Apples besked att iCloud kommer att använda CSAMs databas för att scanna lagrade bilder möts av hård kritik av Edward Snowden och Electronical Frontier Foundation.

I en serie inlägg på Twitter skriver Edward Snowden att hur välment Apples avsikter än är så har Apple skapat världens största övervakningsapparat.

No matter how well-intentioned, @Apple is rolling out mass surveillance to the entire world with this. Make no mistake: if they can scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow.

They turned a trillion dollars of devices into iNarcs—*without asking.* https://t.co/wIMWijIjJk

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 6, 2021

EFF

Även EFF tar avstånd från Apples beslut och levererar hård kritik i ett längre inlägg:

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…

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.

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.

Lagstiftning

Även EFF skriver att Apples beslut kan vara inledningen på en utveckling mot nya och fler krav. Speciellt mot bakgrund av att flera länder instiftat nya lagar som ställer krav på att sociala medier och att nätet ska övervakas.