There is hardly anything that societies around the world agree on as much as there is: Communists and capitalists reject sexual violence against children as much as they do religious fundamentalists and atheists. So what, apparently at the iPhone manufacturer Apple, could speak against helping a little to expose those who share such material via Apple’s cloud storage service?
Quite a lot, as it turns out, since Apple’s plan became known. Many security experts and journalists’ associations are appalled that a mechanism should be installed directly on the devices that searches for incriminated images as soon as they are uploaded to the cloud. “Will images or videos of opponents of the regime or user data then be checked at some point using an algorithm?” Asks Frank Überall, Federal Chairman of the German Association of Journalists.
What if a government asked to search their country for images that the regime does not want to see circulated?
Or could Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary “control images of the LGBT community in this way,” wonders Dieter Bornemann, spokesman for the ORF editorial board. And Priscilla Imboden from the Swiss media union SSM, formerly the USA correspondent, foams: “It cannot be that an American private company here wants to judge the admissibility of content and also want to view and forward it.” The fact that Apple has built in a whole range of security levels and that competing companies have long been scanning their clouds for such images with less data protection is drowned out in the emotional debate.
One critical point, however, remains. In order to search for incriminated images, a file with a type of digital fingerprint, so-called hashes, is played on the iPhones. What if a government asked Apple to import a file with hashes of images in their country that the regime does not want to see disseminated? Apple argues they won’t let that happen. The files would be played out with the updates for the operating system, which are composed the same way around the world.
The basis for the file with the fingerprints of the incriminated images is the input of two independent child protection organizations from different countries, a government cannot smuggle anything into it. In one 14-sided paper Apple explains its security measures in detail. However, it also remains unclear what happens if a government, such as the Chinese one, demands that Apple must import a Chinese version of the hash file in its country.
Apple will find it difficult to stand firm against Beijing – the group cannot do without China as a sales market and production location. If the intention was good, why does a commercial company have to do things that states should be doing? Whatever the motive, the technology is now in the world.