As pointed out in our previous post, Apple is about to enter the big leagues in CSAM (child sexual abuse material) reporting.

John Gruber:

> I do wonder though, how prepared Apple is for manually reviewing a potentially staggering number of accounts being correctly flagged. Because Apple doesn’t examine the contents of iCloud Photo Library (or local on-device libraries), I don’t think anyone knows how prevalent CSAM is on iCloud Photos. We know Facebook reported 20 million instances of CSAM to NCMEC last year, and Google reported 546,000.

Fair question. Also makes me wonder how the people who review this sort of material are protected, both emotionally (a dark, dark job, sure to mess with your psyche) and legally (they spend their day looking at illegal material — Are there special laws that protect workers like these?)

I also wonder what that job description looks like. Certainly one of the more unusual job interviews.

Ben Thompson, Stratechery:

> How is it, then, that a company like Facebook, which is mostly used on mobile — i.e. Android or iOS — made 20.3 million reports of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in 2020, while Apple made only 265? After all, there are almost certainly more photos on smartphones than there are on social networks — the former is in large part a superset of the latter.

To repeat: Facebook made 20.3 MILLION reports of CSAM. Apple made only 265.

Here’s why:

> It’s not because there is somehow more CSAM on Facebook than exists on Apple devices, but rather that Facebook is scanning all of the images sent to and over its service, while Apple is not looking at what is in your phone, or on their cloud. From there the numbers make much more sense: Facebook is reporting what it finds, while Apple is, as the title of Section (3) suggests, protecting privacy and simply not looking at images at all.

And, clearly, as Apple moves from the server side to the client side (i.e., your iPhone), those numbers will likely change dramatically.

There’s much more analysis in the article, but the above really stuck out, obvious though it might be.

Also interesting was the lead-in, taken from this 2009 Online Photographer article:

> The leading photo sharing site, flickr.com, charts the popularity of the cameras used by its membership. Recently the Apple iPhone has jumped into a virtual tie for first place with the Canon XTi. Furthermore, flickr states on its “Camera Finder” page that it can only detect the camera used about 2/3rds of the time, and that, therefore, cameraphones are under-represented on the graphs. Yikes.

This was the moment in time when iPhone photography showed its hand, overtook traditional cameras in popularity.

Here’s a link to Apple’s Expanded Protections for Children pdf.

I’m finding it very difficult to wrap my head around all of this. The best I can do at this point is try to read as much as possible, understand the concerns being raised, Apple’s responses to those concerns.

The video from Apple Support, embedded below, tells you to tap the white side of an AirTag to the top center of your iPhone to read the NFC tag. Watch the video, it’s short.

My instinct, based purely on where the animation appears when I open my AirPods case, would be to tap the AirTag on the bottom of the iPhone. I do recognize that AirTags and AirPods use different flavors of wireless magic, found this interesting, worth passing along.