Apple has announced it will install a program on iPhones in the United States that will persistently scan users’ photos and flag those its algorithm believes to be related to child abuse.
Flagged photos will then be reviewed by humans to determine if they violate any laws. Once implemented, the measure will affect roughly one-third of people in the U.S.
Although the goals of this initiative are noble, its implications are dire. We learned last month that the federal government is actively advising social media platforms on what constitutes disinformation, sometimes even going as far as to single out individual posts and users for removal. Bear in mind, many things branded disinformation throughout the pandemic have turned out to be true.
The question is, at what point does an administration abuse this power in the same way Biden’s has been doing with social media? Inevitably, someone will demand that Apple similarly abuse this photo-flagging capability to target things other than child abuse — such as, say, the lab-leak theory of the coronavirus or a news story about Hunter Biden’s corrupt behavior. Or what if a future Democratic administration could designate the promotion of firearms as a public health crisis and tap Apple to suppress the spread of firearm-related imagery through its devices?
Don’t say it won’t happen — just look at what’s happening right now.
Today, you can get banned on social media for having a view heterodox to the liberal consensus — for example, that males are men. The logical next step for progressive social engineers is to deny people with such opinions access to more important things, such as mobile phones or even bank accounts.
Even if Apple’s policy were never expanded beyond its original scope (which is unlikely), innocent people would still need to be wary of it. Apple’s algorithm, as with all algorithms, will be prone to generating false positives. Do you want an intimate photo of yours, incorrectly identified as malicious by your phone, to be pawed and pored over by strangers checking it? That is a brazen invasion of personal privacy. Maybe that’s just the price to pay in the fight against child predators, but surely the above-discussed possibilities of abuse diminish its acceptability.
Apple is a private corporation and, without a government willing to stand up for consumer privacy, it is free to do as it wishes. But that argument no longer holds up when Apple makes itself the handmaiden of the state. As it stands, the only remedy people have to fight this kind of encroachment is to vote with their pocketbooks. Do not reward Apple for giving bad actors another tool to silence their political opposition. Just buy an Android instead — you’ll get a superior piece of tech that doesn’t come (as much) with built in spyware.
