It's local only and they already scan your photos on-device anyway. All the images have been processed for content and you can do content aware searches on the images.

Is it local-only? If so, it has far fewer privacy implications than CSAM scanning.

Yes, local only as far as I understand. But how many additional steps does it take to turn the process into CSAM scanning? It looks really close, even without squinting. Caveat that I have no certain info though.

> But how many additional steps does it take to turn the process into CSAM scanning? It looks really close, even without squinting.

It’s a different feature that works in an entirely different way. There’s plenty of descriptions of how both features work out there, there’s no need to guess at what they might do.

There has been talk about it here, but it coincided with the CSAM scanning which got much more coverage.

Thanks, I guess I missed it. Too many things going on in this modern world to have a complete picture.

It hasn't gotten as much coverage so far but that could very well change. A lot of people aren't happy that iMessage now has an easily exploitable backdoor built in.