If you allow me to guesstimate wildly, most “child porn” these days, in a technical sense, is made by kids themselves having access to an internet-connected device with a camera. Sometimes it is extorted by despicable abusers, sometimes it is done for no one in particular, just for the perceived fame/popularity/likes on social services/etc. Big services have an army of moderating grunts to keep Victorian purity of blissfully ignorant common public intact, things are a bit different in poorer parts on the Net and on the Globe. Should we expect the naked selfie of a teenager sent to their significant other to automatically cause a police interrogation of the same teenager? What if the device is shared with older members of the family? Another man-made dystopia enabled by people who enjoy to express outrage over the racy stories in the media, and people who are too afraid to speak up.
In essence, Apple has introduced a software agent to signal whether you have files that belong the list someone provides. If I recall the scandal correctly, this is what Kaspersky allegedly (ab)used, and what other antivirus tools (including Microsoft's built-in and enabled-by-default Windows scanner that for some seemingly important reason nags all the time if uploading of files to Microsoft is disabled) surely enjoy offering to various agencies around the world.
I don't think you should worry about “China, Australia, and Saudi Arabia” so much, there's elephant in the room you don't like to notice.
Which markets are closed to Apple by its own government currently? North Korea?
Apple has bowed to them on iCloud server locations and access already.
From the link: "Before an image is stored in iCloud Photos..."
This leads me to believe that only data that is going to get uploaded to their servers is going to be scanned. If anyone has a different interpretation or thinks I'm wrong, feel free to reply.
It's my understanding that all cloud services do this type of scanning, when they are technically able to.
But all data on iCloud is encrypted by default, so Apple can't scan for this kind of material once it is on their servers. Doing it on device before it gets encrypted and uploaded is the only place they even could do a scan like this.
Additionally, they make it clear in the article that there has to be more than one hit (they don't say the actual number) which would mitigate risk of hash collision false positives.
If this type of scanning makes you uncomfortable, you can just not use their cloud services.
I do agree that this is still not a good direction to go, even with all the precautions they've taken. But I had to do some digging to figure out what was actually going on, the comments/commentary made it seem like Apple is now routinely scanning all your photos/videos if you have an iPhone.
Once the code is there to do local scanning, it might make it easier for a zero day exploit to do phone scanning and grab data it might not otherwise have access to or for governments to force Apple to conduct scans of content on a phone when they ask.
They also confirmed it is only when the photos upload to iCloud: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/05/apple-csam-detection-di...
I guess the point I am making is that as of now, this only applies if you're using their cloud services. I'm not sure if Apple would announce if they were compelled to use this functionality through a court order.