Is Apple still testing CSAM child abuse materials privately? The developer screened 40,000 logs and found no evidence.

CTOnews.com, January 22 (Xinhua)-- Apple announced last December that it would no longer censor photos uploaded to iCloud's cloud storage service to detect the presence of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). Recently, however, there have been rumors that Apple is still testing CSAM material in macOS Ventura 13.1, and developers have launched a special investigation.

The developer runs the macOS 13.1 system in the virtual machine and uses the Mints software to scan the activity calendar of the virtual machine instance. Open Finder on the virtual machine and browse a set of images for 1 minute, capturing more than 40000 log entries.

If the system is used for CSAM analysis, each image repeats the outgoing connection from "mediaanalysisd" to the Apple server. CTOnews.com learned that mediaanalysisisd is an element used in Visual Lookup, where photos and other tools can display information about items detected in the image, such as the name of a "cat" or object.

Through the investigation, it is found that there is no entry associated with mediaanalysisd in the log. It is then found that further log extraction is very similar to the Visual Lookup that appeared in macOS 12.3 because the system has not changed significantly since that release.

Further experiments have determined that there are other attempts to send data for analysis, but the aim is to make real-time text work. In his conclusion, Oakley wrote, "there is no evidence that local images on Mac are evaluated and uploaded to Apple's servers when viewed in the Finder window."