Apple fraud executive Eric Friedman told his colleague Herve Sibert that Apple is the largest platform for distributing child pornography.
The comment sheds light on why Apple follows a controversial program and automates child pornography checks on clients' phones and messages.
Ο Eric Friedman is a senior engineering manager at Apple. However, the websites security they list his actual role as "head of Apple's Algorithms and Fraud Risk Unit," also known as FEAR. Sibert is Apple's security and fraud engineering manager, according to the Profile on LinkedIn (Security and Fraud Engineering Manager).
It is important to note that a comment made in a private message is not the same as a full database analysis that compares multiple global platforms and details their ability and use to transmit illegal images and videos. Such an analysis would be provocative at best, impossible at worst.
The NSA informant, Edward Snowden, reported about the incident: It is dangerous and could easily be abused to scan anything else that the government or Apple decides is dangerous.
No matter how well-intentioned @Apple is rolling out mass s to the entire world with this. Make no mistake: if they can scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow.
They turned a trillion dollars of devices into iNarcs— * without asking. * https://t.co/wIMWijIjJk
- Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 6
In any case, we now have a clearer idea, because Apple thought this was important enough to launch such a campaign.
If it finds many cases of child pornography, about 30, Apple will notify the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US (National Center for Missing and Exploited children)
Of course, there are many who are concerned about whether the search for illegal images may eventually "evolve" into a search for banned political topics with unauthorized content.