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.