It may not be good enough, but I think we can acknowledge that caving to political pressure is a very different posture than building your entire business model around monetizing antiprivacy.

Right, but the comparison here is that Meta also does this, in addition to selling every iota of information they have you.

Content scanning is just an assumed part of every major tech platform these days. That of course doesn't necessarily make it right, but it still places Apple's privacy stance significantly ahead of Meta.

People keep repeating the refrain of Google/Facebook selling your data, but is there any evidence of a single case where this actually happened? They use your data, to let advertisers target specific subgroups of the population. The companies that you should be concerned about selling your data aren't the advertising companies, they're the financial companies that are literally selling your transaction data to those and other companies.

I think it's a rather common dysphemism used in context of targeted advertising. Monetizing user data—while not actually selling the data (in the literal sense of the term)—is considered by many to constitute having their data sold, albeit with a layer of indirection.

My understanding is that while this is certainly superior to your data being actually sold, privacy is nonetheless adversely affected in fairly significant ways.

Yep, just like Google, Dropbox, Box, Microsoft and pretty much anyone else who wants to store photos in the US.

One month later…

> Apple delays plans to roll out CSAM detection in iOS 15 after privacy backlash

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/03/apple-csam-detection-delay...

That article is talking about the on-device scanning which IIRC never actually rolled out. That's separate from the iCloud scanning which they still do.

They poisoned the well by showing they were willing to do it in the first place.

Instead of the baseline being they probably are privacy first, now it is "carefully inspect every announcement to see if they are backtracking yet again"

I don't really envy their position; if I built a business that sold hardware and software and found out that customers were using my product to distribute child porn, I would probably be willing to abandon lesser principals too.

There's a reconciliation, necessarily in a civil society, between promoting privacy and doing what's possible to stop child abuse. Should Apple allow child porn to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance?

I don't think they should knowingly allow it. On the other hand I don't think they should do anything about it proactively.

> Should Apple allow [child abuse material] to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance?

No they should not.