Apple's child safety initiative & leaked Thunderbolt 5 specs — This Week in Apple

In the latest "This Week in Apple," we discuss Apple's new child safety initiative including CSAM detection in photos, leaked specs for Thunderbolt 5, leaked regulatory filings for Apple Watch, and more.

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Each week, AppleInsider posts tons of stories about Apple, its products, rumors, and information about related vendors and other firms. Our weekend video series "This Week in Apple" condenses down the week's stories into an easy-to-digest video recap.

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Along with a summary of the week, we have insight and analysis about the key events and what has transpired since the original reports were published. Sources for featured stories are below if you want to look into the events in more detail.

Apple's earnings, Intel Mac Pro, new betas, and more

Headlining this week is Apple's newfound safety initiative for children, with several new features implemented as part of iOS-15 and iPadOS 15 later this year.

Siri and search will now become more contextually aware, providing more relevant information in specific scenarios. In Messages, if children send or receive explicit images, a warning will be shown to let them know that what they're doing is sensitive and alerting their parents.

Apple will also compare hashed images to known child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and if multiple positive matches are found, Apple will alert the authorities. This has wide-ranging privacy concerns and has caused quite a bit of stir among users.

This week, an Intel executive also inadvertently leaked new specifications for the upcoming Thunderbolt 5 standard, including doubling the bandwidth from 40 Gbps to 80 Gbps.

We also dive into the cracked screen issue plaguing M1 MacBook Air users and new regulatory filings that reveal new Macs and Apple Watch models.

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6 Comments

addison huy 16 Years · 27 comments

About 3 years ago

I think this is last weeks video.

cocho 3 Years · 8 comments

So Apple will turn into police but will search without a warrant. What next? Offensive political comments?

pumpkin_king 4 Years · 34 comments

coach said:

So Apple will turn into police but will search without a warrant. What next? Offensive political comments?

No

crowley 15 Years · 10431 comments

cocho said:

So Apple will turn into police but will search without a warrant. What next? Offensive political comments?

If I want to store some stuff at your house then you're well within your right to ask what it is, and if it turns out to be photos of child abuse you're obligated to tell the police.

And no, offensive political comments will not be next. Saying "what's next" and an absurdity is not effective when it's obviously not going to happen.

maikysupra 3 Years · 1 comment

crowley said:

cocho said:

So Apple will turn into police but will search without a warrant. What next? Offensive political comments?

If I want to store some stuff at your house then you're well within your right to ask what it is, and if it turns out to be photos of child abuse you're obligated to tell the police.

And no, offensive political comments will not be next. Saying "what's next" and an absurdity is not effective when it's obviously not going to happen.

Great to see ‘clever’ people like you who are arguing for removal of privacy and rights of
most of us. If you think that practices like these cannot and won’t be used to police other things like ‘political comments’, you are extremely naive I’m afraid. First of all, to a degree it’s already been happening by deplatforming a large number of people based on their public views, but if you think that’s not an extreme case, all you have to do is to look at censorship practices of China or North Korea. Yes, it will happen!

And with regards to your example of ‘being your right to know what someone is storing in your house’, it is a silly argument as your are comparing apples with oranges here. By your own logic, email providers than have a right to access and monitor your emails because they go all inevitably through their servers. If you think that mass surveillance on this scale is ok, and a right to privacy doesn’t exist (only for the ruling class) than I rest my case sir.