Apple’s recent announcement that it will add a CSAM detection system to devices with iOS 15, et al, angered many. Activist organization Fight For The Future created a petition for people to sign.
Tell Apple: No Spyware on my iPhone
Here’s what the default message says:
I urge Apple to abandon its proposed ‘child protection’ update to iOS 15 immediately, and recommit to providing secure communications with end to end encryption and no backdoors for all of its devices.
It is abusive and wrong to expect customers to allow continuous monitoring of all the images on their devices and to allow additional review by law enforcement. Apple is endangering children in abusive households by threatening to reveal sensitive information about a child or their friends to abusers, while simultaneously opening up a door for hackers and authoritarian governments to abuse us all.
Taking away the privacy and security of billions is not the way to combat child exploitation. Apple must immediately reverse course by dropping its plans and recommitting to never opening any sort of backdoor to monitor our communications.
Enter your first name, last name, email address, and postal code to add your name to the petition. The website also provides direct links to email Apple’s executives such as Craig Federighi, Dan Riccio, Cheryl Thomas, and others.
(Comment also posted to FlickType article)
It saddens me!
I’m reading more and more stories over the last years about how Apple is turning itself into this “Evil, Monolithic, Absolutistic, Dogmatic Dictator” (a position once attributed only to Microsoft by us, Mac users).
Apple’s long policy of shielded isolationism and inaccessibility from the input from its mainstream and core Users has allowed and led to this state of (single-leader) corporate authoritarianism. It started with Apple not attending (abandoning) the Mac expositions and killing off the MUGs (Macintosh User Groups)- the community of Users- in order to not hear or face any user feedback or user expectations. The “Apple knows best” mentality started ….and Apple turned itself into “Big Brother,” the very thing that Apple had depicted as its arch-Enemy in the famous TV ad.
Now:
(1) Knocking out small Apps….and small Developers. (FlickType)
(2) Considering our devices to be “owned by Apple” (Apple’s property and ownership, rather than ours).
(3) Sponsoring deep invasion of privacy into our phones to search our (stored) materials in the name of some popular rationale or objective (such as attacking child abuse and child pornagraphy), even though this same invasion/search technology and policy could later be used to invade and detect “anything” else that Government/Apple might eventually want to search and prosecute for. (GSAM detection project)
Additionally, the “Mac Press” has been soft, compliant, and significantly uncritical of Apple for years now, which has helped Apple develop in this direction.
The “Mac Press” started operating this way in the 1990s mostly out of FEAR:
(1) fear of fanning the flames of anti-Apple conspiracy theories that have bombarded us from the “mainstream Press” and “PC fanatics” forever,
(2) fear of hurting Apple (when Apple was on the skids (struggling financially and competitively in the 90s) and
(3) fear of retribution and retaliation against the Mac Press personnel from Apple itself.
This is not the Apple Corp…and Apple ideals…..that I “fell in love with” in the 80s!