For now. We see the direction apple is moving.

The direction of not letting people store child porn on their servers? That's pretty much what everyone in the cloud space is doing already.

This service exists so Apple can E2EE your data while still placating DOJ.

Totally missed the point. The direction of scanning everyone's phone for 'prohibited content', pushed on them by various governments. Be it political, fine in one country but not in another (adult homosexual), etc. And a future where the content scanning applies AI and reports you for doing such things such as taking pictures of police or protests.

It's a cop in your phone.

If that's your position, you cannot own a closed source device with binary updates. Because the device provider _could_ always do anything.

What they actually do is what is important. And what they actually do is publicly disclosed so you can make your choice appropriately.

Why should Apple let pedophiles store CSAM on iPhones just because they’re not uploading it to iCloud Photo Library? It’s morally reprehensible to not disable that flag when it’s such a simple thing they can do to catch so many more criminals!

This is obviously sarcasm but I'd preface it with an explanation since HN is multicultural and not not everyone here is brought up to catch it effortlessly.

Edit: The point here is that even if Apple tries very hard to make this be only about photos about to be uploaded to the cloud, if the percentage of phones that turns off iCloud storage increases as a response to this new "snitch-on-me" feature that will be a very good argument for law enforcement to ask for a list of IMEIs that are not using iCloud, and it will also tempt them to demand that Apple start scanning all files.

You own your iPhone. Apple owns iCloud servers.

It's very simple. You want to upload images to iCloud? Then let your phone scan it and upload it. You don't want your images scanned? Don't upload them to iCloud.

As skinkestek kindly pointed out, the point of my sarcastic comment was that now that the precedent of scanning the contents of users’ devices - as opposed to the contents of Apple’s servers - has been set, deciding whether to do so based on the state of a single “Store photos in iCloud?” toggle is going to start looking awfully arbitrary.