Delays aren’t good enough – Apple must abandon its surveillance plans
This is so frustrating, I generally expected the Hacker News community to observe a more sophisticated take on this topic.<p>Let&#x27;s get it straight: the other Big Tech companies have done this CSAM scanning for many, many years. Their users have been reported. Arrests have been made. Microsoft had this sorted in 2009 with PhotoDNA, and made it available to everyone else in 2014[1]. I doubt very much this has stopped any of you from working at Microsoft or the FAANGs when given the chance.<p>The ONLY distinctions here are that Apple has opted to do the mundane hashing part on the device prior to upload, have been up front about the plan, have take comments from the public and are saying that they will work out a more satisfying scheme.<p>Apple even appears to be responsive to the shady claims that a &#x27;reverse engineered (old) version of NeuralHash&#x27; might have resulted in some novel collisions, and spend the money to improve their current implementation.<p>The other big tech concerns did not do these things; they simply imposed it all and started informing the police.<p>As far as I can see, the only real misstep Apple has taken is being explicit about their plans and assuming people could understand the scope of the subject at hand. Instead they&#x27;ve stepped into a bear-trap of outraged hysteria, a moral panic from people who should know better.<p>The take away lesson here is &quot;Do not announce stuff like this, the general public will flip out if you try to keep them informed&quot;. Is that anyone&#x27;s goal here?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;photodna" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;photodna</a>