Apple Has Begun Scanning Users Files EVEN WITH iCloud TURNED OFF 

Every time I hear "Think about the children", it makes me sick to my stomach. I'm sure a trillion dollar company with ridiculous margins, who exploits people in 3rd world countries to make production costs even lower, truly care, deeply about children. The fact they're trying to encroach on your privacy is bad enough, hiding behind children while doing so is disgusting.

I can totally see this being adapted (quietly) to scan and detect copyrighted material and snitching to the police whenever it is found.

one step closer to the day when having "offline storage" will be a suspicious, borderline criminal thing to have

Trusting Apple with your privacy is like having Epstein as the family babysitter

Protecting children is always the excuse to impose authoritarian measures.

Really miss the times when we had more hardware choices rather than between "don't be evil" trash bin and "think different" trash bin.

Soon we'll have "personalized ads" based on the types of files we have on our devices.

company: “wOnT sOmEbOdY pLeAsE tHiNk oF tHe cHiLdRen?!?” Also company: * uses child labor in India to make $1,000 phones in horrific conditions *

Brb, going to go break into people's houses to make sure they're not abusing children

"We know what is best for you. Think of the children". Atrocities have been committed for less.

I think its safe to assume all tech companies are doing this with the full support of the governments.

One thing about this that no one seems to have considered is this: Whatever this software is it will only ever be able to make suggestions about what the photo "might" be. Before any police or authorities are involved a real human will need to look at the suggestions that the AI has given. If you have private photos of yourself on your computer that might be enough to tigger a suggestion and next thing you know some stranger is looking at it because an AI said it "might" be something.

I called it the moment they “quietly” abandoned the CSAM BS last year. We all knew it was be snuck in without our knowledge

HOW THE FUCK DID APPLE TRAIN THE DETECTION MODEL

TLDR: mediaanalysisd is a process that has been around for years; its purpose is to send neural hashes to apple and get information on what those hashes mean. Such as if there's a cat in a photo, a painting, etc. It can be disabled by turning off Siri suggestions by going to System Settings > Siri & Spotlight. Note disabling mediaanalysisd will turn off visual look up. Mediaaanalysisd is apart of visual look up (VLU) which is a system apple uses to recognize objects in photos like buildings, animals, paintings and more and give users information about the photo. VLU works by computing a neural hash locally that is used to distinguish photos/videos by the objects within them. During VLU apple requests a neural hash to compute what that hash represents and sends it back to the user. I'm assuming the database used to compute the hash’s meaning is too massive to be used locally and wouldn't be able to stay updated with new information. I really didn't like the article this video is based on because it makes claims without any real evidence or research. mediaanalysisd is a process that has been around for years and it's very easy to look up what it's used for and how to disable it. The author is close to some conspiracy theorist in my opinion. Anyway a much more in depth read on this topic can be found here: eclecticlight.co/2023/01/18/is-apple-checking-images-we-view-in-the-finder/

Using children as human shields for surveillance technology is in line with using them in sweatshops to make the iPhones 👍

I'm really grateful to guys like you and Upper Echelon calling attention to problems like this that the mainstream is in full, unhesitating support of. This is some truly frightening, dystopian crap, and it's eternally disappointing how unintelligent the average NPC is that they lack any and all pattern recognition to realize "protect the children" is never the goal.

Maybe they should include to detect photos of repairing your Apple device, so they can send the secret anti-right to repair police

There was the story from i think a year or 2 ago where Google flagged a guy who had sent a text of a rash on his child's genitals to their doctor, and he got visited by the cops and everything. Had a really bad time with it. I can't imagine the stress from that happening with everyone thinking you actually had CSAM on you. That's messed up.

The people who store this type of data aren't stupid enough to put it in the cloud, and I'm sure Apple is aware of this. The only reason this was even considered is that they want to collect even more information from their users under the guise of protecting the children.

I actually cracked up when you we're talking about Apple using the children pretext and then it cut to EDP 😆

>petite woman nudes false flagged by Apple Bot >sent to Apple HQ all part of the plan.

The worst part is that they advertise: "Privacy, that's iPhone" and then do shxt like this. They have the money to advertise to get the most reach possible, like for major sporting events, awards shows and all over the internet, which makes this problem even worse.

If Apple wanted to protect children, they'd build it into a Camera app, rather than search files on the device. All this does is make it easier to frame innocent people.

How would they even train an AI to recognize this kind of images? I can't imagine any ethical or legal way of getting training data.

One more reason I'm really glad I didn't buy an Apple device this Christmas. IMO if you want to protect children, start putting in real punishments for child abusers and leave good normal people alone.

Apple wasn't happy with the old adage: "The cloud is just someone else's computer...". They decided to take it one step further, 'your computer is just someone else's computer'.

A moment of silence for all the conversations where our disapproval will immediately be rebuked with "So you're defending child predators?" followed by incoherent screeching noises.

There are thousands of people who had charges dropped when they proved that a virus or hacker downloaded the illegal images, not them. There are thousands in jail right now who claim to be innocent but were unable to prove it. That should terrify you.

People, this is what we have been talking about. The future. We need to stop it while we still can. (Remember; you will own nothing, and you will be happy) I do not want to live in a world like this.

say you don't like apple, "your icloud" suddenly finds 100TB of CP they found while scanning

You're my favorite RU-vidr bro! Always alerting me of important tech news without stressing me out and making me rage. Easy listening even when the matter is serious or infringing.

It's always in the name of "security".

More reason to use the BSDs, Linux, Haiku, and TempleOS

There's a reason the government always calls laws that infringe on privacy something like "kid's online protection act". It's a very sinister game

I love Apple - Pay 3 times more for a laptop that's overpriced af, and have your privacy violated, becuase "Think of the children". I remember these classic Simspons episodes where Reverend's wife screams "Won't somebody, please, think of the children!"

Madness is about to flourish.

A LOT of people put their intellectual property in icloud - ideas, business plans, unpublished book scripts, trade strategies, engineer designs, personal and bank information, etc. etc. Its only a matter of time before this is stolen by a bad actor given this level of access "for the children" (whether a hacker or contractor paid to look through files). I've been an iphone supporter since the iphone 2G - I am now getting rid of ALL my apple products. The access isn't just images and videos.

Bro I found your channel yesterday, and I’m binging all your vids man. So good! I’ll start becoming more private as well…

This could be the best youtube channel for any topic, definitely for anything tech related

The joke is that you can be imprisoned for a decade just for clicking on a "download" button somewhere on the Internet. I don't even give a cr*p about the content of what is being downloaded. Jail for saving a picture from the 'net. It's the f*cking end. And yeah, hey to the freedomest state of America ❤️.

The sad thing is that most Apple users are so brainwashed that they either don't care or think this kind of thing is a great idea 😬

this is going to be a great way for apple to destroy peoples lives for nothing. and even worse, this could end up a boy cried wolf issue of all the false positives making people ignore when its a legit positive.

This has less to do with scanning for copyrighted material, and more to do with spying (or even falsely incriminating, when really needed) political or ideological opponents marked by the NSA. Also, in limit situations, think of what they could possibly do with undesirable counter-establishment speakers. If they can scan your files, they can also make something "bad" mysteriously appear in your phone during police custody. There's a world os possibilities to this, and I wish more people thought about the implications seriously.

So if Google automatically makes collections out of my photos like "Animals", "Food", "Nature" etc. does it mean it scans my photos as well?

I wouldn't be surprised if iPhone users still continued using their spyware filled devices after witnessing this.

My prediction is this is gonna really bring back old school film photography and developing in a dark room to prevent images uploaded to any types of clouds.

I wouldn't be surprised if windows already has some type of file scanning in the works.

Just found your account and man you are an awesome creator. I’m surprised I haven’t seen your videos before. I know nothing about half the stuff you talk about but you got a like and sun from me!❤

wait a minute. if it's an ai, how did they train it?

Corporations and Governments try not to spy on their customers/citizens (IMPOSSIBLE, GONE SEXUAL)

You got to wonder the potential misuse of this where bad actors use adware or drive by malware to drop “suspicious” images and then try to extort you by showing that there is a file, and post to this scanning, and that by paying them 1btc for them to protect you……

I love your content especially the more Linux/privacy focused content, and more so when you cover gentoo stuff hardly anyone talks about gentoo

Adobe is doing the same with everyone’s Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. files. But that’s to train their A.I. art program.

Me keeping memes on my various cloud accounts to make the FBI agents look at thousands of memes while they work

Both Google and MS already does CSAM scanning, but for the time being I only know of it on their cloud services.

always when i use any cloud platform i treat it as if all my files are publicly visible and just encrypt everything i upload onto it using gpg

Can practically see the privacy being dusted out of that ecosystem.

Louis Rossmann made a video about a man, who was asked by his son's doctor to send pictures about his son's injuries, so he can get the correct medicine faster. google scanned the photos, and alerted the police because they mistook it as csam. the worst part in this is, that if i am correct, before talking to the police, a human went through those photos, CONFIRMING they were csam... so not only IA will scan your photos (or files) but some karens too

thank you for making videos about this stuff. Scary!

Just the attorney fees defending against an accusation is thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands.

I bet they will just scan for known checksums of csam files, but it could obviously be extended to anything they want to track.

9:15 Apple is a honeypot for people who want privacy but don't understand technology

Thank you for your work.

One of MANY reasons why I've never owned an apple product.

7:46 "Litttle Snitch" is a great little utilities. I've used it on Mac for many years.

mediaanalysisd is related to visual lookup. I have my own qualms with the inability to disable VSL but it's not inherently related to the whole CSAM thing. it's also been around forever in one form or another.

Im kinda tired of xmrig and lominer being reported as a virus

I wonder what would happen to weapon artist for games, cause we have tons and tons of images/videos/documents for all sorts of weapons, even ourselves holding the the gun to understand how to use it. Apple is going to go mental over it in a string gun country like the UK

That explains why battery life is going down the shitter.

Unfortunately, the author fails to establish that `mediaanalysisd` is actually scanning their files and transmitting any data about those files to Apple's APIs in a way that is inconsistent with their policies. In fact, quick research suggests this has already been investigated with conclusions to the contrary. The only thing the author proves is that a network connection was attempted, which can be for any purpose, including purposes for which the user has provided consent. For example, Apple will OCR images with text automatically, a capability which is powered by mediaanalysisd, and is available irrespective whether images are stored in iCloud storage or not...

I wonder, how do they train an AI to detect such content? Don't they need a shit ton of training data in the form of images and videos to do that?

Two things first: 1. The following criticism isn’t supposed to defend Apple. It’s just about getting a broader perspective. 2. The approach of analysing personal data is alarming, which makes the main point of this video absolutely valid. BUT I think there are a few things wrong here. 1. “Mediaanalysisd” is not new. It has been around for some time and is used for many different things. One of them is Spotlight. Everything typed into spotlight is sent to Apple Servers for analysis, because there is a web search feature in this program as well. Even without iCloud, I can imagine the intelligent file search is still turned on, which allows the user to search for stuff and MacOS finds local pictures with the corresponding thing in them. I see no evidence, that Jeffery Pauls pictures are sent to Apple or that they are scanned for CSAM content. 2. Apple uses hashes for comparison with the NCMEC database. This means there is no AI, which is analysing photos like some people seem to imagine it. Theoretically it is even supposed to „check for exact matches of known child-abuse imagery without possessing any of the images or gleaning any information about non-matching pictures“ (The Verge). The last statement is questionable, because the algorithm apparently can not guarantee perfect avoidance of false positives. However this entire concept can’t be compared with full image recognition software, even though it is still scary. 3. Another thing so many people got wrong. Apple never said they will stop working on their CSAM scanning software. They just stated that they will push the release further into the future because further development is needed. This means we definitely still need to keep an eye on this. 4. There are at least a few ways of transferring photos from iOS devices to the Mac without the photos app. The Finder, which is the file manager, is indeed one of them.

Man, these guys are really helping to make UNIX & Linux distros more popular

Client-side scanning is exactly what they advertised they'd do, before claiming they're rolling it back. What's changed is they're doing it even with iCloud turned off.

When Your family are apple fans but you are not

I can’t remember where I heard it, but if image scanning isn’t actually involved, Apple will at least try and scan the hashes of the files and see if it matches up with their database. Now this is still bad because when this technology gets to governments, they can scan and look for ANY kind of file such as a picture of Xi Jinping photoshopped onto Winnie the Pooh.

Cleaned out my temp files on Windows the other day and my bing search before and after yielded different results. Maybe I'm just a hecking n00b, but that came as quite a surprise to me.

Since barely anybody seems to know, in the EU the eu commission tries to implement something similar to CSAM, but instead for files in some cloud storage it is for our private communication. With client side scanning they want to have an A.I read through your messages, scan your photos etc before they are encrypted and sent to the receipiant.

Question: Can you do a monthly news update of these kinds of topics? - This was helpful for us who use Unix / Linux but have to interact with MacOS / WinOS for work.

While discussing, to found a company that installs private one home servers and rents leftover space, we ran into the issue to distinguish between legitimate childhood photos and abusive material. Like flirting, there is a fine line towards denying it ever was what it seemed to be.

What interests me the most is, if Apple is training a closed source ai in house to look for csam, they are bound to have a training set in their possession or provided to them. Is the existence of such a training set not highly immoral? What if there is a bad actor somewhere involved and a leak occurs?

9:24 "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." Until your iPhone tells us what happened on it.

This video either needs to be cleared up or outright deleted since the network connections made by mediaanalysisd were never proven or shown that it is actually reporting results of scanning images for "CSAM". And it's coming out now that this was an outright bug... Nice video though.

YES !!! To everything you said! Sad enough though, thx 4 spreading the news!

Thank you for explaining this so well to us. It really Is spooky! I understand the Good that comes of it but can also understand how this can be exploited. Wild world, wild days these Are.

This HAS to be a major breach in privacy. What information is going to be stolen using the, “Think of the children” excuse?

It's a very thin line between "scanning for crime" and "scanning for criticism, dissent, journalism and negativiry".

when this controversy first showed up i thought "good, if there's anything i hate more than children it's child predators", but the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this really is a great example. me getting pissed off at targeted ads might also have had something to do with my switch in attitude, but whatevs.

It's times like this that I'm glad I've stuck with dumbphones for so long, even though I am pretty much fighting progress at this point. I seriously dread the day I finally get a smartphone.

You should post an update to the Jeffrey Paul story. This "issue" has been resolved now, turns out it was a bug where the service would send empty requests whenever a media file was previewed. No information about the files were ever transmitted without consent.

Normally I find your videos informative and entertaining (sure they have filler, but they’re nice to listen to) so I’m disappointed in you for not checking this further. This article is fear-mongering and the comments are eating it up thanks to their confirmation bias against Apple. mediaanalysisd is related to Spotlight and have been a part of macOS long before Apple was interested in CSAM detection, used for things like face, text, and object recognition.

MS has been spying on Windows users for decades. I learned about this in a windows administration class. Up to windows XP there was a way to block it, but when Vista came out of you block it then windows no longer works.

Would love a video on how to setup something like Little Snitch/Glasswire/open source alternatives for those of us still using OSX/Windows to try and cull stuff like this

This claim has already been debunked as false. Are you going to upload a video to clarify this like Louis Rossmann did?

By the way as of today I am one of your kind. My desktop now runs Arch Linux (Garuda to be precise I mean what else did you expect from a normie like me) and im more than happy with how it all works. I even got a game to run pretty well without a win10 VM that's something I believed to be near impossible unil the steam deck came out now Linux Compatibility is literally build into the words biggest game vendor and launcher. Slowly becoming a based, ghost to the feds, redpilled FOSS user by the day. Now I need to convert my Laptop and do something about my shitty Android... Thinking about Google Pixle + Graphene OS. Should be doable for me. Never buying an apple that's for sure not with headlines like oh by the way we scan all pictures on your phone without your consent and when you are offline :) hell no Apple!

I wish I could tell companies, "I don't care about the specificity of your advertising. The violation of privacy and commodification of personal information for the purpose of targeted advertising is creepy to me and I don't want you to try to sell me things on that basis!!"

So is it csam scanning or scanning photos to identify people to search in your library?

Every day I see more and more reasons why my switch to android based devices was more than necessary

as far I remember about Apple's neuralHash white paper it actually dont require the image parsing. it's much like imagededupe. from a given file u compute a hash and then compare its value with CSAM_DB, "if the string distance is >= threshold, then is csam, else not_csam". sorry my english 😅