Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • November 6, 2026 7:23 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

More Apple backdoor censorship?

Apple was in effect the first mobile phone OS developer to put into their OS the foundations of “Client Side Scanning”(CSS) under increasing pressure from US legislators and law enforcement agencies.

Apple received a lot of bad press over it and slid some of it backwards.

Importantly though it emphasised the point that the US Gov had finally accepted the impossibility of NOBUS backdoors in “End to End Encryption”(E2EE) even though it had been repeatedly pointed out by those involved with ICTsec.

Thus the USG move to attack privacy on the other side of the “security end point” via CSS as an “end run attack”.

Something pointed out on this blog back in the very early days of “Secure Messaging Apps” and the weak links in the security chains on consumer and commercial systems.

Hence the argument for taking the “security end point” off the device that is the “communications end point” (and why I gave the basics of the design of how to build a “Deniable Encryption” system on this blog).

Well Apple have a new less obvious nod in the direction of “Client Side Censorship”(CSC).

Investigators have discovered quite deliberate censorship in the user side “autocomplete” text entry system,

Apple’s autocomplete restrictions include ‘Dictator Trump’ and ‘Sleepy Joe,’ researcher finds

Apple has an undisclosed multilingual gray list of tens of thousands of words and phrases that its iOS keyboard will ​not autocomplete or swipe-type, a researcher said on Friday.

“The list is not a ban. iPhone users can still type what they like when drafting emails and texts. But the words on the ‌list will not be suggested to users via autocomplete or swipe-typing in most cases. The researcher, Derik Kauffman, said the find opens a window into how Apple manages the tradeoff between anticipating what hundreds of millions of iPhone users are trying to say and preventing the devices from offering offensive or politically charged suggestions to users – something he said could quietly shape how they communicate.

“It’s a very light-touch form of censorship,” said Kauffman. “But at the scale that Apple is operating, it only takes a light touch to have a big impact.”“

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/apples-predictive-text-restrictions-include-dictator-trump-sleepy-joe-researcher-2026-11-06/

Not only is it a first step “light-touch censorship” system, it also opens up fingerprinting users via their typing cadence and word / symantec usage.