Apple has been the target of criticism since announcing changes to better fight child pornography and protect children. If the goal of these measures unveiled on Thursday, August 5 is consensus, NGOs see in the methods used a threat to the privacy and individual freedoms of iPhone and iPad users.
Although these updates are currently reserved for the American market and only scheduled for the end of the year, Apple finds itself at the heart of a controversy: targeted by a petition from associations and individuals, the company had to publish questions and answers then express his privacy officer, Erik Neuenschwander, in the American online media on Tuesday TechCrunch, in an attempt to extinguish the controversy. This feeds on concerns about the protection of encrypted content, on smartphones or on messaging services such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal or Telegram.
At the heart of the debate are two distinct techniques. On the one hand, Apple will verify, before backing up photos from a user’s phone to the iCloud online service, that the snapshots are not on a list of known child pornography images. The company will use a technique called “hash” for this, which encodes content into a series of unique numbers. The hashes photos of an Internet user will be compared with those collected by an NGO fighting against child pornography in a database, stored on his phone.
The second technique concerns iMessage, Apple’s messaging system: artificial intelligence software will analyze the photos received and sent by underage users whose parents have chosen this option. If an image is deemed to be of a sexual nature, it will be blurred and a warning addressed to the minor. If he is under 12 and has accepted or sent the photo, a message will notify the parents.
Opening of a breach towards surveillance
For NGOs, these changes mark a breakthrough in the management of content stored on smartphones or in messengers, considered private as opposed to those posted on social networks like Facebook or Instagram, considered public. The measures would open a gap in the surveillance of encrypted content, which cannot be read by third parties, unless it is analyzed at the level of users’ devices, as here.
“Apple opens the door to wider abuses”, The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in the petition. The NGO for the defense of online freedoms denounced a “System” which could be extended to other content, other platforms and other non-democratic states. “If they can look for child pornography today, they can look for anything tomorrow,” echoed the former US intelligence agent turned whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NGO Open Privacy Research Society plans the extension “To the contents “terrorists”, “legal but hateful” or censored by specific states ” and worried about the LGBT + community or dissidents.
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