An Australian regulator has sent legal letters to Apple, the owner of Facebook Meta Platforms and Microsoft asking them to share their strategies to eliminate child pornography (CSAM) on their platforms or face fines.
Byron Kaye for Reuters:
The e-Safety Commissioner, a body set up to protect internet users, said it used the laws that went into effect in January to force the tech giants to disclose the steps they were taking to detect and remove abusive material by 28 days. If not, each company would face a fine of A $ 555,000 ($ 383,000) per day.
The threat underscores Australia’s uncompromising approach to regulating Big Tech companies since 2021 … Internet companies have meanwhile been under pressure around the world to find a way to monitor encrypted messaging and streaming services for child pornography without invading user privacy.
Apple, which owns the FaceTime video messaging service, the iMessage messaging service, and the iCloud photo storage service, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
MacDailyNews takes: Since 2020, Apple has scanned every photo uploaded to iCloud using image matching technology (much like spam filters in emails) to find and report child exploitation.
As for Apple’s currently delayed plan to inject surveillance software into users’ devices without authorization, destroying years of user privacy protection, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF) is continuing to collect signatures for a petition that states:
The “child safety” changes Apple plans to install on iOS 15 and macOS Monterey undermine user privacy and break the promise of end-to-end encryption.
I urge Apple to reconsider these systems. Continuous scanning of images will not make children safer and may put more of them in danger. Installing photo scanning software on our phones will spur governments around the world to demand more surveillance and censorship capabilities than they already have.
Users must continue to speak out and say that this violation of our privacy is wrong.
Sign the EFF petition and ask Apple to stop its plan to scan our computers and devices here.
Apple’s “plan” would originally have used a hash database from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
So, after the protests, Apple changed the situation to “two or more child safety organizations operating in separate sovereign jurisdictions.”
Of course, Apple’s multi-country “safeguard” is not a safeguard at all.
The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an intelligence alliance that includes the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. These countries are parties to the UKUSA multilateral agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signal intelligence.
FVEY further expanded its surveillance capabilities in the course of the “war on terrorism”, placing a lot of emphasis on monitoring the World Wide Web. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as “a supranational intelligence organization. which does not comply with the known laws of their countries “.
Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY spied on each other’s citizens and shared the information gathered with each other in order to circumvent restrictive national regulations on citizen surveillance.
Apple’s claim to scan only for CSAM was supposed to be a Trojan horse, introduced via the trivial “Think of the Children” ploy, which would be secretly bastardized for any kind of surveillance under the guise of “security” in the future.
“Those who would give up essential Freedom, to buy some temporary security, deserve neither Freedom nor Security.” – Benjamin Franklin
The fact that Apple ever considered this spoof in the first place, much less announced and tried to implement it the way they did, has immensely damaged the company’s reputation for protecting user privacy; perhaps irreparably.
Hopefully, if Apple makes any sense, it is not irremediably compromised and can withstand whatever pressure has forced them into this reckless. abject disloyalty to customers who value their privacy and security, the company will end this disastrous scheme promptly and double privacy by finally and immediately enabling end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups as a company claiming to be a privacy champion would made many years ago. – MacDailyNews, September 4, 2021
“Nice App Store you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to him. “
Apple is not stupid. So why did they propose something so stupid and then propose to fix it with a non-correction?
Is Apple’s management threatened? Perhaps with an antitrust action? Are Apple management promised things in exchange for this backdoor in every device? Maybe antitrust actions that involve a slap on the wrist or even just evaporate? – MacDailyNews, December 15, 2021
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