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 free 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 my photo stream is shutting down on July 26th of 20
23 by July 26th F20 23
there will be no photos remaining in my photo stream and the service will be shutdown
now just for your reference the my photo stream service has been a staple for iPhones
over the past twelve 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 thirty days and during that thirty day window
you can view them and download them on anyone of your Apple devices your tablet your
laptop your desk top and so on
however all those photos will now be deleted on July 26th
because Apple is phasing out this 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 may photo string 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 he wrote quote my photo stream is a separate service from he cloud 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 your devices you don't need
to do anything else your photos are already uploaded and stored
an iCloud and so essentially it looks like Apple is trying to funnel all
their customers into using the iCloud storage
make 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
justify 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 Reign in child exploitation
but on the other hand almost as soon as this proposal was made public
security experts across the political spectrum they said that this plant
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 right by writing 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 yeah cloud 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 image
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 censor 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 have both security as well as privacy experts again 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 descent
as just one example of this criticism Mr Matthew Green
who's both a cryptographer as well as a professor over at John 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 imagined 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 sub head is Apple build 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
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 managed 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 hoisting their data on these local government run servers
well in 20 15 Apple shut off its news app within China's borders
in 20 17 they removed voice of America from the Chinese version of the app store
and then also in 20 17 they began restricting the emoji of the Taiwan
flag and so people were no longer able to send it to one another
then in 20 18 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
well it would actually automatically crash their phone
then in also in 20 18 Apple removed VP nsw 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 20 19 they removed the music from the itunes platform
of several different artists who dared to mention the Tianmen Square Massacre
in 20 20 they removed the Jehovah's Witness app in China
in 20 21 they removed the Bible app from the Chinese app store
and then just last year in 20 22 after a giant anti government protest
well Apple released an update to their phones which limited the air drop function
of their iPhones in China
and really think about that for a moment people were using the
air rob 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 kneecap 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 US supposedly for
good reasons well give in 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 US
however from this whole episode there are a few key takeaways at least in my opinion
one Apple is removing their may photo stream service and pushing all
their users to adopt the iCloud
photo service two they have developed and I tool which can scan all images that are
stored on people's iCloud accounts even though they've decided not to rule 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 is 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 forces
Apple to crawl everyone's photos
related to that particular event it sounds dystopian but remember
the technology exists Apple is pushing everyone to use their iCloud storage
and thirdly while 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
quote EU internal market commissioner Mr Terry Breton repeatedly stressed on Monday
that quote I am the regulator
when lambasting social medium that works 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 26th 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
and that lastly on a slightly different topic
I like to mention that over on EpochTV which is our awesome no censorship video platform
I recently published a superspace 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 which is a lot
more advanced than you might have realized
the links of that edible mRNA vaccine episode will be right there at the
very top of the description boxed below I hope you check it out
and until next time I'm your host Roman from the Epoch Times stay informed