Source of quoted headline text, Breitbart, here. This is incremental intrusion into user privacy. "Good cause" can be one of the most abused entry mantras for abuses.
End of story? Orwellian? Apple has no business hosting cloud storage, and then farting around with it in any monitoring fashion. It is wrong, no matter what "good cause" BS is thrown out by the privacy abusers.
Breitbart links to EFF content, and that content is worth quoting:
[...] Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
Child exploitation is a serious problem, and Apple isn't the first tech company to bend its privacy-protective stance in an attempt to combat it. But that choice will come at a high price for overall user privacy. Apple can explain at length how its technical implementation will preserve privacy and security in its proposed backdoor, but at the end of the day, even a thoroughly documented, carefully thought-out, and narrowly-scoped backdoor is still a backdoor.
To say that we are disappointed by Apple’s plans is an understatement. Apple has historically been a champion of end-to-end encryption, for all of the same reasons that EFF has articulated time and time again. Apple’s compromise on end-to-end encryption may appease government agencies in the U.S. and abroad, but it is a shocking about-face for users who have relied on the company’s leadership in privacy and security.
There are two main features that the company is planning to install in every Apple device. [...] When Apple releases these “client-side scanning” functionalities, users of iCloud Photos, child users of iMessage, and anyone who talks to a minor through iMessage will have to carefully consider their privacy and security priorities in light of the changes, and possibly be unable to safely use what until this development is one of the preeminent encrypted messengers.
Apple Is Opening the Door to Broader Abuses
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again now: it’s impossible to build a client-side scanning system that can only be used for sexually explicit images sent or received by children. As a consequence, even a well-intentioned effort to build such a system will break key promises of the messenger’s encryption itself and open the door to broader abuses.
That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.
All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change. Take the example of India, where recently passed rules include dangerous requirements for platforms to identify the origins of messages and pre-screen content. New laws in Ethiopia requiring content takedowns of “misinformation” in 24 hours may apply to messaging services. And many other countries—often those with authoritarian governments—have passed similar laws. Apple’s changes would enable such screening, takedown, and reporting in its end-to-end messaging. The abuse cases are easy to imagine: governments that outlaw homosexuality might require the classifier to be trained to restrict apparent LGBTQ+ content, or an authoritarian regime might demand the classifier be able to spot popular satirical images or protest flyers.
We’ve already seen this mission creep in action. One of the technologies originally built to scan and hash child sexual abuse imagery has been repurposed to create a database of “terrorist” content that companies can contribute to and access for the purpose of banning such content. The database, managed by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), is troublingly without external oversight, despite calls from civil society. While it’s therefore impossible to know whether the database has overreached, we do know that platforms regularly flag critical content as “terrorism,” including documentation of violence and repression, counterspeech, art, and satire.
Image Scanning on iCloud Photos: A Decrease in Privacy
Apple’s plan for scanning photos that get uploaded into iCloud Photos is similar in some ways to Microsoft’s PhotoDNA. The main product difference is that Apple’s scanning will happen on-device. The (unauditable) database of processed CSAM images will be distributed in the operating system (OS), the processed images transformed so that users cannot see what the image is, and matching done on those transformed images using private set intersection where the device will not know whether a match has been found. This means that when the features are rolled out, a version of the NCMEC CSAM database will be uploaded onto every single iPhone. The result of the matching will be sent up to Apple, but Apple can only tell that matches were found once a sufficient number of photos have matched a preset threshold.
Once a certain number of photos are detected, the photos in question will be sent to human reviewers within Apple, who determine that the photos are in fact part of the CSAM database. If confirmed by the human reviewer, those photos will be sent to NCMEC, and the user’s account disabled. Again, the bottom line here is that whatever privacy and security aspects are in the technical details, all photos uploaded to iCloud will be scanned.
Make no mistake: this is a decrease in privacy for all iCloud Photos users, not an improvement.
Currently, although Apple holds the keys to view Photos stored in iCloud Photos, it does not scan these images. Civil liberties organizations have asked the company to remove its ability to do so. But Apple is choosing the opposite approach and giving itself more knowledge of users’ content.
Was it necessary to use the added red highlighting, or was the EFF's message so clear as to not need it? This is Big Brother eating Apple. At least they are admitting publicly that they are building a privacy-attacking backdoor.
If a FISA case was initiated and led to this change, it would be secret, and Apple could not say, "Big Brother is making us do it, they got a court order."
So, how do you know it was not a FISA court order that caused this admission of a for-now limited intrusion into user privacy, one easily repurposed? You don't.
There's a joke about a Yiddish meaning to "Trust Me," and it is not antisemitism that called it to mind. It is an appropriate response to what is going down. At least Apple gives notice upfront of the installed capability and current use constraints.
Land of the free, home of the watched? A websearch.
UPDATE: Note in the headlining above, "government request" differs from a secret court order. Words often are chosen carefully.
FURTHER: Wired. ArsTechnica. A ScienceDirect abstract, the main item behind a paywall.
FURTHER: A websearch.