Following up on Thursday’s post, I thought I’d let Apple know directly of my concern about their new CSAM monitoring. I’d already signed the open letter to Apple but I thought it was worthwhile to send a personal message as well.
That turns out to be essentially impossible. There’s no email address that I could find and their support Webpage is restricted to seeking support for specific problems on specific devices. I thought I’d found a way by offering feedback on the Photos app but you’re restricted to 800 characters, which wasn’t quite enough for what I wanted to say.
Here, on the slim chance that someone from Apple will see it and send it on to the appropriate folks, is the letter I tried to send.
I am writing to express my shock and dismay that Apple has abrogated their longstanding promise not to surveil their users. I’m a developer and have a familiarity with crypto so I understand the technical details of your proposed system but even if we suppose that the system works perfectly, those technical details don’t change the fact that you’ll be spying on us.
I appreciate that Apple wants to be seen and see themselves as good citizens by fighting the scourge of child pornography but you’re conscripting your user base to bear the cost of that good citizenship by forfeiting their privacy. The right thing to do would have been to ask your users if that was a price they were willing to pay.
Even if the endgame is iCloud encryption, you’re still betraying your users by not giving them a choice in the matter. A compromise like “agree to the scanning and we’ll give up our keys to your iCloud data, otherwise we’ll retain the keys and your data will be subject to subpeonas from law enforcement” would probably satisfy most people and, most importantly, would give your users something rather than taking something away.
Your users aren’t the only ones who will suffer from this change. Apple had the hard won trust and faith of their users. That’s gone now. The principal of Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus suggests that the wise user will never again trust anything you say.