A group of world-leading cryptography and security experts has warned that scanning images on smartphones, like a scheme proposed by Apple in August, should be treated like mass surveillance and prohibited by law.
“[Device scanning] makes what was formerly private on a user’s device potentially available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies, even in the absence of a warrant,” said the authors, who include Whitfield Diffie, an inventor of public key cryptography, Ronald Rivest, an inventor of the widely used RSA encryption system, and firewall expert Steven Bellovin.
“Because this privacy violation is performed at the scale of entire populations, it is a bulk surveillance technology,” they added.