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So far all the comments are predictably negative and imply that Apple will at some time in the future attempt to covertly implement the feature in secret. Anot

So far all the comments are predictably negative and imply that Apple will at some time in the future attempt to covertly implement the feature in secret. Another take would be that they took on-board the extensive public criticism, and changed their minds.

Macha 5y ago
This is the reaction the tech industry has bred with the only options ever being "Yes, now" or "Later". People are used to the industry not taking no for an answer, and so this pattern matches to every other time the industry has "backed off for now" (see also: MS pushing edge as default browser, Apple boiling the frog with gatekeeper, Whatsapp/Facebook data sharing, Google+ account migrations for YouTube accounts)
- pzo 5y ago
  I have been literally spammed in the last month on my iPhone (even though still using iOS 14) with apple notifications asking me "Do you agree to new terms of agreements? <Yes> <We will ask you later>" (that's regarding new iCloud terms). I was always careful not to miss click and not to agree. No matter what few days later I kept giving the same notification. The stopped for some reason after few months and now I don't know if: 1) I agree by accident 2) They thankfully stopped nagging me 3) Or they buggy implemented it and even though I kept cancelling after few tries they assumed I agreed.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    I'm still tapping "later" on WhatsApp's ToS changes. I wonder how much longer I can get away with it.
    - helloworld11 5y ago
      Likewise. I've managed to keep that little shit show in limbo for several months now. Wonder the same thing.
    - najqh 5y ago
      A few weeks ago I was forced to accept or I couldn't keep using the app at all.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        What have you switched to now?
        najqh 5y ago
        I haven't switched, I accepted them because I don't really care. I just wanted to see for how long I could push it.
        skinkestek 5y ago
        At the moment Facebook bought them I started researching alternatives and I am happy to say that a couple of hundred friends and family of mine have switched and not a single person has tried to reach me on WhatsApp for months until I uninstalled it.
  - Someone 5y ago
    I don’t think cloud services realistically can do something else than forcing all users to accept the latest license. If they don’t, they end up having data from different licenses. If you have many of those, figuring out what you can and cannot do with data becomes a nightmare. You could get questions such as “Can you make a backup in country C for user U? He’s under the 2019 terms, so in principle, yes, but alas, user V has shared content with U, and V still is under the 2017 terms. Also, U has been in the EU for the past weeks, so EU regulations apply, at least as far as we catered for them in the 2019 terms” Not changing the terms isn’t an option, either, as they have to be changed to cater for changes in laws. If you operate in 100+ countries,
    - nkrisc 5y ago
      > If they don’t, they end up having data from different licenses. If you have many of those, figuring out what you can and cannot do with data becomes a nightmare. That's their problem to figure out. If they can't then they should terminate customers who don't agree and ship them their data. Obviously they'll never do that since it would be a terrible look and they'd lose customers, because they want to have their cake and eat it, too. I am not sympathetic to how hard it would be for a corporation to do something. "It's too hard" is not an excuse, not least of all if they're a multi-billion dollar corporation.
      - Someone 5y ago
        We don’t use that kind of reasoning with other service providers. If, for example, your bank changes their terms, your electricity provider increases prices, landlords increase rent, etc. they will inform you and often silently enrol you in the new scheme. Cancelling the agreement always (and maybe not even that) is an option, but that is opt-out, not opt-in. So, why would cloud providers be different?
        Macha 5y ago
        My bank grandfathered me onto an account TOS for a decade before giving me a "move to our modern accounts or close" ultimatum, my electricity provider has legal limits to what the the unit rate and landlords are limited to one rate increase every 12 months, which in my city also has its amount limited. If my phone, internet or TV company wants to increase prices that voids any contractual lock in period I may have been held to otherwise. I work for a B2B company and we do gate features depending on which revision of the TOS the client has agreed to. In short, other countries outside the US _do_ hold other service providers to similar standards.
- adrr 5y ago
  This isn't a revenue generating initiative. It is different than your examples. Apple is trying to make two groups happy, governments and customers. Governments don't like like encryption(assuming Apple starts encrypting iCloud photos with device based keys) and consumers don't like governments snooping on them. If you're were the CEO of apple who would you favor knowing either group could cost you money. Governments could prioritize antitrust initiatives against apple and consumers could stop buying apple products.
  - Nevermark 5y ago
    You could ship a mechanism that scans your documents but doesn't report anything. Or do something equally pointless, but just as signally. I feel like so many of these unstoppable force meets immovable wall situations warp both functionality and discourse (on all sides) on said functionality. This comes about because everything is getting so centralized. The government wants to be in everything, and Apple (stand in for all big tech) does too. This pits them against each other, with the consumer only acknowledged when there is vast consumer agreement and motivation. Similar to App Store, Apple wants total control, then governments use Apple's control to cut of access to particular apps. Consumers that understand the severe loss of freedom this creates (for them and developers) both immediate and in lost innovation don't like it. But there isn't a huge consumer uproar on that one ... so freedom wilts. Bundling these basic features (cloud backups, app stores) with operating systems is creating an unholy government/platform axis that wins every time consumers are unable to drum up the motivation to speak as coherent allies pushing back.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > knowing either group could cost you money I'm not a businessman, but I believe Apple's main customers are not governments, so I suppose that it's not good business for Apple to ignore their users' preferences. Governments in most of Apple's marketplaces change every few years, after all.
    - adrr 5y ago
      Why they pulled the scanning was because of customer backlash. Fallout is yet to be seen what governments especially when Apple switches to not having access the keys to decrypt iCloud photos and documents. And moves iCloud backups to being encrypted. One high profile crime especially involving children and we’ll see government propose escrowed keys. UK is already proposing it. I am not saying it’s right or wrong. I do believe consumers anger at Apple is the wrong target. If they want change, get governments to pass laws that guarantee encryption as a “right”.
skoskie 5y ago
I don’t think Apple has much choice in the matter, and I really wish more people understood why they did this in the first place. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-committee-wants-everyone-know-its-concerned-about-encryption https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-commi...
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Apple has stood up to unreasonable government invasions of privacy before. And won. They have the means. They have the skill. They have the incentive (their entire brand is arguably built around privacy) and their users have been pretty clear in voicing their opposition to CSAM. Some nebulous political references in opposition to encryption aren't the reason Apple did this in the first place. They had and continue to have plenty of choice in the matter.
  - coolspot 5y ago
    > Apple has stood up to unreasonable government invasions of privacy before. And won. Only when they knew they would win, as with Bernandino Shooter PR spectacle. They didn’t stand up against iCloud CN being hosted by Chinese government, they didn’t stand up against unencrypted iCloud backups.
    - brokenmachine 5y ago
      Apple is in it for Apple. As a corporation, they have no intrinsic morals at all, and privacy is nothing but a marketing term to them. They don't want to lose China and $$, and they couldn't use and profit from people's data if iCloud backups were encrypted. Companies are not your friends.
bigyellow 5y ago
It's closed source software - what makes anyone think it isn't already implemented?
matheusmoreira 5y ago
It's proprietary software. There's no way to know what it's doing. Better to assume the worst.
mdoms 5y ago
You can't be that naïve? > Update: Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer told The Verge that though the CSAM detection feature is no longer mentioned on its website, plans for CSAM detection have not changed since September, which means CSAM detection is still coming in the future.
ItsBob 5y ago
I don't believe that they'll slip it under the radar at all. I think they'll brand it as something awesome and magical and just add it anyway. People, for the most part, don't scratch the surface EVER, so they'll just think it has a cool scanning feature built-in now.
- disgu 5y ago
  They already scan your photos but the reason for scanning is important. Type 'cat' into the search and they'll show you the pictures you've taken of cats. However, they can't just go through your photos and use it for any purpose they want. They have to give a specific reason.
  - ItsBob 5y ago
    I meant that they won't hide what it will do. It will be called something benign and fluffy and it will be "for your protection". That's what I meant.
BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
If Apple would like us to believe they changed their mind, they might consider telling us they changed their mind. They haven't told us that, so why should we assume it?
- judge2020 5y ago
  They’re still a company with a PR and Legal team. Letting it die quietly means it stays out of the news cycle (as in, there are less articles about it being removed compared to if they publicly announced they were wrong).
  - BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
    > They’re still a company a PR and Legal team All the more reason to not give them the benefit of the doubt with shit like this. If they say something flat out, that has some weight since there could be legal repercussions for lying (in theory anyway.) But not saying anything and letting people infer whatever they want? That's how companies with PR and Legal teams like to cover their asses instead of outright lying. The company says nothing and lets their supporters invent whatever headcanon is most flattering. I don't go in for that. Edit: The same thing happened when they let Apple fans infer that this feature was preparation for enabling proper E2EE. As far as I'm aware Apple never actually said that and their supporters decided to believe it without evidence, just a lot of wishful thinking.
  - pzo 5y ago
    I would respect more company and people that can admit to mistake and apologize and commit not doing the same mistake again. In this case Apple simply keeps people in limbo - you cannot be sure what they are planning to do with it without any public statement. They might as well tweak it a little bit, rebrand with different name and push it again as wrapped with different package.
klodolph 5y ago
Another possibility (or way to look at it) is that it worked poorly enough, and it was poorly received enough, that the internal factions within Apple that opposed it had enough leverage to kill it. Sometimes, the right way to kill a project (politically) is to let it publicly fail. Killing a project before it fails requires much more of a fight. It could also mean that the very public failure of this project gave Apple leverage over whichever spooks were pushing for it in the first place.
- zionic 5y ago
  >Sometimes, the right way to kill a project (politically) is to let it publicly fail. I feel this is definitely true most of the time, but in this case the cost to their public image/perception among the tech crowd was so high it was a mistake.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    It may have been a mistake for Apple as a company to make this decision, but I think we can understand why the individuals within Apple might choose to let decisions like this play out and fail in public, even if they know it is going to fail.
    - ksec 5y ago
      Well Craig Federighi seems to be happy with it. Their software engineers leads of the features seems to be happy with it. i.e I dont believe there were significant objection to the feature within Apple. At least not those in power. And that is why they went with it. The objection obviously came later after it was reviewed to the public.
      - klodolph 5y ago
        > The objection obviously came later after it was reviewed to the public. Why is this obvious? Normally, when you have an objection to a company policy, you voice those objections in private to people within the company. This seems "obvious" to me, but to explain--(1) it's against company policy and often considered a fireable offense, (2) employees have an interest in presenting a united front, (3) those who want the project to fail publicly want it to happen without interference from inside the company.
DenisM 5y ago
It’s easy to tell which - is E2E still there? Then scanning is still there too.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Well, it’s mostly easy to tell since we still have researchers decompiling and scrubbing through the OS to see what’s in it and what it does[0]. https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX
momenti 5y ago
What does it help if the creepy intelligence services are in the hardware?
- wholinator2 5y ago
  I'd venture to say ease of use. I mean AT&T had everyone's emails but still Facebook makes it much easier to infer and understand and expand surveillance. Getting targeted information might be doable in hardware, but mass surveillance might be much easier if implemented a little higher up, by a dedicated dev team which issues bug fixes and feature extensions, which can turn over a request by you in a fraction of the time and whos capabilities are far more mutable. Hardware is more capable but it's a lot more work
raxxorrax 5y ago
I would have thought they continue the practice but because of the bad publicity will remove all mentions of it. Is it confirmed they won't scan user files? Because I would assume that they still do. As for the negativity. That is based on experience with large tech companies.
kingcharles 5y ago
This. There is absolutely no requirement for Apple to tell you they are checking the signatures of all your files.
gentleman11 5y ago
Somebody above found a quote saying that plans are still to go forward with it eventually

Macha 5y ago

This is the reaction the tech industry has bred with the only options ever being "Yes, now" or "Later". People are used to the industry not taking no for an answer, and so this pattern matches to every other time the industry has "backed off for now" (see also: MS pushing edge as default browser, Apple boiling the frog with gatekeeper, Whatsapp/Facebook data sharing, Google+ account migrations for YouTube accounts)

pzo 5y ago
I have been literally spammed in the last month on my iPhone (even though still using iOS 14) with apple notifications asking me "Do you agree to new terms of agreements? <Yes> <We will ask you later>" (that's regarding new iCloud terms). I was always careful not to miss click and not to agree. No matter what few days later I kept giving the same notification. The stopped for some reason after few months and now I don't know if: 1) I agree by accident 2) They thankfully stopped nagging me 3) Or they buggy implemented it and even though I kept cancelling after few tries they assumed I agreed.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  I'm still tapping "later" on WhatsApp's ToS changes. I wonder how much longer I can get away with it.
  - helloworld11 5y ago
    Likewise. I've managed to keep that little shit show in limbo for several months now. Wonder the same thing.
  - najqh 5y ago
    A few weeks ago I was forced to accept or I couldn't keep using the app at all.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      What have you switched to now?
      - najqh 5y ago
        I haven't switched, I accepted them because I don't really care. I just wanted to see for how long I could push it.
        skinkestek 5y ago
        At the moment Facebook bought them I started researching alternatives and I am happy to say that a couple of hundred friends and family of mine have switched and not a single person has tried to reach me on WhatsApp for months until I uninstalled it.
- Someone 5y ago
  I don’t think cloud services realistically can do something else than forcing all users to accept the latest license. If they don’t, they end up having data from different licenses. If you have many of those, figuring out what you can and cannot do with data becomes a nightmare. You could get questions such as “Can you make a backup in country C for user U? He’s under the 2019 terms, so in principle, yes, but alas, user V has shared content with U, and V still is under the 2017 terms. Also, U has been in the EU for the past weeks, so EU regulations apply, at least as far as we catered for them in the 2019 terms” Not changing the terms isn’t an option, either, as they have to be changed to cater for changes in laws. If you operate in 100+ countries,
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    > If they don’t, they end up having data from different licenses. If you have many of those, figuring out what you can and cannot do with data becomes a nightmare. That's their problem to figure out. If they can't then they should terminate customers who don't agree and ship them their data. Obviously they'll never do that since it would be a terrible look and they'd lose customers, because they want to have their cake and eat it, too. I am not sympathetic to how hard it would be for a corporation to do something. "It's too hard" is not an excuse, not least of all if they're a multi-billion dollar corporation.
    - Someone 5y ago
      We don’t use that kind of reasoning with other service providers. If, for example, your bank changes their terms, your electricity provider increases prices, landlords increase rent, etc. they will inform you and often silently enrol you in the new scheme. Cancelling the agreement always (and maybe not even that) is an option, but that is opt-out, not opt-in. So, why would cloud providers be different?
      - Macha 5y ago
        My bank grandfathered me onto an account TOS for a decade before giving me a "move to our modern accounts or close" ultimatum, my electricity provider has legal limits to what the the unit rate and landlords are limited to one rate increase every 12 months, which in my city also has its amount limited. If my phone, internet or TV company wants to increase prices that voids any contractual lock in period I may have been held to otherwise. I work for a B2B company and we do gate features depending on which revision of the TOS the client has agreed to. In short, other countries outside the US _do_ hold other service providers to similar standards.
adrr 5y ago
This isn't a revenue generating initiative. It is different than your examples. Apple is trying to make two groups happy, governments and customers. Governments don't like like encryption(assuming Apple starts encrypting iCloud photos with device based keys) and consumers don't like governments snooping on them. If you're were the CEO of apple who would you favor knowing either group could cost you money. Governments could prioritize antitrust initiatives against apple and consumers could stop buying apple products.
- Nevermark 5y ago
  You could ship a mechanism that scans your documents but doesn't report anything. Or do something equally pointless, but just as signally. I feel like so many of these unstoppable force meets immovable wall situations warp both functionality and discourse (on all sides) on said functionality. This comes about because everything is getting so centralized. The government wants to be in everything, and Apple (stand in for all big tech) does too. This pits them against each other, with the consumer only acknowledged when there is vast consumer agreement and motivation. Similar to App Store, Apple wants total control, then governments use Apple's control to cut of access to particular apps. Consumers that understand the severe loss of freedom this creates (for them and developers) both immediate and in lost innovation don't like it. But there isn't a huge consumer uproar on that one ... so freedom wilts. Bundling these basic features (cloud backups, app stores) with operating systems is creating an unholy government/platform axis that wins every time consumers are unable to drum up the motivation to speak as coherent allies pushing back.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > knowing either group could cost you money I'm not a businessman, but I believe Apple's main customers are not governments, so I suppose that it's not good business for Apple to ignore their users' preferences. Governments in most of Apple's marketplaces change every few years, after all.
  - adrr 5y ago
    Why they pulled the scanning was because of customer backlash. Fallout is yet to be seen what governments especially when Apple switches to not having access the keys to decrypt iCloud photos and documents. And moves iCloud backups to being encrypted. One high profile crime especially involving children and we’ll see government propose escrowed keys. UK is already proposing it. I am not saying it’s right or wrong. I do believe consumers anger at Apple is the wrong target. If they want change, get governments to pass laws that guarantee encryption as a “right”.

skoskie 5y ago

I don’t think Apple has much choice in the matter, and I really wish more people understood why they did this in the first place. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-committee-wants-everyone-know-its-concerned-about-encryption https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-commi...

elliekelly 5y ago
Apple has stood up to unreasonable government invasions of privacy before. And won. They have the means. They have the skill. They have the incentive (their entire brand is arguably built around privacy) and their users have been pretty clear in voicing their opposition to CSAM. Some nebulous political references in opposition to encryption aren't the reason Apple did this in the first place. They had and continue to have plenty of choice in the matter.
- coolspot 5y ago
  > Apple has stood up to unreasonable government invasions of privacy before. And won. Only when they knew they would win, as with Bernandino Shooter PR spectacle. They didn’t stand up against iCloud CN being hosted by Chinese government, they didn’t stand up against unencrypted iCloud backups.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    Apple is in it for Apple. As a corporation, they have no intrinsic morals at all, and privacy is nothing but a marketing term to them. They don't want to lose China and $$, and they couldn't use and profit from people's data if iCloud backups were encrypted. Companies are not your friends.

bigyellow 5y ago

It's closed source software - what makes anyone think it isn't already implemented?

matheusmoreira 5y ago

It's proprietary software. There's no way to know what it's doing. Better to assume the worst.

mdoms 5y ago

You can't be that naïve? > Update: Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer told The Verge that though the CSAM detection feature is no longer mentioned on its website, plans for CSAM detection have not changed since September, which means CSAM detection is still coming in the future.

ItsBob 5y ago

I don't believe that they'll slip it under the radar at all. I think they'll brand it as something awesome and magical and just add it anyway. People, for the most part, don't scratch the surface EVER, so they'll just think it has a cool scanning feature built-in now.

disgu 5y ago
They already scan your photos but the reason for scanning is important. Type 'cat' into the search and they'll show you the pictures you've taken of cats. However, they can't just go through your photos and use it for any purpose they want. They have to give a specific reason.
- ItsBob 5y ago
  I meant that they won't hide what it will do. It will be called something benign and fluffy and it will be "for your protection". That's what I meant.

BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago

If Apple would like us to believe they changed their mind, they might consider telling us they changed their mind. They haven't told us that, so why should we assume it?

judge2020 5y ago
They’re still a company with a PR and Legal team. Letting it die quietly means it stays out of the news cycle (as in, there are less articles about it being removed compared to if they publicly announced they were wrong).
- BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
  > They’re still a company a PR and Legal team All the more reason to not give them the benefit of the doubt with shit like this. If they say something flat out, that has some weight since there could be legal repercussions for lying (in theory anyway.) But not saying anything and letting people infer whatever they want? That's how companies with PR and Legal teams like to cover their asses instead of outright lying. The company says nothing and lets their supporters invent whatever headcanon is most flattering. I don't go in for that. Edit: The same thing happened when they let Apple fans infer that this feature was preparation for enabling proper E2EE. As far as I'm aware Apple never actually said that and their supporters decided to believe it without evidence, just a lot of wishful thinking.
- pzo 5y ago
  I would respect more company and people that can admit to mistake and apologize and commit not doing the same mistake again. In this case Apple simply keeps people in limbo - you cannot be sure what they are planning to do with it without any public statement. They might as well tweak it a little bit, rebrand with different name and push it again as wrapped with different package.

klodolph 5y ago

Another possibility (or way to look at it) is that it worked poorly enough, and it was poorly received enough, that the internal factions within Apple that opposed it had enough leverage to kill it. Sometimes, the right way to kill a project (politically) is to let it publicly fail. Killing a project before it fails requires much more of a fight. It could also mean that the very public failure of this project gave Apple leverage over whichever spooks were pushing for it in the first place.

zionic 5y ago
>Sometimes, the right way to kill a project (politically) is to let it publicly fail. I feel this is definitely true most of the time, but in this case the cost to their public image/perception among the tech crowd was so high it was a mistake.
- klodolph 5y ago
  It may have been a mistake for Apple as a company to make this decision, but I think we can understand why the individuals within Apple might choose to let decisions like this play out and fail in public, even if they know it is going to fail.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Well Craig Federighi seems to be happy with it. Their software engineers leads of the features seems to be happy with it. i.e I dont believe there were significant objection to the feature within Apple. At least not those in power. And that is why they went with it. The objection obviously came later after it was reviewed to the public.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      > The objection obviously came later after it was reviewed to the public. Why is this obvious? Normally, when you have an objection to a company policy, you voice those objections in private to people within the company. This seems "obvious" to me, but to explain--(1) it's against company policy and often considered a fireable offense, (2) employees have an interest in presenting a united front, (3) those who want the project to fail publicly want it to happen without interference from inside the company.

DenisM 5y ago

It’s easy to tell which - is E2E still there? Then scanning is still there too.

judge2020 5y ago
Well, it’s mostly easy to tell since we still have researchers decompiling and scrubbing through the OS to see what’s in it and what it does[0]. https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX https://github.com/AsuharietYgvar/AppleNeuralHash2ONNX

momenti 5y ago

What does it help if the creepy intelligence services are in the hardware?

wholinator2 5y ago
I'd venture to say ease of use. I mean AT&T had everyone's emails but still Facebook makes it much easier to infer and understand and expand surveillance. Getting targeted information might be doable in hardware, but mass surveillance might be much easier if implemented a little higher up, by a dedicated dev team which issues bug fixes and feature extensions, which can turn over a request by you in a fraction of the time and whos capabilities are far more mutable. Hardware is more capable but it's a lot more work

raxxorrax 5y ago

I would have thought they continue the practice but because of the bad publicity will remove all mentions of it. Is it confirmed they won't scan user files? Because I would assume that they still do. As for the negativity. That is based on experience with large tech companies.

kingcharles 5y ago

This. There is absolutely no requirement for Apple to tell you they are checking the signatures of all your files.

gentleman11 5y ago

Somebody above found a quote saying that plans are still to go forward with it eventually