concerns from government agencies about it and saw this as a means to an end(-to-end).
The system was designed pretty elegantly and offers far better privacy protections - including guardrails - than what Microsoft and Google do, but the communication from Apple about it was absolutely horrible and generated enormous backlash. (Not saying I agreed with implementing it, just saying the design was infinitely better than competitors.)
The VAST majority of “CSAM” is consensually created and exchanged by teens. Their future selves and their parents form this pressure group attacking everyone’s liberty and privacy to try to undo the downsides of choices they made themselves with full knowledge of what could happen.
The criminal and disgusting tail end of this type of material deserves the worst of consequences for the perpetrators and all the support in the world for the victims, but these are mostly - you guessed it - poor and unprivileged children from far away places and they certainly can’t put this much pressure on apple
I wrote to the rep and explained my concerns. I wholeheartedly agreed with the intent of the law, but the code was buggy. To my surprise, he wrote back in horror to say he hadn’t considered that and pulled the bill immediately. I’m proud of having done that.
I’m 100% pro yeeting child pornographers into the sun. I still don’t want to throw kids in prison or remove all traces of a right to privacy in our haste to sun-yeet them.
The one messy corner of this is the "strict liability" for this type of material. An underage kid can take a nude photo, send it to an adult, and then the adult can criminally liable for just having it, even if he deleted it as soon as he saw it. Either both parties involved in handing something for which there is "strict liability' need to be held accountable, or "strict liability" has to be changed so a person isn't liable if he deletes or reports the material as soon as he first becomes aware of it. And this isn't likely to happen because it would provide a plausible defense for every one criminally charged.
I'm sure smarter people than me have sussed this out and can explain why it's a good thing, but it sits wrong with me. We can put the subject matter aside for a second: I don't think I could convict someone for having something happen to them, regardless of what the law says. Let's say drug possession was a strict liability law (and maybe it is for all I know). Finding a baggy of meth on the corner of a farmer's lot would mean that, technically, he was guilty of possession and had to prove that it wasn't really is. That's nuts. And looping back to the subject at hand, if the only evidence that someone possessed CSAM was their email inbox, without proof that it was solicited? They want me on their jury.
There should never be a circumstance where someone can't report something that happened to them to the police without a legitimate fear of being arrested. That's bad for the person, and it's bad for society.
But if their hard drive has folders grouped by age or something, prepare the solar catapult.
While on statistics, I wonder, are there reliable statistics about child abuse of different types? Studying correlations with other social metrics, like sex education, liberal/conservative, policies regarding prostitution, and others can provide support for/against decisions.
Not that I hope these will impact people's and governments' choices, but I want to challenge my intuitions.
Why would some adults find kids sexually attractive? Is it abusive/aggressive behavior manifesting itself in sexuality? Or is it sexuality channeled in the wrong direction? If it's the second, is it out of desperation, and would happen less if the culture makes it easier for them to satisfy their needs with adults, or would it happen regardless? On the victim's side, are the shy and less social ones more in danger, or the socially active ones? From my social scientist friends I hear a lot that most child sexual abuse is domestic. What are measures that a society can take to prevent these, without turning the society into a surveillance state, which will ultimately harm everyone more, including the children? What can be done to make sure children speak up, so that such behavior is dealt with at the beginning (and maybe while the more terrible things have not happened yet), and not turn into a multi-year childhood trauma?
What are signs (and early signs) on the abuser's side and the child's side? How to deal with these signs?
The real question is what happens when a horny teenager sends another a nude. There definitely have been insane cases where they get stitched up for creating child porn. I don't know if that's the normal outcome today though.
I don’t have any ideas for a solution, but I suspect that the heightened focus on CSAM is really compensating for the fact that we don’t have solutions for revenge porn.
It was not a tool to identify private images as being underage. That’s an impossible task.
Just ask the dad who was investigated for taking pictures of his toddler for the doctor: https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-da...
In theory, modern vision language models could classify human nudity and sexual activity very thoroughly. But every model I have tried is reluctant to clearly describe what is notable about sexualized/nude images. The models are deliberately under-exposed to nude and sexualized content during training and further RLHF'd away from generating straightforward descriptions of such images.
Models also occasionally hallucinate WTF captions for ordinary adult sexual activity. I recently ran a baseline test with frames extracted from adult videos and about 1/3000 frames was mis-captioned as involving a child according to Gemma 4 12b.
Our legal systems are not built to deal with that mess, and it may hang around your neck for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, the law is very explicit, leaving barely any avenue for the courts to drag us out of the mess, and politicians - even if they are actually interested in the topic in the first place - won't touch that area with a ten foot pole for fear of getting blamed a pedophile themselves.
[1] https://www.n-tv.de/panorama/KI-treibt-Jugendporno-Fallzahle...
I'm questioning the parent post's contention that the "vast majority" of CSAM falls into this bucket.
Yes, poor and unprivileged children can't really defend themselves here, but this is the system working to find some legal mechanism to do what it can, as a more powerful force. Protecting people from exploitation is a good use of government. If this was shot down for legal reasons, OK, the system is working and I hope there is a way to expand protections that fits into our system.
Once again, someone (in this case, the judge of this case) asks if we can meet in the middle on whether or not private communications are actually private.
To be clear: this is not a limitation of nerds' imagination. This is a limitation of physics. A person is either party to a communication (and thus can decrypt it) or is not (and thus cannot). If you demand Apple scan encrypted photos for CSAM, what you are demanding is that Apple be party to every communication done with an iPhone. There is no middle ground on encryption, there will never be a middle ground on encryption, and I will hold this truth on my deathbed.
There is no "encrypted but crackable" - if the CIA can crack it at all, we're only a few years away from some kid's gaming rig doing the same thing. There is no "secure golden key" - if there was, you could buy it in the same section of Amazon that sells copies of the TSA master key that opens all luggage locks.
Personally, the next time a government demands decryption keys, I think Apple should just set all iCloud photo libraries in that country to public and say "Sorry, your politicians made private photos illegal, take it up with them". Obviously, telegraph this far in advance and give users time to actually delete their cloud-hosted photos first. But definitely do not pretend like you can keep a secret with a government bureaucracy of hundreds of thousands of people.
But then again, Apple also capitulated (good meaning) to the EU on third-party app distribution, so Apple has a lot less of a spine than they let on. At least Google actually stayed out of China.