Should Apple snoop on your iPhone?

Should Apple use software to scan the photo library of every individual iPhone in search of images of child abuse? GCHQ thinks so. So does the National Cyber Security Centre. (Well, you might say: they would, wouldn’t they?) And so does professor Hany Farid, inventor of a technology called PhotoDNA, which is already used across the web to scan for illegal images.

He told the Internet Watch Foundation that, though Apple paused proposals to roll out this software last year thanks to ‘pushback from a relatively small number of privacy groups’, ‘I contend that the vast majority of people would have said, ‘sure, this seems perfectly reasonable’’. 

At issue, it should be said, is not the idea of checking for such images altogether. Tech companies already scan cloud-storage services, emails and suchlike for illegal images. But so-called ‘client-side’ scanning would install software on the individual phone itself – which would, among other things, circumvent the difficulty of intercepting these images on end-to-end encrypted messaging services.