Apple’s Scan Plans Prompt Organizations’ Requests To Stop

Organizations around the globe published an open letter to Apple requesting that it toss plans to scan the messages children receive in order to spot abuse overtures, Reuters and other news outlets reported on Thursday (Aug. 19).

Over 90 organizations dedicated to policy and rights sent the letter to Apple requesting that it drops all initiatives that involve scanning children’s messages for nudity and adults’ messages for images depicting the sex abuse of a minor. 

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“Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children,” the letter indicated.

This latest attempt to tackle an encryption policy at a solitary tech firm was put together by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a non-profit company based in Washington, D.C., dedicated to lobbying for digital rights.

“It’s so disappointing and upsetting that Apple is doing this because they have been a staunch ally in defending encryption in the past,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, co-director of CDT’s Security & Surveillance Project.

Apple said it has worked to take care of the privacy concerns and released a document that frames the reason why the “complex architecture of the scanning software should resist attempts to subvert it.”

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Greg Nojeim, co-director of CDT’s Security & Surveillance Project, said in the letter that ​​Apple is “replacing its industry-standard end-to-end encrypted messaging system with an infrastructure for surveillance and censorship, which will be vulnerable to abuse and scope-creep not only in the U.S. but around the world.”

Nojeim added that Apple can “restore its users’ faith” that their data is secure by dropping the new scanning policies. 

Groups signing the open letter included several organizations in Brazil, a country that has already blocked Facebook’s WhatsApp several times for not decrypting messages in criminal investigations. Other signees included those from India, Mexico, Germany, Argentina, Ghana and Tanzania.

“Our main concern is the consequence of this mechanism, how this could be extended to other situations and other companies,” said Flavio Wagner, president of the independent Brazil chapter of the Internet Society. “This represents a serious weakening of encryption.”