- Lots of people have been saying
that Apple is going to scan your personal photos
on your iPhone,
and that probably sounds scary.
I think it should sound scary 'cause it is scary.
Apple is saying it's for the kids. Is it really though?
- Won't somebody please think of the children?
- Here's what's going on.
Governments have databases of CSAM,
or child sexual abuse material, photos, videos,
and Apple's goal is to catch child predators.
It's hard to disagree with the goal of protecting children.
- I've seen nobody complain about that portion
of what Apple is proposing.
- Different governments have these databases of the images.
Apple is going to distill those down
into digital signatures,
which are random strings of letters and numbers.
Then what Apple wants to do
is download that entire database of every digital signature
or perceptual image hash onto everybody's iPhone
each time an iOS update comes out.
So you'll get this giant data file
with all the different digital signatures.
Then your iPhone will scan all of your photos
to see if any of them match the digital signatures
that are part of the database.
If you have more than 30 matches of these photos,
Apple will manually review them,
like a low resolution version of it, is what they're saying
and then if they confirm that you actually do have
at least 30 photos, they'll disable your iCloud account,
report you to, in the US,
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
who then will report you to law enforcement
and then you will go to jail.
- There are a lot of problems with what Apple is proposing.
First and foremost,
this is essentially an image detection algorithm
that can be used for anything.
- Let's say that a bunch of people live in a country
with an oppressive government
and people are sharing memes of the government leader.
The government leader decides that they want to scan
for those memes in everybody's iCloud account.
So then all the people
that don't like this government leader
are now grouped together,
the government knows who they are
and they can go and shoot 'em or something, okay?
So that's like a legitimate concern.
Building lists of people,
if they're not using it for child sexual abuse material,
and this is why they're packaging it in the children way,
protect the children,
because like, it's hard to argue with that.
But it can also be used to target certain groups of people
and that can have real world consequences.
- It's a very slippery slope.
- Won't somebody please think of the children?
- The reason why Apple says
the database of child sexual abuse material is secure
is that a photo has to appear in two separate jurisdictions
for it to show up in Apple's database
and then your iPhone will scan and detect it.
Because Apple is saying that there's no way
that two separate governments
would be able to collude with each other
to add these images,
let's say it's a political leader
or a picture of a star of David.
- Governments working together,
who's ever heard of such a thing?
- There's no way that governments could do that.
So two different jurisdictions,
Apple doesn't have access to the database.
So apple was saying like,
"Oh, we don't know what they're scanning for."
- Think of the children.
- Is this really about the kids?
Well, Edward Snowden makes the point,
if Apple was serious about cutting down on CSAM,
they wouldn't make it so easy
for anyone who has it on their phone
to just turn off iCloud photos and then done.
- Right, that's it. That's all you have to do.
So instead of actually scanning all the photos
on these pedophiles iPhones, they only care about the ones
that are going to their servers.
- Oh, I think that's the point, you know?
We don't want this on our servers.
Out of sight, out of mind.
That's on their phone,
that's not our problem anymore.
- Right.
How many pedophiles are actually storing
these photos in iCloud photos?
- Well, we're gonna find out,
'cause this is going to get rolled out,
they're gonna catch a handful of 'em, take the victory lap,
mission accomplished.
- And then roll it out to more stuff.
So why are we doing this?
It's all to protect Apple
and I really don't see a benefit for the kids all that much.
I mean, unless these people are using iCloud,
shared photo albums to share, I don't get it.
- How about this?
They roll it out, they are super successful
and they immediately turn it off and it's done.
(man laughs)
- That'd be nice, but it's not the way it works.
They're saying that they don't wanna do the scanning
on iCloud servers
because that would constitute a breach of personal privacy.
So they're doing it on our phones
and then not telling people?
The nerd in me wants to know
how big is this database gonna be
of all the CSAM digital signatures, like in the world,
from all the countries? How, how big is this gonna be?
It's gonna be giant.
- I was thinking that newer phones,
they could kind of ship it out,
maybe like an extra storage chip,
but existing phones, it's just gonna have to go.
- Yeah, they're not gonna do that though.
They're not gonna spend the money
'cause they don't care.
- I'm already kind of running low on storage space.
- How much battery life is going to be used
scanning every single one of your photos when you take it
and reducing it down to this digital fingerprint?
I wonder if that's why they're not doing it on their servers
because it costs money
and they don't want to pay for the power.
- That's possible.
- You know, tell them it's for their personal privacy.
I don't like this idea at all.
So Apple, after an uproar,
put out a statement,
they said as of September 3rd, 2021,
previously we announced plans for features
intended to help protect children from predators
who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them
and to help limit the spread of child sexual abuse material.
They sound really like knights in shining armor here.
(metal clunks)
- We won't get tired this time.
- Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups,
researchers and others, everybody,
we have decided to take additional time
over the coming months to collect input
and make improvements before releasing
these critically important child safety features.
Bull (beep).
They're not critically important child safety features.
They are features that are going to compromise the security,
not of pedophiles who will just turn off a switch,
but people who want to share photos
of their Hanukkah celebration.
- Now, after hearing that Apple
was putting a pause, you know?
We said, "Oh, do we really need to record this video?"
But it is just a pause.
There's gonna be additional steps.
This isn't gonna go away.
It's especially not gonna go away
if people stop talking about it entirely.
- Right, yeah, so this is the time to really say no
and I think it might even take
contacting government officials
to then get on board with this
because Apple has really just sort of buried
what they're actually doing
underneath this layer of think of the children.
- One thing I noticed when Craig Federighi
was being interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about this,
he kept making the point that users were just confused.
Like, oh, nothing's actually wrong, you're just an idiot.
- And it should be clear, this is not what is happening.
A lot of messages got jumbled or widely misunderstood.
- I really don't like when the authorities
sort of make that, you know,
like, oh, you're actually stupid,
they're kinda gaslighting you
into thinking this isn't real issue.
But if you look at the people
who are really speaking out about this,
it is privacy experts, security experts
who are saying, "Hold on. This might be really, really bad."
- You have to understand the math behind it,
like the encryption algorithms,
which I don't understand
to understand that it's a bad idea in real life.
Who at Apple is gonna get these jobs
where they're gonna be sitting there reviewing
whether or not a picture is CSAM.
That's a weird job description.
- But I bet it'll pay quite well.
- I would say, not safe for work, but this is your work.
- Saying no to this
does not mean that you're saying yes to child abuse.
Like that's sort of what the implication is.
It doesn't mean that you support that in any way.
It doesn't mean that you're soft on child predators
or think that they should be, you know,
not sent to jail immediately.
It just means that you care about your personal privacy
and that a few child predators,
and obviously there are a lot of them,
not trying to minimize it,
should not be able to cause a company like Apple
to sacrifice the rest of our personal privacy.
- It's a nuanced issue.
Don't let them make it black and white.
- Could've just said that at the beginning.
Yeah it's true, hundred percent.
Thank you for watching.
What do you think?
Please subscribe. - Leave a comment down below.
- Share with your friends.
Yeah, this should be one of the more controversial ones.
So, thank you.
(woman crying)
- Won't somebody's please think of the children?