WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – Apple says it will be introducing a new photo scanning feature for its iPhones, with former U.S. National Security Agency member and whistleblower Edward Snowden warning that the U.S. is in fact rolling out mass surveillance to the entire world.
Snowden’s warning came after Apple confirmed that it plans later this year to roll out what it calls new child safety features that include searching for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in a user’s iCloud Photos library.
The tech giant said the CSAM searching process would happen locally on a user’s device, insisting that its intention is only to root out child sexual abuse.
Snowden and other privacy advocates endorsed a petition against the Apple’s plan, calling it an assault on user’s privacy.
In a series of tweets on Friday, Snowden expressed concerns that Apple is rolling out a form of “mass surveillance to the entire world” and setting a precedent that could allow the company to scan for any other arbitrary content in the future.
In their petition, security and privacy experts, cryptographers, researchers, academics, legal experts and ordinary consumers blasted Apple’s plan as a “privacy-invasive content scanning technology.”
While acknowledging that efforts to combat child exploitation and abuse are “almost unquestionably well-intentioned,” the signatories stressed that Apple’s plan to constantly monitor and scan everyone’s photos “introduces a backdoor that threatens to undermine fundamental privacy protections for all users of Apple products.”
They raised the alarm that the technology has the potential to bypass any end-to-end encryption that would normally safeguard the user’s privacy, something Apple has long been promoting as a major feature of its software ecosystem.
Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Open Privacy Research Society were among several prominent advocates and researchers that signed the petition.
The EFF echoed similar concerns in a statement and said that Apple’s decision “will come at a high price for overall user privacy.”