It is indeed meaningfully different: your sensitive data never leaves your device in order to be scanned. There can't be a crack in Apple servers that would expose files of millions of users uploaded for scanning.

Eventually it could lead to Apple platform not having any CSAM content, or any known legally objectionable content, because any sane perpetrator would migrate to other platforms, and less sane, caught.

This, of course, takes the user base to overwhelmingly agree that keeping legally objectionable content is a bad thing and should be exposed to police, and to trust the whatever body which defines the hashes of objectionable content. I'm afraid this order is not as tall as we could imagine.

> your sensitive data never leaves your device in order to be scanned. There can't be a crack in Apple servers that would expose files of millions of users uploaded for scanning.

And yet photos that get scanned are still uploaded to iCloud Photos, so they do end up on Apple's servers.

You can disable iCloud backup.

Doing so right while activating a new iDevice is the way to prevent its private keys from ending up in iCloud, and so preventing Apple, or law enforcement, or some malicious hackers from cracking into your device.

Photos that users choose to upload to iCloud Photos do indeed get uploaded to iCloud Photos?

I'm failing to see the issue.

I think you might be tilting at windmills here. The issue is that the post I'm replying to claims that data never ends up on Apple's servers even though it does. Thanks for confirming that it does, though.

Am I supposed to be shocked that photos the user uploads to iCloud are on iCloud?

The results of the scan looking for kiddie porn cannot be read by Apple until the device finds 30 examples of photos that match known kiddie porn, whereupon Apple gets the decryption key so they can see which images on their server need review, and a human review is triggered to make sure there haven't been 30 false positives.

> Am I supposed to be shocked that photos the user uploads to iCloud are on iCloud?

I implore you to read the comment I originally replied in order to understand the context of my replies. Personally, I don't care what you're shocked about or not, as my OP wasn't directed at you at all.

Then why the outrage if they're the same?

Because this is Apple and people are very passionate about both hating and liking Apple.

Apple keeps the scan results encrypted with a key they don't have until the device informs them that the threshold of 30 images that match known kiddie porn has been reached.

After that, they get the decryption key and trigger a human review to make sure there haven't been 30 false positives at once.

That is better, and more private, in a very meaningful way.

False positive scan data sitting on the server is open to malicious misuse 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...

Also, I sincerely doubt that Google has ended it's practice of refusing to hire a human being to check for false positives when a poorly performing algorithm is cheaper.

I do agree that it's more private, but I'm not sure it's better.

I'm fine with the idea that if I upload stuff to someone else's server, they may take a look at it and maybe even punish me for what I've uploaded. Certainly if I encrypt the data before I upload it, they can't do that. But if I don't, then it's fine with me if they do.

But my device should not be snitching on me. Yes, this device-side scanning is supposedly gated on enabling uploads to iCloud, but that doesn't really make for much of a distinction to me. And since Apple certainly has the capability, they are likely one secret court order away from being required to scan even photos that aren't being uploaded, at least on some targeted subset of devices.

> And since Apple certainly has the capability, they are likely one secret court order away from being required to scan even photos that aren't being uploaded, at least on some targeted subset of devices.

Apple has the ability to upload literally any software to iPhones, so this argument applies equally to literally any conceivable bad thing that software could do on iPhones.

As well as any conceivable bad thing that Google could be ordered to add to Android.

Or Google with Chrome (way more reach than Android), or Microsoft with Windows, etc. This is why I reject slippery slope arguments for software updates to auto-updating platforms. They already have the ability to ship literally any conceivable software to millions of people, so the "slippery slope" already exists trivially for the evilest software you can imagine.