Apple Announces Limits to Child Sex Abuse Image Scanning System After Privacy Backlash

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The Epoch Times

Apple on Friday provided new details of how its planned child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detection system would work, outlining a range of privacy-preserving limits following backlash that the software would introduce a backdoor that threatens user privacy protections.

The company addressed concerns triggered by the planned CSAM feature, slated for release in an update for U.S. users later this year, in a 14-page document (pdf) that outlined safeguards meant to prevent the system from erroneously flagging child pornography on Apple devices or being exploited for malicious surveillance of users.

โ€œThe system is designed so that a user need not trust Apple, any other single entity, or even any set of possibly-colluding entities from the same sovereign jurisdiction (that is, under the control of the same government) to be confident that the system is functioning as advertised,โ€ the company said in the document.

Appleโ€™s reference to โ€œpossibly-colluding entitiesโ€ appears to address concerns raised by some that the system could be abused, for instance by authoritarian regimes, to falsely incriminate political opponents.

โ€œThis is achieved through several interlocking mechanisms, including the intrinsic auditability of a single software image distributed worldwide for execution on-device, a requirement that any perceptual image hashes included in the on-device encrypted CSAM database are provided independently by two or more child safety organizations from separate sovereign jurisdictions, and lastly, a human review process to prevent any errant reports,โ€ Apple added.

Besides ensuring that the database of child sexual abuse imagery that Apple will check against is not controlled by a single entity or government, Appleโ€™s other technical protections against mis-inclusion include choosing a high match threshold so that โ€œthe possibility of any given account being flagged incorrectly is lower than one in one trillion.โ€ At the same time, Apple said the system would prevent privacy violations by never learning any information about iCloud-stored images that do not have a positive match to the CSAM database.

By Tom Ozimek

Read Full Article on TheEpochTimes.com

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