Apple Will Soon Start Scanning Your Phone For Images of Child Abuse

Well, this isn’t the news I wanted to hear this morning and honestly, I have mixed feelings about it.

So, apparently, Apple will soon start scanning phones for images of child abuse. Yes, scanning your phone without your permission.

And here’s the thing – the idea behind it, is great. I get their intention is to help children.

Apple said its messaging app will use on-device machine learning to warn about sensitive content without making private communications readable by the company.

The tool Apple calls “neuralMatch” will detect known images of child sexual abuse without decrypting people’s messages. If it finds a match, the image will be reviewed by a human who can notify law enforcement if necessary.

Again, could be great idea BUT there are some cyber agencies and researchers that say this is very concerning as it has flaws and could accidentally put innocent people in legal trouble.

According to reports, Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins, a top cryptography researcher, was concerned that it could be used to frame innocent people by sending them harmless but malicious images designed designed to appear as matches for child porn, fooling Apple’s algorithm and alerting law enforcement — essentially framing people. “This is a thing that you can do,” said Green. “Researchers have been able to do this pretty easily.”

Um. What?!

I mean, aside from that, isn’t this an invasion of privacy? Shouldn’t this be something we OPT IN to?

Again, I am all for helping children and cracking down on child abuse but there has to be a better way than digging through people’s phones and privacy without their knowledge.

Sure, for people like myself that have nothing to worry about, I am okay with it to a certain extent but I am concerned about my privacy. Having images on my phone of my kids, life and family. Like what if there is a cyber attack and that all gets leaked?

Apple does say that they are confident they have developed technology that will protect Apple user’s privacy while being able to crack down on child abuse.

I am totally torn on this. It’s concerning all around that we even have to resort to this because some people are so horrible in this world.

Nonetheless, we have no idea when this will be happening but Apple does have plans to do this.