I haven’t read all the details, articles, and comments. My personal thoughts on the whole situation are the following.
If you are a parent and lose a child then you would want every possible avenue taken to find your child. You would be going mad wanting to find them. If there is a way to match photos to known missing children then I say it should be at least tried.
I equate this to Ring cameras. They are everywhere. You cannot go for a walk without showing up on dozens of cameras, which we know Amazon (god mode) and law enforcement abuse their access privileges. However, if a crime happened to you and a Ring camera captured it, then I know almost everyone would certainly want that footage reviewed. Would you ignore the Ring footage possibility just because you despise Ring cameras? Probably not.
It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table where you have a vested interest in getting access to the information.
If I were a parent and my child went missing, something much higher on my priority list than matching photos in some national database would be having the police search every home in a 2 mile radius of my home.
It seems just as rational to argue that the people who live in those homes should be willing to give up their right to not have their home searched if it means potentially finding a missing child in a potential criminal's home.
We can come up with all kinds of hypothetical situations. I am empathetic to parents going through the hell of a missing child, and to the children themselves. But the protection of children and victims must be balanced with the preservation of rights and freedoms considered deeply sacrosanct.
> If you are a parent and lose a child then you would want every possible avenue taken to find your child. You would be going mad wanting to find them. If there is a way to match photos to known missing children then I say it should be at least tried.
the problem with this argument is that you can use it to justify basically anything.
> It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table where you have a vested interest in getting access to the information.
That's why it's so insidious. People keep making it about children, which are a very worthy cause. Nobody wants child abuse. But the problem is that the technology can be used for anything. Wouldn't it be nice to read all of the internal Slack messages at a company you're about to acquire? Wouldn't it be nice for Apple to have a copy of Google's source code? Wouldn't it be nice for a political candidate to cause their opponent some legal trouble? Spying on other people is always very valuable and governments (and corporations, probably) spend billions of dollars a year on it.
If we want to make this just about detecting abuse of children, I'm totally on board. Pass a law that says using this technology to steal corporate secrets or to gain a political advantage is punishable by death. Then maybe it can be taken seriously as something very narrow in scope. That, of course, would never happen. (Death penalty arguments aside; I'm exaggerating for effect.)
I can't believe that once this technology is out, it's only going to be used for good. (I imagine politicians will love this. Look at the recent Andrew Cuomo abuse allegations -- he abuses women, and then his staff try to cover it up by leaking documents, to discredit the abused. Sure would be nice to see what sort of things they have on their phone, right? Will someone like Cuomo NEVER have a friend that can add detection hashes to the set and review the results? I would say it's a certainty that a powerful politician will have loyal insiders in the government, and that if this system is rolled out, we're going to see colossal abuse -- flat-out facilitation of crime, lives ruined -- over the next 20 years.)
I have to wonder what Apple's angle is here. It would cost them less money to do nothing. They could be paying these researchers to work on something that makes Apple money, and banning users from their platform (or having them hauled off to prison) doesn't help them make money. I really don't want to be the conspiracy theory guy, but doesn't it seem weird that the Department of Justice wants to investigate Apple's 30% app store cut, and right about that time, Apple comes up with a new way to surveil the population for the Department of Justice? Maybe I read too much HN.
But it's just a totally different situation isn't it? I'm not personally opposed to the general concept of security cameras in public spaces. If you choose to install one on your property that doesn't seem unreasonable. If you choose to share that footage with the police that doesn't seem unreasonable.
The problem with Apple's system isn't even the current implementation (which is on device, but iCloud only). It's that the system can be trivially expanded to all on device content, and report the user of the phone for any unacceptable behaviour.
It's more like a camera in your home that reports you to the police if you do anything unacceptable. Would anyone choose to have that?
But the bigger problem is that Apple have been selling products based on "privacy first" marketing. By reporting on their users off-line content they break that trust. And there are really few viable options in smartphones so you can't really just move to another provider.
If I lost my child, I would do anything and everything to get them back. I would shoot anyone who got in the way. This is fine because I am not the police and they won't give me guns.
Kinda unrelated to that, is the 4th amendment, which protects the rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
> It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table where you have a vested interest in getting access to the information.
It is still an invasion of privacy regardless of the side on which you sit. This situation is unlike a ring camera capturing footage in a public space where individuals already have no expecation of privacy.
> It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table where you have a vested interest in getting access to the information.
That’s the thing about privacy that so many don’t want to admit. “Everyone deserves it, until they don’t”. All of society’s privacy is more important than your single child, sorry.
Meanwhile I created this great new technology. It runs in the background super efficiently on your phone. It immediately detects housefires and alerts you. It uses a combination of sensors to literally detect the spark of flame and there’s only one in 1 trillion false positives.
Simply download the app and give it permission to sample your microphones, cameras,
accelerometers and historical gps data to build a profile, then flick a lighter anywhere in your house and sure enough your phone alarm goes off.
How it works is incredible, an algorithm listens for supersonic soundwaves created by the chemical reaction during combustion. Video and sound samples are then reviewed by one of our technical representatives.
Housefires and house fire deaths will be a thing of the past. The only compromise is that our algorithms listen to all of your video and audio and occasionally monitored by a human technician, which might include audio of you making love to your wife.
> "All of society’s privacy is more important than your single child, sorry." "which might include audio of you making love to your wife."
You and your wife bumping uglies just isn't that special, your embarassment about it is way out of proportion to the amount necessary. The fact that you would rather people die in house fires than a small chance that a stranger hears you breathing heavily and talking dirty should cause you a lot more concern than it seems to be causing you.
Just to be clear, you're saying that it's unreasonable to prefer everyone having private bedroom conversations over the elimination of spontaneous house fires?
That it's worth having a random human being able to listen to all said conversations?
To me at least it's incredibly reasonable to make that tradeoff. As a society we make tradeoffs all the time and people die as a result. Some of those tradeoffs are arguably unreasonable but this hypothetical seems very clear...
Just to be clear, you’re saying “I would not undergo temporary embarrassment to avert mass agonising death” and you think that’s incredibly reasonable?
The government believes you might have information about a missing child and are withholding it. They are about to restrain you against your will and search your rectum without your consent.
The reason this violation was able to take place is because…
> It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table
The thing about privacy and the government is you must always envision yourself on the wrong side of the table, because you are. Right up to the point they are inside you. [1]
Your right to privacy is your strength and without it you are a slave to forces you don’t understand, can’t see, hear, taste, or smell.
Privacy or lack there of changes who you are and how you act. It changes what you say and why.
Be very careful how you submit to surveillance. The privacy you forfeit can never be recaptured.
If you are a parent and lose a child then you would want every possible avenue taken to find your child. You would be going mad wanting to find them. If there is a way to match photos to known missing children then I say it should be at least tried.
I equate this to Ring cameras. They are everywhere. You cannot go for a walk without showing up on dozens of cameras, which we know Amazon (god mode) and law enforcement abuse their access privileges. However, if a crime happened to you and a Ring camera captured it, then I know almost everyone would certainly want that footage reviewed. Would you ignore the Ring footage possibility just because you despise Ring cameras? Probably not.
It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table where you have a vested interest in getting access to the information.