Why wouldn't they show a pop-up on the phone highlighting which images may be problematic and that report is being sent to the government? I might change my mind on uploading these things to my iCloud. Can't wait for all examples of false positives that will surface.

Why wouldn't they delete them directly, but rather send report to the government?

Why wouldn't they go even further and if image detected on the webpage that is problematic => It doesn't allow it to get to my filesystem either, so that I don't get into trouble if for some reason police decides to search my laptop.

All relevant questions. Answer is the only one: so that when police knocks on your door you were blissfully unaware.

Quite honestly this is all too sad. Again this argument about CP that everyone will buy, but which doesn't work in the wild. There are some bad people out there, but if these people are into buying or creating CP => they will rarely upload it into iCloud. Especially now, when everyone knows Apple is looking for it. So they will go even deeper into hiding, while everyone else will have to live with devices that are spying on them...

The difference is that Google doesn’t advertise itself as a bastion of privacy. Google spying on you is expected. More consumers also pay for iCloud vs Google Drive. Expectations change when you’re paying for a service.

Isn't the difference that with google drive, they scan the files you upload to their servers? And, this latest apple debacle is on scanning files locally on the device itself?

If Apple is to be believed (and doesn't change anything later) then they're doing the same thing. They're scanning the things that are being uploaded to iCloud. They're just doing it locally instead of doing it after they're on the iCloud servers.