A firestorm emerged on Friday and raged during the weekend over Apple’s new “Expanded Protections for Children,” a series of measures across Apple’s platforms aimed at cracking down on child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The new protections address three areas, including communications tools for parents and updates to Siri and search to help children and parents deal with unsafe situations.
The flashpoint for cryptographers, cybersecurity specialists, and privacy advocates is Apple’s planned use of “new applications of cryptography to help limit the spread of CSAM online, while designing for user privacy.” The plan is to scan users’ photo libraries and then apply a new form of encryption to compare those photos to images from existing CSAM libraries.
