German politician requests Apple abandon its plans for CSAM scanning
- Manuel Höferlin asks Apple to cancel the plans for CSAM scanning.
- The politician applauds the effort for child safety, however, he sees Apple’s move as too dangerous.
Manuel Höferlin from the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP), who is chairman of the Digital Agenda committee in the German Bundestag, has requested in a letter to Tim Cook, to cancel the plans for CSAM scanning that Apple announced a few weeks ago.
According to Höferlin, CSAM scanning must be described as “the greatest breach of the confidentiality of communication that we have experienced since the invention of the Internet”.
Although the FDP politician welcomes the fact that Apple is thinking about how to tackle the serious problem of sexual violence against children, he is convinced that the approach chosen is not a good one.
Every scanned content destroys a piece of the trust that users place in the fact that the content of their communication is not monitored unnoticed. Without trustworthy communication, the Internet is no longer a civilizational progress, but the greatest monitoring instrument in history.
In his letter, Höferlin refers to the arguments of the American civil rights organization "Electronic Frontier Foundation" (EFF). They had referred to Apple's image comparison as a back door and already stated at the beginning of the month: Even narrow, well-documented, and meticulously thought-out back doors remain back doors.
The member of the Bundestag appeals to Tim Cook to refrain from CSAM scanning and thus avoid the risk of being confronted with the inevitable inquiries of authoritarian regimes who want to use the comparison function in the long term for data other than just images that depict the sexual exploitation of children.
This not only saves your own company many foreseeable problems, but also protects the Achilles' heel of the modern information society! Please stay by the side of those who defend the civilizational achievement of a free network!
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Published to Apple Scoop on 18th August, 2021.
