So in other words, there is a chance for collision. And when (not if) there's a false positive, eventually the system will transmit private information to some underpaid army of people who will be receiving either real child porn or pictures of someone's naked children for confirmation.

Ignoring the nasty aspects of doing that kind of work, I don't see any way to buttress the fact that Apple has taken another step on the universally one way street of ever increasing surveillance. And whataboutism in the form of "oh but other cloud providers are already doing this" is an extremely weak argument because I don't want to use other cloud providers. I liked Apple, because irrespective of their real motives (ie money), they seemed to be privacy focused. The backhanded way they tried to sell this "feature" shows that they are just as bad as the others.