>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account

https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...

You don't consider the contents of your email account or the files you mirror to a cloud drive to be your own private data?

No OP, but yes. I expect that my emails can be read and that my files on a cloud service can be accessed. And I don’t even use Gmail.

I expect that my ISP tracks and stores my DNS resolutions (if I use their DNS) and has a good understanding of the websites I visit.

I expect that an app that I grant access to my contacts uploads as much data as it can to their servers.

I expect WhatsApp and similar apps to collect and upload meta data of my entire photo library such as GPS info the second I give them access.

Hence, I don’t give access. And hence, it’s a problem if there is no opt-out of local file scanning in the future.

There are worlds between. One case is about pictures on your device. The other case is about pictures on Googles "devices" or network. You had to upload it to Google. EMail is also nothing like a letter anyway. It's a postcard. Everybody can read it.

No, one case is about photos you upload to iCloud Photos only, and the other case is about every single thing in your Google account.

>So if iCloud Photos is disabled, the system does not work, which is the public language in the FAQ. I just wanted to ask specifically, when you disable iCloud Photos, does this system continue to create hashes of your photos on device, or is it completely inactive at that point?

If users are not using iCloud Photos, NeuralHash will not run

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/interview-apples-head-of-p...

No, that happens on Google's servers and is not an agent in my pocket that scans and invades my personal property for evidence of crimes and snitches on me to authorities.

At least Google does.

https://protectingchildren.google/intl/en/

> CSAI Match is our proprietary technology, developed by the YouTube team, for combating child sexual abuse imagery (CSAI) in video content online. It was the first technology to use hash-matching to identify known violative videos and allows us to identify this type of violative content amid a high volume of non-violative video content. When a match of violative content is found, it is then flagged to partners to responsibly report in accordance to local laws and regulations. Through YouTube, we make CSAI Match available for free to NGOs and industry partners like Adobe, Reddit, and Tumblr, who use it to counter the spread of online child exploitation videos on their platforms as well.

> We devote significant resources—technology, people, and time—to detecting, deterring, removing, and reporting child sexual exploitation content and behavior. Since 2008, we’ve used “hashing” technology, which creates a unique digital ID for each known child sexual abuse image, to identify copies of images on our services that may exist elsewhere.

Note that they're not pushing it to devices that consumers have purchased, just running it on their cloud services. I think it's an important distinction here with what Apple is doing.

No, that happens on Google's servers and isn't an agent in my pocket that runs on and invades my personal property. It's also only for videos.

The images being scanned are the ones that go to iCloud.

The Google page has a section later down that also says they use hashing of images.

When the scan is carried out on device, Apple can't read the results of the scan until the 30 image threshold is reached.

When Google scans on server, a single false positive result can be abused by anyone who can get a warrant.

>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

Apple's method is more private.