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.
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.
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.