According to Bengaluru | San Francisco: Apple said on Friday that collecting feedback and improving proposed child safety features would take longer to complete. The company received criticism of the system for privacy and other reasons both inside and outside the company, so it had to make this decision.
The iPhone maker has sparked a global backlash from a range of rights groups, with employees also criticizing the plan internally last month. The reason is that they have promised to check customers’ phones in the US for images related to “child sexual abuse”. This feature is expected to be suppressed by governments to obtain other documents for censorship or arrest, and they are also worried about whether the information on the device will be checked by Apple.
On Friday, Apple said that it would take longer for security researchers to make changes to the system. Previously, these researchers had been authorized by Apple to test the company’s claims.
The Cupertino, California-based company issued a statement: “Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features,”
A cybersecurity researcher at Johns Hopkins University, Matthew Green posted an article on Twitter with the content: “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”. Previously, he criticized Apple and said that this was Apple’s “hopeful” action.
Later software updates this year in the United States for iPhones, iPads, and Macs will include this feature, and the company also provides evidence to support that the risk of false positives is rare.
