That doesn't make it ok. The fact that you and my mom have normalized bad behavior doesn't make it any less offensive to my civil liberties.

> Am I the only one who finds no issue with this?

If you only think about the first order effects. This is great, we catch a bunch of kid sex pedos. The second order effects are much more dire. "slippery slope" sure... but false arrests, lives ruined based on mere investigations revealing nothing, expanding the role of government peering in to our personal lives, resulting suicides, corporations launching these programs - then defending them - then expanding them due to government pressure is *guaranteed*, additional PR and propaganda from corporations and government for further invasion in our personal lives due to the marketed/claimed success of these programs. The FBI has been putting massive pressure on Apple for years, due to the dominance and security measures of iOS.

Say what you want about the death penalty, but many many innocent people have dead in a truly horrific way, with some actually being tortured while being executed. That is a perfect example of second order effects on something most of us without any further information (ending murderous villains is a good thing) would agree on. So many Death Row inmates have been exonerated and vindicated.

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exonerated_death_row_i...

Not only has it been possible for a decade, it’s been happening for a decade. Every major social media company already scans for and reports child pornography to the feds. Facebook submits millions of reports per year.

Scanning publicly accessible material makes a lot of sense and is within the boundaries of section 230, tech companies are responsible for policing removing illegal or threatening material. For private or encrypted information, section 230 does not apply.

The purposes these services were designed for matters. iCloud is meant to be private, facebook would prefer everything you post is public as it’s built in to benefit their business model. Facebook should scan, iCloud shouldn’t. You are purposely obfuscating that detail.

Apple is introducing a reverse 'Little Snitch' where instead of the app warning you what apps are doing on the network, the OS is scanning your photos. Introducing a 5th columnist into a device that you've bought and paid for is a huge philosophical jump from Apple's previous stances on privacy, where they'd gone as far as fighting the Feds about trying to break into terrorist's iPhones.

"Well you can turn it off" to "Well, but then you just don't trust Apple".

Clearly these are users who did trust Apple. Apple betrayed their trust. Given that Apple bulk handed over iCloud data to China, I don't really believe their pinky promise that they are, by policy only, going to resist government use of this tech. They can cave to government cases _and_ the government can certainly force them to.

Therefore you must trust Apple. So if you still have issues then you don’t trust Apple.

Trust is fragile and Apple has taken what in the past I believed it understood to be a strategic advantage and stomped it into little pieces.

The reason people don't like this, as opposed to, for example, Dropbox scanning your synced files on their servers, is that a compute tool you ostensibly own is now turned completely against you. Today, that is for CSAM, tomorrow, what else?

> people don’t care about that because you’re literally, voluntarily, giving Dropbox your files.

Correct and I agree. I don’t upload my most personal photos to Dropbox for this very specific reason. In fact I stopped using Dropbox when Condi Rice joined the board because she lacks good sense and doesn’t respect civil rights. See ‘The Patriot Act’ and ‘the Invasion of Afghanistan’. It was easy to stop using Dropbox because the alternatives were vast. Apple has me very purposely locked in to this scheme to where the alternatives are a huge transition and compromise on privacy no matter where I turn.

Not to mention the meaning of ownership is completely unrelated to ability to view the designs of a given object. I think I own the fan currently blowing air at me without ever having seen a schematic for its controls circuitry just fine and everyone for all of history has pretty much felt the same.

The point is it's hard to hide your evil plans in daylight. Either you trust Apple or your don't. Same with Microsoft's telemetry, they wrote the whole OS, if they were evil they have 10000 easier ways to do it.

All Apple has to do is lie, you'll never know.

The issue is that Apple previously was not intruding into their user's privacy (at least publicly), but now they are.

It sounds like your argument is that Apple could have been doing this all along and just not telling us. I find that unlikely mainly because they've marketed themselves as a privacy-focused company up until now.

Apple reserves the right at all times to determine whether Content is appropriate and in compliance with this Agreement, and may screen, move, refuse, modify and/or remove Content at any time, without prior notice and in its sole discretion, if such Content is found to be in violation of this Agreement or is otherwise objectionable.

You must not have been paying attention for the last 20 years.

I don't think they have been doing server-side scanning until now, hence the publicity. Do you have any evidence that shows they've been doing this before?

I wasn’t able to find the whole video though.

No time to watch, but. https://www.ces.tech/Videos/2020/Chief-Privacy-Officer-Round...

> Currently, although Apple holds the keys to view Photos stored in iCloud Photos, it does not scan these images

It also seems weird that the EFF wouldn't have complained about this before if Apple was known to be doing server-side scanning for some time now.

I also am not going to watch through an hour video, but I scanned the transcript and I didn't see anything that said that Apple currently (at that time) scanned content.

If you don’t trust Apple why would you use iCloud anyway? Makes no sense.

I just have to point out the ridiculousness of this statement. With your logic any feature in any product can be "turned off" by not using the entire product at all. For example, the radio in my car sounds like shit, I guess I should just stop driving completely to avoid having to hear it.

In reality, this new "feature" will be a requirement of using iCloud Photos. The feature itself cannot be turned off. If your answer is to stop using iCloud Photos, that is no help for the millions of people who currently use iCloud Photos.

> If you don’t trust Apple why would you use iCloud anyway? Makes no sense.

I've trusted Apple for a long time because I felt like they were one of the only companies that cared about consumer privacy. After these actions I am less convinced of that. I'm not sure why that stance is so surprising.

iCloud Photos can be used on Windows, for example. This scanning only applies to iOS devices. You could use iCloud Photos and not be subject to the scanning.

> I've trusted Apple for a long time because I felt like they were one of the only companies that cared about consumer privacy. After these actions I am less convinced of that. I'm not sure why that stance is so surprising.

Nothing about what they're doing is contradictory with privacy beyond what they're already doing. The only reason they're even implementing it this way is because they do care about privacy. They could just not encrypt and scan on the server like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, Box.com and more.

That's great for the <0.001% of people who use iCloud Photos without an iPhone. Everyone else is SOL.

>Nothing about what they're doing is contradictory with privacy beyond what they're already doing. The only reason they're even implementing it this way is because they do care about privacy. They could just not encrypt and scan on the server like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, Box.com and more.

False dichotomy. Apple doesn't have to do either of these things.

in any case I've given you the solution on how to use iCloud and not be scanned. Take your photos, sync your iDevice to your computer and manually upload to iCloud photos. there you go.

A subpoena is a lot different than scanning every single photo on every user's device automatically.

> Why do you think all of these companies even do this? lol

Because most companies don't give a shit about privacy? And they will cave at even the slightest government pressure to do so. Honestly it's probably easier for them that way (but worse for the consumer).

> in any case I've given you the solution on how to use iCloud and not be scanned. Take your photos, sync your iDevice to your computer and manually upload to iCloud photos. there you go.

Gee thanks, your "solution" is 1000x harder to use than just using iCloud Photos on your iPhone. One of the biggest selling points of it now is for convenience, and this is pretty obvious so I'm starting to think you're just trolling at this point.

> Because most companies don't give a shit about privacy? And they will cave at even the slightest government pressure to do so. Honestly it's probably easier for them that way (but worse for the consumer).

Most people don’t care. I’m giving you solutions and you’re taking about convenience how hard it is. Plugging in your phone is trivial. I assume you’re going to stick with iCloud even despite this “privacy” issue? If not, what are you switching to?

It's not black or white. Clearly Apple does care more about privacy than most other tech companies. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be critical of them when they make a mistake.

Also, Apple doesn't use e2ee now. AFAIK it's possible for them to decrypt the contents of your iCloud content, and they will do so and forward your data if legally required to.

> Most people don’t care. I’m giving you solutions and you’re taking about convenience how hard it is. Plugging in your phone is trivial.

I don't see what is so hard for you to understand about this - because of Apple's decision, I gain nothing and lose privacy. I shouldn't have to jump through extra hoops to avoid that, and it's reasonable to dislike Apple's position on this. In order to replicate the same functionality I would have to remember to sync my phone every night, and if I ever forgot and my phone died, I just lost data. Yours is an indefensible position when a MUCH easier solution exists today.

> I assume you’re going to stick with iCloud even despite this “privacy” issue? If not, what are you switching to?

That's a bold assumption. I haven't decided yet, for a couple reasons. One is that it's a pain in the ass to switch providers, so I'm going to wait and see if Apple actually follows through with it. Two is that it's possible that Apple is only implementing this so that they can in fact implement full e2ee and then tell law enforcement to kick rocks when they ask for user data (only allowing them to see the CSAM results before they are uploaded to the cloud). I might be willing to accept that compromise, but it's not clear that that is what their plan is.

Why is that the alternative? How about everything is encrypted and nothing is scanned.

If you don’t want to be scanned you can turn it off. I honestly don’t see the issue. It seems the only thing people can say are hypothetical situations here.

How about neither? Just let people have their privacy. Some will misuse it. Thats life.

What is also possible: No scanning on your device and encrypted cloud storage. E.g. borg + rsync.net, mega, proton drive.