Edward Snowden Condemns Apple’s Plan to Surveil iPhone Photos: ‘Turned a Trillion Dollars of Devices Into iNarcs’

Rudy TakalaAug 6th, 2021, 12:24 pm
 

Aleksandar Nakic/Getty Images

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden took aim on Twitter at Apple’s plan to begin monitoring user photographs held on iPhones and its other products, writing that it had turned the devices into “iNarcs.”

“Apple says to ‘protect children,’ they’re updating every iPhone to continuously compare your photos and cloud storage against a secret blacklist,” Snowden wrote in a Thursday summary of Apple’s plan, which it announced earlier in the day. “If it finds a hit, they call the cops. iOS will also tell your parents if you view a nude in iMessage.”

“No matter how well-intentioned, Apple is rolling out mass surveillance to the entire world with this,” he added. “Make no mistake: if they can scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow. They turned a trillion dollars of devices into iNarcs—*without asking.*”

Apple said in a Thursday announcement that it would use “on-device machine learning” to begin analyzing images. If the system determines that a photograph is potential Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), it will forward it to a human to examine to decide whether to call police on the customer.

Devices that belong to minors, meanwhile, will blur images in text messages the system deems “sexually explicit,” and that “as an additional precaution, the child can also be told that, to make sure they are safe, their parents will get a message if they do view it.”

Apple said the plan to begin watching its 1 billion iPhones around the world — in addition to iPads, iWatches, and other devices — will go into effect with an update later this year. The announcement was widely panned by critics online, whose messages Snowden shared into Friday.

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