July 18, 2023 - Epoch Times
12:11
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| Time | Text |
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| Apple has just released a new, rather urgent statement, saying that by the end of this month, they will be permanently deleting the photos of millions of their users. | |
| Specifically, in this statement, they wrote that on July 26th, which just for your reference is the Wednesday of next week, all photos within the folder called My Photo Stream will be deleted. | |
| Here's exactly what they wrote. | |
| Now, just for your reference, the My Photo Stream service has been a staple for iPhones over the past 12 or so years. | |
| And it basically works as an intermediary between all your different devices. | |
| It uploads the photos that you've taken on your phone and it holds them in a special folder for 30 days. | |
| And during that 30-day window, you can view them and download them on any one of your Apple devices. | |
| Your tablet, your laptop, your desktop, and so on. | |
| However, all those photos will now be deleted on July 26th. | |
| Because Apple is phasing out the service. | |
| And so you really want to make sure that you check this folder on your phone and your computer and download all the photos that you have in the My Photo Stream folder in order to make sure that you don't lose them. | |
| Now, interestingly, within the statement, Apple actually also gave a bit of a hint as to why they're doing this. | |
| Here's what they wrote, quote, My Photo Stream is a separate service from iCloud Photos. | |
| Moving forward, iCloud Photos is the best way to keep the photos and videos you take up to date across all your devices and safely stored in iCloud. | |
| If you already have iCloud photos enabled on all of your devices, you don't need to do anything else. | |
| Your photos are already uploaded and stored in iCloud. | |
| And so, essentially, it looks like Apple is trying to funnel all their customers into using the iCloud storage. | |
| Makes sense. | |
| However, you might look at the situation and say, wait a minute. | |
| How safe are my photos on the Apple iCloud? | |
| Do they have the capability to scan my photos whenever they like? | |
| And the answer to that question is technically yes. | |
| They do have that capability. | |
| Because you see, about a year and a half ago, Apple released a detailed plan about how they were going to scan the photos of every single iPhone user within the United States. | |
| Now, at the time, they justified this program of theirs by saying that it was necessary in order to combat child abuse imagery. | |
| Now, obviously, this sort of a plan has both a positive and a negative aspect to it, because while on the one hand, I think most people can agree that it is a real positive to rein in child exploitation, But on the other hand, almost as soon as this proposal was made public, security experts across the political spectrum said that this plan could allow Apple to essentially run surveillance on tens of millions of people for reasons completely unrelated to child exploitation. | |
| And interestingly enough, in their official statement, will Apple actually try to preempt all these different privacy concerns by writing this, quote, This innovative new technology allows Apple to provide valuable and actionable information to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and law enforcement regarding the proliferation of known child sexual abuse material. | |
| And it does so while providing significant privacy benefits over existing techniques since Apple only learns about users' photos if they have a collection of known child sexual abuse material in their iCloud Photos account. | |
| Even in these cases, Apple only learns about images that match known child sexual abuse material. | |
| According to this statement from Apple, the way that this system was supposed to work Is that the AI that Apple developed would scan all phones in the country for these types of photos. | |
| And then, those images would be matched against a known database of illegal images. | |
| Then, if the system found that a certain number of these types of images were in your possession, some Apple employee would come in and review them. | |
| And if they were deemed to in fact be illegal, they would then be reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. | |
| That was at least the general plan. | |
| They developed an AI crawler to go through the iCloud photos of tens of millions of people in order to look for these illegal images. | |
| However, as soon as this plan was made public, you had both security as well as privacy experts, again of all political stripes, begin to voice their concerns saying that while this was a good effort to combat child abuse, Well, this type of a program could be an authoritarian government's best tool for silencing political dissent. | |
| As just one example of this criticism, Mr. | |
| Matthew Green, who is both a cryptographer as well as a professor over at Johns Hopkins, he wrote this on the matter, quote, This sort of tool can be a boon for finding child sexual abuse imagery in people's phones. | |
| But imagine what it could do in the hands of an authoritarian government. | |
| And then right below that, he linked to an article from the New York Times that was titled this. | |
| Censorship, Surveillance, and Profits. | |
| A Hard Bargain for Apple in China. | |
| And then the subhead is, Apple built the world's most valuable business on top of China. | |
| Now it has to answer to the Chinese government. | |
| Then, here is a brief excerpt from that article. | |
| And this part is describing a newly built data center in China's southwest. | |
| Quote, Inside, Apple was preparing to store the personal data of its Chinese customers on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm. | |
| Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, has said the data is safe. | |
| But at the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government. | |
| Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. | |
| Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. | |
| And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they're meant to secure. | |
| And to be frank, as bad as all that sounds, this article only detailed a small portion of Apple's capitulation to the Chinese regime. | |
| For instance, within China, besides hosting their data on these local government-run servers, well, in 2015, Apple shut off its news app within China's borders. | |
| In 2017, they removed Voice of America from the Chinese version of the App Store. | |
| And then, also in 2017, they began restricting the emoji of the Taiwan flag, and so people were no longer able to send it to one another. | |
| Then, in 2018, Apple went one step further, and they actually restricted Chinese iPhone users from even being able to text the word Taiwan to one another. | |
| Doing so, if someone tried to text the word Taiwan, it would automatically crash their phone. | |
| Then, also in 2018, Apple removed VPNs from their App Store so that iPhone users wouldn't be able to jump over the Great Firewall of China and access the free internet. | |
| In 2019, they removed the music from the iTunes platform of several different artists who dare to mention the Tiananmen Square Massacre. | |
| In 2020, they removed the Jehovah's Witness app in China. | |
| In 2021, they removed the Bible app from the Chinese App Store. | |
| And then, just last year, in 2022, after a giant anti-government protest, well, Apple released an update to their phones, which limited the airdrop function of their iPhones in China. | |
| And really, think about that for a moment. | |
| People were using the airdrop function on their iPhone to spread messages between each other while protesting against the Chinese Communist government. | |
| And instead of supporting those people, Apple went ahead, they capitulated to the Chinese Communist government, and they kneecapped them, making it almost impossible to share information both easily and anonymously. | |
| And so, amidst all that, when Apple introduced their plan to start scanning all photos of the users here in the U.S., supposedly for good reasons, well, given their track record, a lot of people really weren't buying it. | |
| And indeed, because the backlash against their plan was so strong and widespread, Apple did eventually drop the program. | |
| They released another statement, this one right here, saying that they will not be scanning the photos of every single iPhone user within the U.S. And then it—sorry, is it raining money? | |
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| And now, let's head on back to the studio. | |
| However, from this whole episode, there are a few key takeaways, at least in my opinion. | |
| One, Apple is removing their My Photo Stream service and pushing all their users to adopt the iCloud photo service. | |
| Two, they have developed an AI tool which can scan all images that are stored on people's iCloud accounts. | |
| Even though they've decided not to roll out the feature, the reality is that they did develop it. | |
| Thirdly, evidenced by their actions in China, as well as in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Russia, and Iran, well, Apple seems to have developed a bit of a track record of complying with different government demands, oftentimes citing the fact that if they didn't comply, well, they would just not be able to stay in the market. | |
| And so with all that as the context, it's worth remembering that right now, it's not just the Chinese, Iranian, and Russian governments that are pushing for massive censorship. | |
| Instead, there's a push by many Western governments to censor more and more speech as well. | |
| And so, who's to say that, for instance, in the near future, there won't be some kind of a large protest or a large political demonstration? | |
| And then, some European government, or even the United States government, It sounds dystopian, but remember, technology exists, Apple is pushing everyone to use their iCloud storage, and thirdly, many mainstream politicians are calling for exactly this type of censorship. | |
| As just one recent, very prominent example, after you had all those riots over in France, the European Union's Internal Market Commissioner, he came out and he threatened social media companies with banishment from Europe if they didn't censor these types of riots moving forward. | |
| EU Internal Market Commissioner Mr. | |
| Terry Breton repeatedly stressed on Monday that, quote, I am the regulator when lambasting social media networks for, quote, not having done enough during the recent French riots and threatening them with sanctions, including even banishment, if they should remain similarly inactive and not comply with the EU's Digital Services Act, which is designed precisely to regulate online speech. | |
| And so, that's all to say that on July 26, which is again next Wednesday, all the photos in your My Photo Stream folder on your iPhone will be deleted. | |
| Therefore, you should consider backing those photos up ASAP. But perhaps you should also think twice before joining Apple's iCloud storage service. | |
| Because who knows when they will receive a similar ultimatum from the European or even the American government, and then, frankly, given their track record, well, it's not exactly clear what direction Apple will go in. | |
| If you'd like to read either of these two statements from Apple for yourself, I'll throw those links down into the description box below this video for you to peruse, which is, I should mention, that description box right below those like and subscribe buttons, both of which I hope you take a moment to smash so that this video and this content can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| Now, lastly, on a slightly different topic, I'd like to mention that over on Epic TV, which is our awesome no censorship video platform, I recently published a super spicy episode detailing the current state of edible mRNA vaccines, the research behind them, as well as the push to get them into our food supply. | |
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| If you'd like to check out that exclusive episode, you can do so over on Epic TV, again, our awesome no-censorship video platform. | |
| The link to that edible mRNA vaccine episode will be right there at the very top of the description box below. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. | |
| Stay informed. |
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