![]() Law enforcement officials around the world have also pressured Apple to weaken its encryption for iMessage and other software services like iCloud to investigate child exploitation or terrorism. Thursday's announcement is a way for Apple to address some of those issues without giving up some of its engineering principles around user privacy.īefore an image is stored in Apple's iCloud, Apple matches the image's hash against a database of hashes provided by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). That database will be distributed in the code of iOS beginning with an update to iOS 15. The matching process is done on the user's iPhone, not in the cloud, Apple said. If Apple then detects a certain number of violating files in an iCloud account, the system will upload a file that allows Apple to decrypt and see the images on that account. A person will manually review the images to confirm whether or not there's a match.Īpple will only be able to review images that match content that's already known and reported to these databases - it won't be able to detect parents' photos of their kids in the bath, for example, as these images won't be part of the NCMEC database. If the person doing the manual review concludes the system did not make an error, then Apple will disable the user's iCloud account, and send a report to NCMEC or notify law enforcement if necessary. Users can file an appeal to Apple if they think their account was flagged by mistake, an Apple representative said. The system only works on images uploaded to iCloud, which users can turn off, Apple said. Photos or other images on a device that haven't been uploaded to Apple servers won't be part of the system. Some security researchers have raised concerns that this technology could eventually be used to identify other kinds of images, such as photos of a political protest. ![]() Apple said that its system is built so that it only works and only can work with images cataloged by NCMEC or other child safety organizations, and that the way it build the cryptography prevents it from being used for other purposes.Īpple can't add additional hashes to the database, it said. ![]()
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