Ahead of today’s iPhone event, dozens of activists across the US took to Apple Stores to protest the company’s controversial plan to combat child porn, alleging the system paves the way for widescale surveillance.
“Apple must immediately reverse course in dropping its plans and recommit to never opening any sort of backdoor to monitoring our communications ever,” said one protester at one of Apple’s New York stores.
The pro-privacy groups Fight For The Future and The Electronic Frontier Foundation organized Monday’s protest, which sparked supporters to lobby outside Apple Stores in several cities including Boston, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.
“No spyware on our phones, ever,” wrote some of the protest signs.
Last month, Apple introduced its plan to stop online child porn, which involves enlisting consumer iPhones to detect the illegal content as it’s uploaded to an iCloud Photos account. If an account has been flagged containing at least 30 images of suspected child porn, Apple will investigate, which could lead the company to contacting a national center for child exploitation.
The company has built numerous guardrails to prevent the system from producing errors or being abused. Nevertheless, numerous security researchers and privacy advocates fear the same technology could be expanded to spy on iPhones and censor content.
The criticism was enough to cause Apple to delay implementing the anti-child porn system in iOS 15 later this year. “Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features,” the company said at the time.
However, participants in Monday’s protest say Apple should abandon the plan entirely. “Users want the devices they have purchased to work for them—not to spy on them for others,” said Joe Mullin, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a press release about the protest. “Delaying the program is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough. Apple needs to take the next step to protect its users and abandon the program.”
“Apple can’t just shove this horrible phone scan plan to the side in order to avoid bad press during its Apple Event,” added Caitlin Seeley George, a campaign director at Fight for the Future. “If Apple moves forward with installing this software it would be a total game changer —opening up the door to unprecedented surveillance and forcing the entire communications industry to follow suit.”
