Friday, August 6, 2021

The Government Spy That You're Paying to Have

Your smartphone:

Apple unveiled plans to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, drawing applause from child protection groups but raising concern among some security researchers that the system could be misused, including by governments looking to surveil their citizens.

The tool designed to detected known images of child sexual abuse, called “NeuralHash,” will scan images before they are uploaded to iCloud. If it finds a match, the image will be reviewed by a human. If child pornography is confirmed, the user’s account will be disabled and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children notified.

Separately, Apple plans to scan users’ encrypted messages for sexually explicit content as a child safety measure, which also alarmed privacy advocates.

This is how it begins. They annouonce a spying measure that nobbody will oppose, in this cae, fighting child exploitation. But once the tool's in use, whose to say that it doesn't get used to find people who are saying things that a government, any government doesn't approve of. You can bet your paycheck that the Chinese government will use it to find anyone mentioning Tianamin Square or the June Fourth Massacre.

Any dictatorial or authoritarian regime will use it to find political opponents. The Russian state would use it to find anyone mentioning Alexei Navalny. You can bet your ass that if goons like Stephen Miller got their hands on it, he'd use it to identify people opposed to Commandante Bone Spurs.

This is a horrible idea, like a chocolate-covered cyanide pill.

You may want to consider using your smartphone as only a phone.

7 comments:

  1. simple solutions:

    Its a phone use it for that.

    If used for camera make sure its benign subjects.

    And above all else don't use the Fscking cloud.
    That one is to me total stupid, its storing your
    important stuff in someone else's truck and they
    will not peek or lose it.

    That and if you need that storage, maybe your
    hording crap than is mostly rotted bits.


    Eck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I thought that we were already being monitored by the microchips Bill Gates planted in the vaccines. I thought I had a smartphone, but it never found its way home when I left it on a park bench. So now I have to get a landline? Life is so hard sometimes...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I just assume that we are being monitored all the time. I am not concerned. How can i live with these perverts?
    I'm too old for this. It is a sad day when my bona fides include the fact that i have never raped anyone.

    ReplyDelete
  4. If you post anything to 'the Cloud' (stupid name for other people's servers) you have lost it already, it's no longer yours and it will be hacked or vanish. It's my understanding that iThings all save everything to 'the Cloud' already. Don't buy or use anything Apple. Problem solved.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The only Apple products I've ever owned were two computers I got used from the e-waste recycler 15 years ago and an iPod nano my sister gave me while I was in the hospital.
    I was curious about the computers at the time because I kept reading about how recording studios all used Macs, and while the ones I got were old and slow, they did work for sound programs OK, but really no better than my Windows XP box.
    My phone is a cheap ass Samsung and the only thing I've used it for besides texting so far is to run Google maps on my recent trip to Madera for jury duty, mostly to see if it actually worked. It did.
    These days Apple seems to be making a lot of "glued together shit that won't do what you need it to do" in the words of Rick Beato, but I'll never know whether he's right about that because I'll never be able to afford a new Apple product, and the old ones are purposefully obsolete.

    -Doug in Sugar Pine

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm seriously considering going dark. Not because I must or for that matter should.
    Just because at this point ... It is still optional !

    ReplyDelete
  7. Spud, get a cheap flip-phone and only use that as a phone and for short texts.

    Keep all of your schedules and photos on a smartphone that you've set in airplane mode. If you need to transfer photos, do it by hardwire to a non-Apple computer.

    ReplyDelete

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