Apple will delay the rollout of new child pornography protection tools

Apple will delay the introduction of its new child pornography protection tools due to a heated debate raised by privacy advocates.

Apple announced this week that it will delay the rollout of its new child pornography protection tools after many experts and privacy advocated claimed it poses a threat to user privacy.

The tools were announced by the IT giant in August, the company explained that every image containing child sexual abuse on iPhones and iPads will be reported to its experts and uploaded to its infrastructure in the United States.

Privacy advocates and digital rights activists argue that the feature could introduce a potential “backdoor” into the Apple devices that could be exploited by threat actors, for this reason, the company decided to conduct further investigation.

(2) Be clear about why you’re scanning and what you’re scanning. Going from scanning nothing (but email attachments) to scanning everyone’s private photo library was an enormous delta. You need to justify escalations like this.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 3, 2021

“Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features,” the company said in a statement.

Apple denied that its technology could pose a threat to user privacy for weeks, it offered a series of explanations and shared multiple documents to demonstrate that there is a low rate of false positives.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Apple)

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