How to stop Apple from scanning your iPhone photos before iOS 15 arrives

Starting with iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, Apple will be enforcing a new child protection policy when it comes to scanning photos you upload to iCloud. This policy will help Apple report illegal child pornography to authorities, and at first glance, it seems like a good thing Apple is doing. But there is a lot of controversy and confusion around how they do it, so let’s talk about how it works and then what you can do if you want to stop Apple from scanning your iPhone photos.

How Apple iPhone Photo Scan Function Works

Part of the confusion is that Apple announced two child safety features together, but they work in completely different ways.

The first is the child pornography analysis function for iCloud photos. Here, Apple scans the photos for child pornography fingerprints and compares them to the Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) database for illegal images. CSAM is managed by the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a quasi-government entity in the United States

The second feature is an activation feature based on machine learning and limited to the Messages app on iPhone and iPad. This is used to alert children or their parents to pornographic images in the Messages app.

The controversy is surrounded by the first, the iCloud Photo Scanning feature, which is enabled by default for all iCloud Photos users. When your iPhone uploads a photo to iCloud Photos (if iCloud Photos is enabled), there is a multipart algorithm that analyzes the photo on your device and sends it to iCloud. Then iCloud does the other part of the analysis; If you reach a threshold of 30 known child pornography images, Apple will report your account.

Then Apple’s manual review process starts and Apple knows the reported images (not the rest of the images). Then, Apple sends the photos to the CSAM program and the authorities take over.

Apple says this program only works against CSAM’s known child pornography database and does not report regular pornography, nude photos, or, say, photos of your child in a bathtub. And Apple’s process here is secure, and Craig Federighi goes into the technical details in a recent WSJ interview. If you’re curious, take a look at the video below.

According to Apple, there is no real photo scanning going on here. Essentially, Apple assigns your photo a “neural hash” (a string of numbers identifying your photo) and then compares it to the hashes in the CSAM database. It then records this process in what Apple calls a security voucher, along with the image.

Then it performs further parsing and matching based on those hashes; if 30 security vouchers correspond to CSAM images, only then is your account flagged by the system so that human reviewers can actually see if there are any illegal images, and the images and account are flagged.

How to stop Apple from scanning your iPhone photos

So, now that you know how the system works, you can choose if you want to stop Apple from doing it. This scan only occurs when photos are uploaded to iCloud.

Photos sent to messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram are not analyzed by Apple. Still, if you don’t want Apple to perform this scan at all, your only option is to turn off iCloud Photos. To do this, open the “Settings”On your iPhone or iPad, go to the“Pictures“, and deactivate the”ICloud Photos“feature. In the pop-up window, choose the”Upload photos and videos”To download photos from your iCloud Photo Library.

You can also use the ICloud website to download all photos to your computer. Your iPhone will now stop uploading new photos to iCloud, and Apple will not scan any of your photos at this time.

Are you looking for an alternative? There really isn’t. All the major cloud backup providers have the same scanning functionality, it’s just that they do it completely in the cloud (whereas Apple uses a mix of on-device and cloud-based scanning) . If you don’t want this kind of photo scanning, use local backups, NAS, or a fully encrypted end-to-end backup service.