Apple says it will reject any government demands to use new child sexual abuse image detection system for surveillance
Apple defended its new system to scan iCloud for illegal child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) on Monday during an ongoing controversy over whether the system reduces Apple user privacy and could be used by governments to surveil citizens.
Last week, Apple announced it has started testing a system that uses sophisticated cryptography to identify when users upload collections of known child pornography to its cloud storage service. It says it can do this without learning about the contents of a user’s photos stored on its servers.
Apple reiterated on Monday that its system is more private than those used by companies like Google and Microsoft because its system uses both its servers and software running on iPhones.
Privacy advocates and technology commentators are worried Apple’s new system, which includes software that will be installed on people’s iPhones through an iOS update, could be expanded in some countries through new laws to check for other types of images, like photos with political content, instead of just child pornography.
Apple said in a document posted to its website on Sunday governments cannot force it to add non-CSAM images to a hash list, or the file of numbers that correspond to known child abuse images Apple will distribute to iPhones to enable the system.
“Apple will refuse any such demands. Apple’s CSAM detection capability is built solely to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos that have been identified by experts at NCMEC and other child safety groups,” Apple said in the document. “We have faced demands to build and deploy government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users before, and have steadfastly refused those demands. We will continue to refuse them in the future.”
It continued: “Let us be clear, this technology is limited to detecting CSAM stored in iCloud and we will not accede to any government’s request to expand it.”
Some cryptographers are worried about what could happen if a country like China were to pass a law saying the system has to also include politically sensitive images. Apple CEO Tim Cook has previously said that the company follows laws in every country where it conducts business.
Companies in the U.S. are required to report CSAM to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and face fines up to $300,000 when they discover illegal images and don’t report them.
A reputation for privacy
Apple’s reputation for defending privacy has been cultivated for years through its actions and marketing. In 2016, Apple faced off against the FBI in court to protect the integrity of its on-device encryption systems in the investigation of a mass shooter.
But Apple has also faced significant pressure from law enforcement officials about the possibility of criminals “going dark,” or using privacy tools and encryption to prevent messages or other information from being within the reach of law enforcement.
The controversy over Apple’s new system, and whether it’s surveilling users, threatens Apple’s public reputation for building secure and private devices, which the company has used to break into new markets in personal finance and healthcare.
Critics are concerned the system will partially operate on an iPhone, instead of only scanning photos that have been uploaded to the company’s servers. Apple’s competitors typically only scan photos stored on their servers.
“It’s truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up on its particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying the fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device is truly yours,” technology commentator Ben Thompson wrote in a newsletter on Monday.
Apple continues to defend its systems as a genuine improvement that protects children and will reduce the amount of CSAM being created while still protecting iPhone user privacy.
Apple said its system is significantly stronger and more private than previous systems by every privacy metric the company tracks and that it went out of its way to build a better system to detect these illegal images.
Unlike current systems, which run in the cloud and can’t be inspected by security researchers, Apple’s system can be inspected through its distribution in iOS, an Apple representative said. By moving some processing onto the user’s device, the company can derive stronger privacy properties, such as the ability to find CSAM matches without running software on Apple servers that check every single photo.
Apple said on Monday its system doesn’t scan private photo libraries that haven’t been uploaded to iCloud.
Apple also confirmed it will process photos that have already been uploaded to iCloud. The changes will roll out through an iPhone update later this year, after which users will be alerted that Apple is beginning to check photos stores on iCloud against a list of fingerprints that correspond to known CSAM, Apple said.
Technology
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Vice Chair and President at Microsoft, Brad Smith, participates in the first day of Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 12, 2024. The largest technology conference in the world this year has 71,528 attendees from 153 countries and 3,050 companies, with AI emerging as the most represented industry. (Photo by Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 on the construction of data centers that can handle artificial intelligence workloads, the company said in a Friday blog post.
Over half of the expected AI infrastructure spending will take place in the U.S., Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote. Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year ends in June.
“Today, the United States leads the global AI race thanks to the investment of private capital and innovations by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic start-ups to well-established enterprises,” Smith said. “At Microsoft, we’ve seen this firsthand through our partnership with OpenAI, from rising firms such as Anthropic and xAI, and our own AI-enabled software platforms and applications.”
Several top-tier technology companies are rushing to spend billions on Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running AI models. The fast spread of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022, kicked off the AI race for companies to deliver their own generative AI capabilities. Having invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft provides cloud infrastructure to the startup and has incorporated its models into Windows, Teams and other products.
Microsoft reported $20 billion in capital expenditures and assets acquired under finance leases worldwide, with $14.9 billion spent on property and equipment, in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Capital expenditures will increase sequentially in the fiscal second quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in October.
The company’s revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 33% year over year, with 12 percentage points of that growth stemming from AI services.
Smith called on President-elect Donald Trump‘s incoming administration to protect the country’s leadership in AI through education and the promotion of U.S. AI technologies abroad.
“China is starting to offer developing countries subsidized access to scarce chips, and it’s promising to build local AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese wisely recognize that if a country standardizes on China’s AI platform, it likely will continue to rely on that platform in the future.”
He added, “The best response for the United States is not to complain about the competition but to ensure we win the race ahead. This will require that we move quickly and effectively to promote American AI as a superior alternative.”
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