Q&A with Alex Stamos on Apple's proposed child safety features, his reservations about the company's announcement and approach to child safety online, and more
Stamos is also an unusual critic here: back in 2018 he publicly called out Apple's own anti-privacy compromises in China while defending Tim Cook's privacy positioning against Facebook. His reservations carry weight precisely because he has no stake in Apple-versus-Facebook framing.
First-order effects
Apple's proposed on-device scanning features face public expert pushback at launch, forcing the company to defend the design rather than control the narrative around its iOS announcement cycle.
The encrypted-communications field gains a concrete articulation of why client-side scanning breaks the trust model — from someone who previously criticized Apple from the other direction.
Second-order effects
Rivals building e2e messaging can point to Apple's stumble when resisting similar government pressure for scanning mandates, using Apple's misstep as cover for their own refusal.
Child-safety advocacy groups and legislators lose their most credible corporate ally's momentum, complicating efforts to legislate scanning requirements while the technical debate is unsettled.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — and the related reporting that Apple eventually scrapped the on-device CSAM system after team departures suggests it did — platform companies learn that unilateral, expert-free launches of surveillance-adjacent features invite enough backlash to kill even well-intentioned projects, pushing the real decisions toward regulators rather than engineering teams.
The trend: Platform-level child-safety scanning is moving from quiet engineering rollouts to contested public-policy fights decided by expert scrutiny and regulator involvement rather than company announcements.
Apple: “Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.” https://www.apple.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“Apple kicks legitimate apps out of the App Store and allows in scam apps all the time - so what's to guarantee they'll do any better at CSAM detection, where the consequences of a false positive are far, far more harmful?” full video by @reneritchie: https://www.youtube.com/... …
Finally reading Apple's security paper on its child safety features, which should have been released a week ago. So much wasted time arguing about questions which are answered in the paper https://www.apple.com/...
They were being sued for child trafficking at the same time they exploited victims for a second time by using them as a PR stunt. I just don't trust their motives. Trust is earned. https://www.bbc.com/...
Apple claimed they would remove apps used for human trafficking. They would have to start with removing Facebook first. They won't and they don't care. https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Apple believes people are misunderstanding their new child safety features, so I made this hyper-detailed explainer: https://www.youtube.com/... But I think Apple is also misunderstanding the objections, so I made this follow up: https://www.youtube.com/... RTs appreciated!
I'm grateful that Apple has been so open and positive to the technical community. I wish they'd done this before they launched their unpopular service, not after. Some of us have been talking about these issues for two years.
Angwin: So what do you think Apple should do? Stamos: I think they need to pull back and say, “We're reopening this discussion.” https://www.getrevue.co/... https://twitter.com/...
Apple sh*ts on Facebook for data privacy while building the most sophisticated surveillance technology ever created...which is embedded in iPhones. https://www.wired.com/...
Apple has also started emphasizing that they will include “hash publications” to prevent selective targeting of individuals. This is great! None of these things were properly described in the technical/security reviews they did last week! https://twitter.com/...
Very interesting stuff. My main takeaways (1/n) - Apple using the same image for devices all around the world is crucial (enables auditing), and explains why the main work done on-device is claimed as a privacy feature. The use of same image itself seems auditable too. Good. http…
In writing this op-ed for the Times, @alexstamos and I had to go through two days of fact checking delays while Apple kept insisting that their system doesn't do scanning on the client. We kept quoting back their own documentation in response. https://www.google.com/...
Just remembered how pre-iOS 8, Apple literally dictated to law enforcement what language to copy-paste into their draft All Writs Act orders to Apple to unlock iPhones for them, and it made everything happening now make so much more sense.
@tommycarpi @sreekotay @MacRumors Realistically (taking Apple at their word) would require that they load the signatures from said governments into the global operating system itself, plus the targets would need to be using iCloud. There are easier ways to spy on/repress dissiden…
@clancynewyork @JuliaAngwin @alexstamos As one media exec put it to me quite succinctly some years ago, “if you open a hole on the internet, it gets filled with shit.” Every single company that provides a storage and/or tranmission of data has problem with the worst of the worst.…
I have cancelled my Apple News subscription. I will cancel Apple Music next week, and will migrate off iCloud in the coming month and sell my Apple stock if Apple doesn't reverse this plan. It will finally be time to #LeaveApple. Join me! https://twitter.com/...
@JuliaAngwin @alexstamos .@alexstamos points out Apple runs “one of the largest social networks on the planet with over a billion users.” They don't have a real Trust & Safety function. Perhaps, this is an awkward and tech-only attempt to grapple with their responsibility for han…
“We know from history that if you make it unsafe for some thoughts to be said or written down, eventually people stop having them. Surveillance is intimately tied up in not just freedom of expression, but freedom of thought itself.” https://maxhodak.com/...
honestly all in all what baffles me is that this is such a weird hill to die on and such a weird 180 to do. how they hell do you go from ‘what happens in iphone stays in iphone’ to ‘ios 15 will call the cops on you’ overnight what happened https://twitter.com/...