Apple's response to the "what if governments force you to abandon the hidden set intersection stuff you wrote" thing is, "well we'll just say no". Which, unless Apple plans to pull out of hostile jurisdictions entirely or levy their own private military[1], holds no weight. Countries own their internal markets in the same way Apple owns the App Store market.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
[1] which should scare the shit out of you even more than the CSAM scanner
The CSAM scanner does not scarry me as it is today, but the fact that is a step, next year will scan more files, then Google will copy Apple (willing or not) and then most PCs will do the same thing.
Apple just normalized that is fine you have an proprietary file scanner/"antiviruys" installed on yoru device with the properties:
1 it can't be stopped or removed
2 it get's hashes from some government agencies over online updates
3 matches will be reviewed by someone that it said are trustworthy and might get sent to your local police
4 the stupid scanner has stupid excuses to exist, where would have been extremely simple to implement and non controversial to scan the fucking images after the upload and not before.
Sure, it is not hard, but already laws can apply, did China had to pass a law like "any company has to update their maps software to conform with our local maps?" or China just showed Timmy a graph with profits from China dropping and then Apple said "yes sir!!!" .
> 2. The hashes would then need to come from the government. Instead of the two intersection of two independent CSAM databases
Yeap, the government will demand for a local database to be used and since the crimes are local you need to send the reports o the local police and a local Apple employee will have to check, not some cheap random contractor.