Stefan Mileschin

Helping the police with their inquiries after all

While the fruity cargo cult Apple has been famous for saying that it does not want to get into monitoring people’s gear, it has been helping coppers with their inquires quite a bit.

A search warrant uncovered by Forbes shows how the iPhone maker intercepts and checks messages when illegal material—namely, evidence of child sexual abuse—is found within.

Apple isn’t manually checking all of your emails. It uses what most other major tech companies like Facebook or Google use to detect child abuse imagery: hashes.

When Apple systems see one of those hashes passing through the company’s servers, a flag will pop up. The email or file containing the potentially illegal images will be quarantined for further inspection.

Once the threshold has been met, that’s enough for a tech company to contact the relevant authority, typically the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children [NCMEC]. NCMEC is a nonprofit that acts as the nation’s law enforcement clearinghouse for information regarding online child sexual exploitation. It will typically call law enforcement after being tipped about illegal content, often launching criminal investigations.

https://fudzilla.com/news/50286-appl...canning-emails