"negative PR resulting from...expanded protections for children" is an insanely generous paraphrasing of what actually happened...

Agreed, we should stop ceding the language we use to describe this betrayal of trust to Apple’s idiot marketing division. These aren’t child safety features. By the time CSAM has been produced the child has already been harmed. Also pedophiles, may they be tortured barbarically and may their barbaric torture be televised by mandate on all those little TV screens that squawk at us while we’re getting gas until every last one of them is too scared to ever go near another child again, will simply turn off iCloud photos, or iCloud, or whatever 3rd parties Apple will let in on the surveillance.

This will not help keep a single child safe. It’s not a child safety feature, it’s an adult surveillance feature.

Normally the conflation isn't a big deal, but if you're going to be that vitriolic, I'm going to please ask you to say "child abuser" and not "pedophile". What pedophiles need is therapy and possibly monitoring.

Is there data on how effective therapy is for pedophiles? Intuitively I'd expect it enjoys the same 0% efficacy rate as gay conversion therapy.

Lots of people have bad impulses that they need to control and therapy helps there doesn't it? The goal wouldn't be the same as conversion.

It's at least similar. Gay conversion aims for 3 things as far as I can tell:

1) Stop acting on your current sexual feelings

2) Stop having those feelings

3) Start feeling different sexual feelings somehow, but probably not

At the very least the first step is the same, and equally unlikely to happen. I don't know what the current status is with castration or chemical castration for pedophiles but I wholeheartedly support it. I don't really care if they get the help they need, I don't care about them or their dignity or humanity at all. I only care that they don't rape children.

> At the very least the first step is the same, and equally unlikely to happen.

Well there's different kinds of "acting on". "Don't have consensual sex with another gay person" is a hard sell. "Don't rape anyone" gets pretty good support from everyone. Rape is a lot more about power than it is about attraction, and it's not that easy to figure out who would go there.

That's a good point, I dunno, maybe you're right and I just get carried away when I think about this stuff, it's all just so disgusting. I see what you mean, the difference between pedophile and child abuser.

> will simply turn off iCloud photos, or iCloud, or whatever 3rd parties Apple will let in on the surveillance

I mean apparently they're already uploading photos to Facebook of all places and getting caught there, so you may be overestimating how smart they are.

Well said. If Apple wanted to keep children safe they would fund investigations into allegations of child abuse.

You mean the mandatory Personal Informant app that Stasi left on it's wish list?

Sorry, you mean spying on everyone?

*better time

They are responsible as long as they have a contract with that company. Otherwise it's denying responsability by using contractors.

For what it's worth, Apple is a very deliberate company with immense control over their supply chain. Surveillance could very well be their internal MO, we have no way to hold them accountable in that regard. Considering how they want to generate low-resolution hashes of your content on-device before it's shipped off to their servers... yeah, I can see the two aligning. It's part of a larger, internal push to increase liability and weed out "bad actors"

Yeah, for a company like Apple, I would hold them responsible for the contractors actions here. Apple could easily replace them if they wanted to.