Apple’s controversial phone-scanning plan gets eviscerated

The backlash to Apple’s scan-plan was swift and severe. Critics said it would be infeasible for Apple to prevent world governments, including authoritarian, censorship-happy regimes, from abusing the tech, levying demands to root out disagreeable content of any sort on people’s personal devices. The software, which would effectively act like a narc embedded on people’s iPhones, could have unintended consequences, critics said, despite Apple’s assurances that it would be used solely to stop child predators.

The chorus of opponents is growing louder. The phone-scanning software “neither guarantees efficacious crime prevention nor prevents surveillance. Indeed, the effect is the opposite,” the 14 co-authors of the new paper said. Apple’s proposed solution “by its nature creates serious security and privacy risks for all society while the assistance it can provide for law enforcement is at best problematic.”

The tech “can fail, can be evaded, and can be abused,” the security researchers said. They called the method of scanning a form of “wiretapping” that can be exploited by governments, rogue actors, criminals, spies, and intimate partners.

“Plainly put, it is a dangerous technology,” the group said, one that “can result in a significant chilling effect on freedom of speech and, indeed, on democracy itself.”

The anti-scanners consist of the same pro-strong encryption folks who years ago sided with Apple in the company’s struggle to resist the FBI’s demands, for the purposes of an investigation, to unlock an iPhone used by a terrorist. Suffice it to say they are not persuaded by Apple’s latest turn. While Apple endures their heat, the company is delaying its plans for the scanning program’s rollout—not unlike Facebook putting Instagram for Kids on ice while it weathers blowback from a series of embarrassing data leaks.