Should Apple Scan Our Phones for Abuse Imagery?
Protecting our children is the right thing to do, but is this the way to do it?
Apple, the company that famously fought the FBI on backdoor access to anyone’s encrypted iPhone, may be working on a plan to automatically scan photos in the cloud and on your phone for child abuse images.
This, on the face of it, sounds like a solid plan: automated technology that can help authorities get ahead of those who might seek to or be actively harming children. That’s almost fist-pumping stuff.
However, the technology, which reportedly will use artificial intelligence (AI) trained on a database of 200,000 images from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, does raise some interesting and potentially concerning issues.
AI and its cohort, machine learning, are powerful tools known for accurately identifying needles in a universe of haystacks. It’s also known for being misguided by bias-informed training and, yes, even false positives. There’s also the larger issue of a potential law-enforcement activity automatically running on the phones in our pockets.
As I was exploring this issue online, some pointed out how Twitter already had implemented a similar system as early as 2013. There is, obviously, a…
