The Grey Lady takes a deep dive into creepy waters with an editorial and an episode of The Daily podcast.
From “Apple’s Illusion of Privacy Is Getting Harder to Sell” on Friday’s op-ed page:
Even iPhone users with nothing to hide could be forgiven for being a little creeped out that Apple will scan their photos and see if they match existing databases of known illegal pornographic images. Privacy experts called the idea a potential back door for governments to request or demand scans for other images or files. Some of Apple’s own employees are reportedly pushing back on the idea.
It’s a good indication that things are headed in the wrong direction when your company’s anti-child-pornography initiative gets panned.
A major reason for the failure of Apple’s defense is that the photo-scanning program confirms a fear many users already harbor: Personal data, even the most sensitive, is effectively out of users’ control, accessible at the flip of a switch.
Apple says, relentlessly, that privacy is the central feature of its iPhones. But as the photo scanning demonstrates, that’s true only until the company changes its mind about its policies.
Cue the podcast: Praise, Concern and Apple’s New Tools Against Child Abuse Imagery (With Kevin Rouse and Jack Nicas)
My take: Headed out to walk the dog with Rouse and Nicas in my AirPods.
It is not like a back door into your house.
If anyone reads Rouse and Nicas, please tell us if the two understand the issues.
They’re publishing.
I resemble that remark.
PED’s piece concludes with a quote from the article: “Apple says, relentlessly, that privacy is the central feature of its iPhones. But as the photo scanning demonstrates, that’s true only until the company changes its mind about its policies.”
It’s pretty hard to argue the truth of that statement, as the govt has completely failed all of us in this area.
Following your lead:
“… that’s true only until the company changes its mind about its policies.”
Which not so incidentally gives Apple zero credit for doing the right thing on its own, and even casts doubt on whether or not they are. Because after all, how would we know?
But Apple users do know, which must just stick in the craw of whoever wrote this.
However, I’ll give them a tiny bit of credit for the faint possibility that they wrote this to try to goad congress-critters to get off their butts, do their job, and come down hard on all those who AREN’T following Apple’s lead.
But in this day and age, when scoring political points and staying in office is far more important than protecting the lives of their citizens, I hold out almost no hope for that.
So thank you, Apple, for your efforts to do the right thing. And may you continue to thrive for doing so!
“Privacy is central to all we do.”
and
“We follow the laws in every country where we operate.”
The NYT piece follows a bunch of non-sequiturs that derive from the starting point the two statements above are either-or. Real insight would explore where these two statements overlap and start to contradict, rather than assuming a binary choice between them. The Apple solution has some real concerns, but those are about potential problems versus the real problem of detecting these images while preserving the privacy of the great great majority of iPhone users and the data on Apple’s servers.
The NYT seems to want to decide it is now empowered to make moral judgements on behalf of the population, and establish by decree when someone is behaving incorrectly. That’s long been a problem in journalism, in other countries at least the newspapers are honest about their political bias.
Or “true” much of anything. Almost any statement (outside of good science) seems to be shading someone’s agenda.
The byline of this op-ed piece reads: “By Greg Bensinger. Mr. Bensinger is a member of the editorial board.”
It’s notable that the piece is expressly NOT stated as the opinion of the NYT’s editorial board, but is simply authored by one of its members. I think it’s safe to assume that other board members must have disagreed with Bensinger’s perspective, otherwise this would have come out as an “official” NYT editorial and would have been published on a Sunday for added gravitas. So in the interest of fairness, there is no “NYT perspective” offered here, nor are they trying to tell people what to do. The piece appears on the op-ed page – where opinions are expressed – and is clearly labelled as to whose opinion it is.
So let’s hope that Apple PR/Comms is drafting up a response right now disagreeing with Bensinger’s perspective in a respectful way, and pointing out factual errors where they appear. This should get a thoughtful but quick review and submitted as authored by Tim Cook or any of his able VPs. You can be sure the NYT will publish it. That’s what op-ed pages are for, right?
The cynical may say: “But this will only generate even more clicks for that worthless fish wrap!”
And alas that might be at least partially true. But it will better inform the public, at least those members that still read the NYT like I do. (Yes, I agree. Ever since Pogue left their coverage of Apple and all tech has gone downhill.)
But I do remember a day not so long ago when we used to argue things out in a vigorous (but generally respectful) way on the editorial pages of our major newspapers – the public forums of a bygone era. And we all learned something. This community here on Apple 3.0 generally reminds me of that better era, before too many of us started yelling at each other and calling our fellow citizens stupid.