This example changes with regards to emotional weight if you remove "a man" and leave it at just "a scanning machine". There is no human scanning your photos on an iPhone, so let's compares apples to apples here.

If that scanning machine didn't reveal the contents of my mail, and then ensured that it wasn't able to be given out in-transit? Yeah, I'd potentially be fine with it - but I'll leave this answer as a hypothetical since it's all theory anyway.

The point here is that you're choosing to use the mail system and you're thus choosing to play by those rules. Given that these checks happen for iCloud you're effectively making the same agreement.

There actually is a man involved: enough similarities and a human will review the photos. Every algorithm, especially perceptual hashing, will have false positives, and at Apple's scale, some people's private and intimate photos will be false positives and be exposed to a man looking at it.

> some people's private and intimate photos will be false positives and be exposed to a man looking at it

and deciding who gets reported to police based on their cultural views on nudity

I think the point of the OP is that it was already the case before when you were using iCloud photos. The scan was server side.

But the barrier between “only happens for iCloud” and “happens for all photos on device” has been reduced to a very small barrier. Before it was the photos actually being sent to a separate server by my choice, now it’s Apple saying their on-device tool only runs given criteria X.

And on a second note I think people are allowed to be freshly concerned at the idea of Apple scanning photo libraries given a government-provided hash list, even if it was already happening before now.

To be clear, I have no qualms about people being concerned. You can find my comments elsewhere on this site that I think people should scrutinize this entire thing.

I'm just very tired of people (not necessarily you) spouting off as if the functionality is new. It dilutes an otherwise important conversation. So many of the threads on this site are just people privacy LARPing.

Agreed. I still think there is a distinction, even if only in principle and mostly psychological, between what a company does with my files on their server, and what they do with my files on my device.

Even if the outcome is theoretically the same, the means are different and it feels different.

> The post office scans your mail through various machines in transit.

That is a totally bogus comparison.

The post office 100% does NOT can the content of every piece mail they handle.

Not even close to the same scenario as Apple/governments being able to continually and silently check your phone/photo library for images on their watch list.

I’m pretty sure lots of mail gets x-rayed, perhaps even more looking for malicious packages or substances.

I agree that data content scanning is more invasive than physical scanning. It was an intentionally simplistic example not meant to defend Apple.

Parcels, maybe. I’d bet it’s a tiny percentage though.

I doubt the entire world has enough X-ray machines to scan even a vanishingly small percentage of the envelopes the postal service delivers every day.

Sorry my metaphor wasn’t good enough.