Apple will not yield to pressure to use its photo scanning technology for other purposes.

In a six-page document of common questions, Apple has clarified some questions about the operation of its child abuse image identification technology.

The first use of your technology has to do with detection of sexually explicit photos sent or received by children 12 and under through the Messaging app.

This feature uses machine learning on the device to automatically blur problematic images, inform children that they do not need to see the content, guide them and inform parents if they continue to choose to see such images.

Children between 13 and 17 years old will receive similar guidance, but your parents will not be informed. For this flow to work, children’s accounts must be configured in iCloud’s Family Settings, the feature must be turned on, and parent notifications must be turned on for children.

No other entity, not even Apple or law enforcement, is informed if a child sends or receives sexually explicit images. Therefore, this does not break any existing privacy guarantees or end-to-end encryption. Apple emphasized that the feature only applies to Messaging.

The second use of technology is Identify child abuse images in the iCloud Photo Gallery. In this case, iCloud image hashes will be compared to known abuse images and Apple will be notified if a match is detected.

This feature it doesn’t work for private images on the device or if iCloud Photos is turned off.

The company stressed that does not download any images to the device for comparison. Instead, it calculates the hashes of your images and compares them to known content to determine a match.

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The company also stated that your system doesn’t work for anything but child abuse images, as even possession of such images is illegal in many countries. That said, authorities are not automatically informed. If there is a match, Apple first performs human analysis before notifying authorities.

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