The irony is the CSAM measures they were doing may have enabled them to encrypt the iCloud iMessage backups since they’d still be able to help the feds with CSAM.

Instead everything remains unencrypted.

Agreed.

Frankly it makes me doubt the veracity of some of the activists who go off the handle when these types of controversies pop up.

Literally every online storage service is analyzing user content for various reasons, but I don’t see any hue and cry over it. The Apple approach was a novel take imo.

Yeah - it's quite frustrating because dumb knee-jerk responses like what we saw on HN make it harder to push back on actual bad policy.

Another recent one was the Covid bluetooth exposure notifications that were cleverly designed in a way that preserved privacy. People on HN with no understanding of how it worked freaked out and as a result instead of that smart privacy preserving approach governments just bought location data or implemented other centralized information systems that are much worse for privacy.

If I worked in policy it'd be hard not to roll eyes at the privacy people and just ignore them - which is definitely not what we want.

You can use another messaging app that supports encryption. Some of us don’t want your laziness resulting in local scanners on devices that we have paid for.

Then don’t enable iCloud backup. If you do enable iCloud backup you’ll have your images scanned in both cases.

There’s functionally no difference, except one offers a future path to encryption on iCloud servers.

If this was about on device scanning without iCloud backup enabled then I’d agree with you, but it’s not.

Congrats, you “won” on an issue that wasn’t an issue and missed the actual problem.

Since the 90s, there has always been a mainstream private option. Be it Nextel, BlackBerry PIN, prepaid phones, iMessage, FaceTime, etc. Now that’s gone, and fringe stuff like Signal isn’t a replacement.