OK so a slightly longer thread on how we got to the Apple CSAM thing and why it's not going away
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Fundamentally this technology is attempting to bridge the gap between two very strong social principles. The first is that the child abuse image problem is real and very, very large, involving extraordinary damage to a really depressingly large number of children.
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It's tempting to handwave it away as pretextual. It's not. For reference, in 2018 Facebook was doing about 17m referrals *a month* of roughly 700,000 unique images.
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The second principle is that Apple, in general, wants to not hold user data. Folks can debate exactly how much of that is genuine privacy reasons vs just not wanting to deal with floods of subpoenas and risk of holding it, but it's also real. They don't like holding private data.
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That gets you into a conflict. You can't scan data you have engineered yourself into never having access to.
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Most companies resolve this conflict by dropping one of those principles. Some decide to not do scanning; treating the social harm as an externality or pretending it is not real. Others quietly drop plans to not fully encrypt.
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That second one is usually the lower risk for companies. It puts you at parity with other companies and shoving all data through CSAM scanning (usually via PhotoDNA on your servers) is relatively uncontroversial, and rarely publicized. So nobody complains.
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There's also a learning curve where sites that permit file sharing discover just how much CSEM gets uploaded to any popular platform, and just how awful some of that material is, that makes those companies much more amenable to pragmatic arrangements like PhotoDNA.
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