If it's so easy to produce collisions, it's only a matter of time before someone submits illegal material that intentionally collides with the most common images, resulting in insane number of collisions and rendering the system useless.
I think the headline is kinda missing the point here; the issue is not the flagging of illegal images once found, the issue is snooping around people's computers that were left for repairs deliberately looking for illegal images and the violation of trust there.
My computer doesn't have anything illegal on it, that doesn't mean I want a Geek Squad employee looking around at what is there. And if they know there's a payday from the FBI if they find something, you bet they are going to look around. Then what happens when they find something not illegal but that they like; pictures of my wife or friends and family at the beach or something.
I write FR software, and this practice irritates the fuck out of me. A common phrase in the industry is you can't anticipate what stupid users won't do, and this is a clear case of end-users sticking their fingers into powered light sockets, at the expense of the general public's safety by the very agency enlisted to protect the public. The stupidity is amazing. If there is ever any regulations around FR's use, probing with doctored or "looks like" images needs to be illegal or at minimum no grounds for any warrant of any kind.
Then the myriad other tech companies that scan the images uploaded to their platforms will be alerted of supposed illicit images being uploaded. This isn't new. No one's lives have been ruined by this and it's been practice for years now.
So this is the future - we can't trust anything and so we trust nothing but our pre-existing biases
Bugger that.
This is a tech-created problem it can be tech-solved.
1. Photo manipulation leaves traces on the pixels, and this must be worse.
2. cameras can hash / sign every other frame or similar - we can build a chain of hardware to image that can be followed - and of an image or video does not have a CA cert chain it should be as mis-trusted as a web site without TLS
Don't take digital photos that you don't want the world to see.
I don't like seeing "don't victim blame" taken as gospel. Blame isn't a simple binary thing. Every time a company is hacked we don't line up to defend their shoddy security practices even though they are a victim.
There is one thing to be concerned about individuals violating terms of service and scanning on the device to identify and refer to law enforcement. It’s a WHOLE other thing to have humans somehow review images that are not in a device.
By this line of thinking… if a computer service tech finds and shares compromising pictures of you or your loved ones with their friends it’s all good because nothing bad happens to the customer.
It's not as though it's impossible to make a secure image. Mistakes can and do happen, though. Better to own up to it and fix it than to hide the problem.
What you’re missing is that now they have an incentive to go looking for imagery when they should simply be trying to fix your computer. And maybe even an incentive to plant evidence.
Moreover, I don’t see any reason Geek Squad would need to be in my images folder in the course of working on my computer, and I’m sure that, child porn or not, most people probably wouldn’t want their private collection of pictures being sifted through without permission.
A non-techie relative of mine told me about images being sent to wrong people and them asking why they sent the photo. I first assumed it was just user error but apparently that's quite a bit data leak on signals side.
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