> What is the utopian perspective of this which counterbalances the risks for this to be a path worth taking?
Apple takes care of everything for you, and they have your best interests at heart. You will be safe, secure, private and seamlessly integrated with your beautiful devices, so you can more efficiently consume.
What's not to like about a world where child crime, terrorism, abuse, radical/harmful content and misinformation can be spotted in inception and at the source and effectively quarantined?
No one here has a problem with the worst criminals being taken out. The problem is the scope creep that always comes after.
In 2021 and 2020 we saw people being arrested for planning/promoting anti lockdown protests. Not for actually participating but for simply posting about it. The scope of what "harmful content" is is infinite. You might agree that police do need to take action against these people but surely you can see how the scope creeped from literal terrorists and pedophiles to edgy facebook mums and how that could move even further to simple criticisms of the government or religion.
It's difficult to say how we draw the line to make sure horrible crimes go punished while still protecting reasonable privacy and freedom. I'm guessing apples justification here is that they are not sending your photos to police but simply checking them against known bad hashes and if you are not a pedophile, there will be no matches and none of your data will have been exposed.
In Germany police went around and even looked at contact tracing lists (on paper) in restaurants [1]. Even while politicians still stated publicly that these lists were only used (or to be used) for contact tracing.
Also the partly state sponsored luca app (check in in locations, festivals, restaurants, concerts) that is privately developed (and riddled with security holes) is already in discussion to use the data on the people to better target them for concert tickets and the like [2].
So we see this data is already in abuse by the state and also by state sponsored private entities.
I believe, that this data, once collected, will only be (ab)used further in the future. In my experience it will be as with all data caches - somebody wants to create additional value from it.
(Note that one mostly-united political party controls 89.2% of Singapore's legislature seats, and can pass any laws or amend its constitution to their liking.)
Thank you, it clearly shows that the German government cannot be trusted to do the right thing.
And the underlying desire for having this information will no doubt prolong the Corona restrictions longer than necessary, which is certainly not in the interest of German citizens.
We also saw HN shadow banning entire IP CIDR blocks because they didn’t like argument against fleeting CDC guidance that was put forth or the Chinese lab origin theory in 2020.
You can’t register from these CIDR blocks. If you had an account before the comments would just end up in a black hole.
Dang can explain.
Apple takes care of everything for you, and they have your best interests at heart. You will be safe, secure, private and seamlessly integrated with your beautiful devices, so you can more efficiently consume.
What's not to like about a world where child crime, terrorism, abuse, radical/harmful content and misinformation can be spotted in inception and at the source and effectively quarantined?