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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2021-08-05, 14:54

Tech Crunch did a look/talk about how it works too.
Quote:
NeuralHash will land in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, slated to be released in the next month or two, and works by converting the photos on a user’s iPhone or Mac into a unique string of letters and numbers, known as a hash. Any time you modify an image slightly, it changes the hash and can prevent matching. Apple says NeuralHash tries to ensure that identical and visually similar images — such as cropped or edited images — result in the same hash.

Before an image is uploaded to iCloud Photos, those hashes are matched on the device against a database of known hashes of child abuse imagery, provided by child protection organizations like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and others. NeuralHash uses a cryptographic technique called private set intersection to detect a hash match without revealing what the image is or alerting the user.
So the phone/Mac all hash the images before uploading.

I've talked to an FBI agent about this process and how they deal with pedophiles and child porn (cyber security class in college). When they have someone they suspect is into child porn or such there are known images out there. Those images are hashed, much like an installer is hashed for security verification, and those hashes are stored. Then when they go to someone they "know" is breaking parole or child porn laws in general they scan their drive for file hashes that match a known list.

The agent said it is shocking how often those people actually have the same images on their systems. Then again, birds of a feather flock together so how shocking is it really. We discussed (as a class) edge cases like those producing the images so they wouldn't be hashed yet, those who got their hands on images early before larger circulation, etc... and the agent was candid about it. Those "get away with it" that time, but inevitably if they are deemed to need deep scrutiny then they end up getting tagged in the end.

I have a major privacy concern here even though the likelihood of me getting a false positive are negligible, I don't like the fact that I'm going to have my pictures hashed.

Do I like the idea of all child porn/exploiters getting caught and hammered, absolutely. Fry them. Firing squad, electric chair, what ever. I do have to say the tweet that talks about the bad government having access to that deep look into files on a device it troubling. In this case, at least the images aren't specifically being looked at until after they "match" the hash data base.

In the end, this is better than Android there the feds likely already have direct access but no one wants to talk about. In the end, iOS security is still bounds above Android. Then we talk about Macs v PCs and we know Microsoft loves law enforcement and hands over everything with little fight. Since this is coming to Monterey it clearly isn't a mobile device thing only.

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