New Apple technology will warn parents and children about sexually explicit photos in Messages.

Apple says NeuralHash tries to ensure that identical and visually similar images - such as cropped or edited images - result in the same hash.

Any time you modify an image slightly, it changes the hash and can prevent matching. NeuralHash will land in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, slated to be released in the next month or two, and works by converting the photos on a user’s iPhone or Mac into a unique string of letters and numbers, known as a hash. The news was met with some resistance from some security experts and privacy advocates, but also users who are accustomed to Apple’s approach to security and privacy that most other companies don’t have.Īpple is trying to calm fears by baking in privacy through multiple layers of encryption, fashioned in a way that requires multiple steps before it ever makes it into the hands of Apple’s final manual review. News of Apple’s effort leaked Wednesday when Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, revealed the existence of the new technology in a series of tweets.

This looks like a start, and it's a welcome one, but users will have to wait and see just how robust this becomes over time if Apple plans to optimize this experience and expand it.Apple said its new CSAM detection technology - NeuralHash - instead works on a user’s device, and can identify if a user uploads known child abuse imagery to iCloud without decrypting the images until a threshold is met and a sequence of checks to verify the content are cleared. News Landed, one of the first publications to dive into this, found a few problems with the experience on Android that prevented the use of certain features or made things that much more difficult. However, it looks like Apple still has some work to do. Some things like browsing iCloud photos previously lacked strong solutions on that platform, and there are some people out there who, for one reason or another, live in both the Android and Apple worlds simultaneously across their devices.

That said, the main benefit here seems to be access to these features on an Android phone, as most of Apple's services don't offer native apps for Android. And if you have access to a desktop, you'll get more functionality out of the desktop version of the website. Further Reading Apple releases iOS 13.3.1 and macOS Catalina 10.15.3If you're using an iPhone or iPad, you'll be much better served by the more robust and performant native apps available on those devices in all cases.

Apple photos login