What exactly is Apple up to?
If you read much about this topic and you’re not a complete geek like me, you’ve probably been convinced that Apple is scanning all of your photos, that they have a backdoor into your phone to read all of your texts, and they’re going to start calling the cops on you because you texted your dealer a pretty good 420 joke last April. Smartphones as we know them are over. It’s time to burn it all down and start over with primitive things, like the wheel and Nokia.
Well, I’m here to tell you that you can calm down about having an Apple employee looking at your spicy texts and hidden photos—it’s not going to happen. The way Apple has set up their CSAM tech on your phone is sophisticated, smart, and will not let their employees see your dank memes.
The recent controversy is mostly around the CSAM detection that could send people’s info to law enforcement, so let’s focus on that. When you hear that pictures on your phone will be reviewed to see if they’re CSAM, you might naturally believe that means that Apple can see all of the pictures on your phone. But actually they can’t!
When you upload a photo to iCloud your phone will also send a doubly encrypted copy of the photo to Apple. In addition to this doubly encrypted copy of your photo, it also uploads a voucher. This might sound complicated, but you can understand the double encryption and the voucher as long as you have a working knowledge of Harry Potter and space stuff.
Let’s talk about the doubly-encrypted copy of your photo that Apple receives. The two layers of encryption are different, so we’re going to treat them differently. The first layer is like your own personal Voldemort. Between Apple and every user’s photos is that user’s Voldemort. They can’t get to your photo because, and I hate to sound like a broken record here, your Voldemort is in the way. Each user has their own Voldemort and if Apple defeats a user’s Voldemort on one picture, he’s gone on all of their other photos as well.
Warner Bros.