> The entire world would know within about 30 minutes if Apple ever pushed some malware update that did an end run around security and started grabbing files off people's hard drives

But it would be very hard to spot new weights of the neural network and a new list of target hashes. These are pretty much guaranteed to change regularly as they retrain the embedding network and/or change the list of known target images. So it will be very hard if not impossible to see what they're searching for. That latest update could just add the ability to recognize CSAM pictures that had meme texts added to them. Or it could change the embeddings and target list to spot unlicensed posting of copyrighted still frames from movies. Or it could now retrieve any picture of people in police uniform. No way to know if you don't have a hunch and a targeted picture you want to test with.

> I keep hearing this argument and I don't understand it. The entire world would know within about 30 minutes if Apple ever pushed some malware update that did an end run around security and started grabbing files off people's hard drives. I don't trust them, I know they don't do that - and we would know pretty quickly if they did.

Do you know this for certain about any vendor? If a company the size of Apple were pushing the same update to everybody, then it would likely be known about by the world pretty quickly. But... if a targeted signed update is sent to a handful of selected devices, that's harder for the world to find out about. It's risky, but it's definitely technically possible.

I'd like to respond to all three responses: We have the ability to monitor upstream traffic. If Apple takes away that ability to see what's being pushed on the device, we can look for suspicious traffic on the router or network level. I personally don't let any of my devices communicate with known Apple, Facebook, Microsoft or Adobe IP addresses, so it'll be interesting if they suddenly start popping up new addresses in order to do so.

People do know the difference. The point of disagreement is in what you said firtst. You say that you know they don't currently ship with a backdoor, while others say you cannot possibly know that.