The new Apple spy-Phone

Edward Snowden (who fled to -Russia- for his freedom, let's not forget) speaks about the new Apple "child safety" spyware.

If you're an enterprising pedophile with a basement full of CSAM-tainted iPhones, Apple welcomes you to entirely exempt yourself from these scans by simply flipping the "Disable iCloud Photos" switch, a bypass which reveals that this system was never designed to protect children, as they would have you believe, but rather to protect their brand. As long as you keep that material off their servers, and so keep Apple out of the headlines, Apple doesn't care.

So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren't backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering "extremist" political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"?

Pretty much my take on it. No one objects to Apple keeping child porn off their servers. Pretty much everyone with a functioning brain objects to a corporation filtering their photos, running facial recognition on their videos, downloading and storing files off their phone (and laptop, and PC, and iPad, and Apple-TV, and etc.) without permission, and so forth.

Apple scanning stuff I store on their iCloud is objectionable, but ultimately up to me. I make the choice if I want to send it to the cloud. If I don't want it scanned and stored forever to be used for other purposes at their convenience, I won't send it to them.
 

Apple scanning my phone, whether I send things to their cloud or not, that's different. Now they're screwing with my hardware, that I bought.

And let us not pretend, as Snowden says, that this intrusion will remain forever limited to child porn prevention.

That's bad enough, after all. No more pictures of your little kids, ladies and gentlemen. If it has a kid in it, a cop is liable to show up at your house. This is known as "function creep." A process whereby they need another child-porn arrest this month so they can make their budget, so they tighten up the algorithm another notch. Before long, a diaper advertisement on a billboard you drove past while taking video of the scenery is getting you a visit from the constabulary.

But function creep is a wide ranging thing. All it takes is a court order to Apple and suddenly every phone in the world gets scoured for... pretty much anything they want. Location data, photos, text files, videos, telephone conversations, game data, whatever is in there.

Currently that capability does not exist. But in September, it will.

Time to go buy a film camera for your family photos, before the inevitable price jump. It's very difficult for Apple to scan Polaroids. They have to physically come to your house.

This is why, just like  I put a piece of tape on my Apple product's camera. It's harder for them to spy on you when you cover the sensor with  tape.