An worldwide coalition of coverage and civil rights teams revealed an open letter Thursday asking Apple to “abandon its recently announced plans to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads and other Apple products.” The teams embody the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Privacy International, and the Tor Project.

Earlier this month, Apple introduced its plans to make use of new tech inside iOS to detect potential baby abuse imagery with the purpose of limiting the unfold of kid sexual abuse materials (CSAM) on-line. Apple additionally introduced a brand new “communication safety” function, which can use on-device machine studying to determine and blur sexually express photos acquired by youngsters in its Messages app. Parents of kids age 12 and youthful might be notified if the kid views or sends such a picture.

“Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material, we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children,” the teams wrote in the letter.

Apple’s new “Child Safety” web page particulars the plans, which name for on-device scanning earlier than a picture is backed up in iCloud. The scanning doesn’t happen till a file is being backed as much as iCloud, and Apple says it solely receives knowledge a few match if the cryptographic vouchers (uploaded to iCloud together with the picture) for an account meet a threshold of matching recognized CSAM. Apple and different cloud electronic mail suppliers have used hash techniques to scan for CSAM despatched through electronic mail, however the brand new program would apply the identical scans to pictures saved in iCloud, even when the person by no means shares or sends them to anybody else.

In response to considerations about how the know-how may be misused, Apple adopted up by saying it could restrict its use to detecting CSAM “and we will not accede to any government’s request to expand it,” the corporate mentioned.

Much of the pushback in opposition to the brand new measures has been centered on the device-scanning function, however the civil rights and privateness teams mentioned the plan to blur nudity in youngsters’s iMessages might probably put youngsters in peril and can break iMessage’s end-to-end encryption.

“Once this backdoor feature is built in, governments could compel Apple to extend notification to other accounts, and to detect images that are objectionable for reasons other than being sexually explicit,” the letter states.