SAN FRANCISCO Apple will implement a system that checks photos on iPhones in the United States before they are uploaded to its iCloud to ensure the upload does not match known images of child sexual abuse.
Detection of child abuse image uploads sufficient to guard against false positives will trigger a human review and report of the user to law enforcement, the company said on Thursday.
The new system seeks to address requests from law enforcement to help stem child sexual abuse while respecting privacy and security practices that are a core tenet of the firm’s brand. But some privacy advocates said the system could open the door to monitoring of political speech or other content on iPhones.
Most other major technology providers – including Alphabet’s Google, Facebook and Microsoft – are already checking images against a database of known child sexual abuse imagery.
“With so many people using Apple products, these new safety measures have lifesaving potential for children who are being enticed online and whose horrific images are being circulated in child sexual abuse material,” said the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children’s chief executive John Clark. “The reality is that privacy and child protection can co-exist.”
Here is how Apple’s system works. Law enforcement officials maintain a database of known child sexual abuse images and translate them into “hashes” – numerical codes that positively identify the image but cannot be used to reconstruct them. Apple has implemented that database using a technology designed to also catch edited images similar to the originals. That database will be stored on iPhones. When a user uploads an image to Apple’s iCloud storage service, the iPhone will create a hash of the image to be uploaded and compare it against the database.
Photos stored only on the phone are not checked, and human review before reporting an account to law enforcement is meant to ensure that any matches are genuine before the account is suspended. Apple said users who feel their account was improperly suspended can appeal to have it reinstated.
One feature that sets Apple’s system apart is that it checks photos stored on phones before they are uploaded, rather than checking the photos after they arrive on the company’s servers.
Some privacy and security experts expressed concerns that the system could eventually be expanded to scan phones more generally for prohibited content or political speech.
REUTERS