If you turn off iCloud Photos, nothing is scanned.
Microsoft scans everything.
>The system that scans cloud drives for illegal images was created by Microsoft and Dartmouth College and donated to NCMEC. The organization creates signatures of the worst known images of child pornography, approximately 16,000 files at present. These file signatures are given to service providers who then try to match them to user files in order to prevent further distribution of the images themselves, a Microsoft spokesperson told NBC News. (Microsoft implemented image-matching technology in its own services, such as Bing and SkyDrive.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/your-cloud-drive-really-pr...
According to Apple. and For Now. Patriot Act was only for terrorists. Apple makes concessions for China. Creating this technology, makes it very easy for China to go, "Look at all photos, always". If they only want to scan stuff on iCloud Photos, no worries, just implement on it on their end. This tech does not need to exist in that case.
> Microsoft scans everything.
Everything uploaded to the Cloud. The Cloud bit is fairly important here. That's me, willingly, putting information on their property. Perfectly acceptable and fine for them to ensure that it's nothing unethical.
However, someone else snooping through your drawers looking for something to pin on you is not private, nor the same as checking their own property.
By your definition of "everything", both Microsoft and Apple scan "everything". (Or Apple will, after this new system is rolled out.)
Nobody is arguing about the legality of CSAM itself. It's an issue that is not popular to discuss, and of course being on the wrong side of it results in near-universal, justifiable derision. Stopping its spread is absolutely the right thing to do.
So at the point that companies will always be held liable for storing it, they will have to put up countermeasures of some kind or find themselves sued out of existence. Server-side scanning is one method, and Apple's on-device scanning is another.
There are certainly ways that Apple can go too far with whatever it happens to come up with as its solution to stopping CSAM, but there is still seems to have been a line behind which nobody particularly cares how the detection is implemented and life continues as usual. If Apple had chosen not to cross that line, maybe many of the arguments being made here would never have been brought up at all.
What it takes to accept is the "nothing to hide" mentality: your files are safe to scan (locally) because they can't be known CSAM files. You have to trust the scanner. You allow the scanner to touch your sensitive files because you're not the bad guy, and you want the bad guy be caught (or at least forced off the platform).
And this is, to my mind, the part Apple wasn't very successful at communicating. The whole thing should have started with an educational campaign well ahead of time. The privacy advantage should have been explained again and again: "unlike every other vendor, we won't siphon your files unecrypted for checking; we do everything locally and are unable to compromise your sensitive bits". Getting one's files scanned should have become a badge of honor among the users.
But, for some reason, they tried to do it in a low-key and somehow hasty manner.
Everybody knows what goes on behind that door. And yet, everyone would much prefer to close it. Apple's method is equivalent to the toilet door being removed, so that you cannot do anything nefarious behind that door.
Your phone also (on average) have nothing to hide, but that's also why you need privacy on your devices.
That's purely specious, and you say it as if I ever asserted there aren't "dumb people of every type.", which I didn't say.
Yes, there are dumb people of every "type". Are there as many intelligent people as those of low intelligence who struggle to think abstractly, struggle to read and write, have poor motor control, rely heavily on dogma for a moral compass, or have trouble with impulse control?
If you think there are as many people with a high IQ as a low IQ with those traits, I don't think you're being honest.
Here's some data for you:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4478390/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14744183/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/961457/
https://www.dw.com/en/scientists-find-brain-differences-in-p...
https://sci-hubtw.hkvisa.net/10.1023/a:1018754004962
https://www.livescience.com/4671-study-pedophiles-tend-short...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29625377/
Are most pedophiles of low intelligence overall? It's doubtful, but there's room for more study.
Are the pedophiles that are offenders of low intelligence? Significantly more offending pedophiles are of low intelligence than the general population. Yes, the factors at play may also apply to other forms of crime. But when you factor out non-offending pedophiles, those we aren't as concerned with in regards to CSAM, the ones that are caught aren't exactly the cream of the crop.
Furthermore, I've met a handful of pedophiles, both convicted and not. Every one of them either was clearly mentally retarded or bordering on retardedness, or they had a severe personality disorder. Yes, it's a small sample size, but the ones that were caught did so doing the dumbest of shit (putting aside the horrific nature of child exploitation in the first place). This even includes a female pedophile, who was both stupid and psychopathic, and I find it funny that one of those studies questions the very existence of female pedophiles.
There are many pedophiles that are of above-average intelligence. Most may not even be considered "dumb". But to imply that there's no difference in distribution of, frankly, dumb people to smart people between different behaviors is absurd in that it ignores any sort of relation implication that intelligence has on said behaviors.
As a group, the data does not suggest that pedophiles are exceptionally intelligent, but rather the opposite.
So yes, while I believe there is a privacy concern (I said earlier I would not want such software or hardware running on my own compuer), I stand by my conclusion that CSAM detection would catch a significant number of pedophiles and probably continue to do so for some time. The point of such systems isn't to be a superweapon to catch every pedophile. The ones that it might catch happen to be the ones who are most likely to offend. If you play the stupid game of uploading CSAM to Apple iCloud, you win the stupid prize of getting convicted, and it just so happens that a ton of pedophiles are likely to do something that boneheaded.
I’ve reviewed much of the existing data on minor-attracted persons (which is scant). The problem is that the samples are heavily biased towards including individuals who are caught or self-admit for care, which is not a very good representative sample. As a few of the studies and articles you posted mention, there was little study done until very recently. You also make the leap without supporting data that this system would catch those most likely to offend. Generally I would say the data is insufficient to conclude in any direction other than dumber people get caught doing crimes at a higher rate than smarter people.
Lastly, I have some serious doubts about your expertise in mental health and the study thereof from your use of “mentally retarded” and “retardedness”. You should know for future discussions that the clinical terminology has shifted to “intellectually disability”.
Maybe that's true of the ones that get caught, but if so there's a good chance that at least part of that is inverse survivorship bias. (Similar to “Why are most of the CIA covert missions you hear about failures?”)
I don’t mind my one drive being scanned for “bad stuff”, I very much mind my personally owned data stores being scanned, with no opt out.