Should Apple scan iPhones for child abuse images? Here's what expert has to say

An expert said that Apple should revive its plans to scan iPhones for child abuse imagery. The use of the software by the company to scan the photo library of every individual who uses the iPhone was deemed controversial. 

But the inventor of the scanning technology, Prof Hany Farid, has argued that Apple should take a hint from warnings issued by the security services of the United Kingdom. 

While speaking to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) on the child safety group's latest podcast, Prof Farid said that Apple should be emboldened to revive its plans after an intervention from the technical leads of GCHQ and the National Cyber Security Centre as they are backing an extension of the technology on to individual phones.  

Prof Farid is an expert in image analysis at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the inventor of PhotoDNA, which is an "image hashing" technique. It is generally used by companies across the web to remove illegal images after identifying them.  

During the latest podcast, Farid said, "The pushback was from a relatively small number of privacy groups. I contend that the vast majority of people would have said 'sure, this seems perfectly reasonable', but yet a relatively small but vocal group put a huge amount of pressure on Apple and I think Apple, somewhat cowardly, succumbed to that pressure." 

He added, "I think they should have stuck their ground and said: 'This is the right thing to do and we are going to do it.' And I am a strong advocate of not just Apple doing this, but Snap doing this, and Google doing this – all the online services doing this." 

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